PPC, part of the broad paid media services category, has many components. From where you place your campaigns to keyword research and landing page optimization, there’s a lot to cover. However, there are a few easily identifiable steps you must go through to create a PPC campaign that creates the most sales leads possible. Below are these steps and a few tips to help you increase the sales leads your PPC campaign generates.
Define Your PPC Goals
If you’re already running a campaign or two, don’t skip this step. Creating a reasonable goal will help you decide if PPC is a marketing tactic that’s worth pursuing and whether or not you should keep your efforts in-house or not. In a few cases, a campaign that’s not converting no matter what you try needs the help of a professional agency.
Every campaign needs a goal. With 160 billion monthly searches done with the intent of purchasing a product or service, you have a lot of room to build your campaigns. How much do you plan to spend, where do you expect to spend it, and what results do you need to see to make it worthwhile? These are the three critical questions that must be answered at this stage. 55% of marketers have increased their PPC budget in the last year, and many lament that they were not able to.
Decide on Your Keywords and Campaign Segments
Campaign keywords should be grouped for easy tracking. The more specific your data is, the easier it will be to adjust the campaign down the line.
Don’t neglect “negative” keywords. What searches might trigger your PPC ads but are not made by people looking for your products and services? Are there specific words within these searches that you could highlight as “negative” keywords to reduce money lost? This type of filtering can quickly increase the quality of your campaigns.
Trim the Fat From Your Campaigns
A lower traffic volume isn’t always a bad thing, as long as it means you’re getting a higher conversion ration. In addition to including “negative” keywords that keep your PPC ads from triggering, it’s important to trim any keywords that may result in traffic but rarely if ever result in conversions.
In a study performed to determine the media literacy of children, teens, and their parents, it was found that nearly half of participants couldn’t tell the difference between paid advertisements and organic posts or search results. To increase sales leads, there should be very little difference.
Once you have trimmed your campaigns to an optimal level and gone after just the keywords that typically result in high-quality leads, you may realize that your average cost per click has gone up. That’s fine, as long as your average cost per quality lead has gone down and your budget has remained the same.
Identify Any Bottlenecks
PPC campaigns have many parts. It’s easy for one aspect of letting others down. While your advertisements may bring in the traffic, you need a great hook or landing page to convert this traffic to leads. Tracking your efforts is vital to determine where any problems happen to be.
For example, basic analytics will show you where your traffic comes from, the bounce rate of your landing page, etc. From there, you know how many leads you’ve gotten. But what about the leads you didn’t get? What happened to them?
At this stage, you may wish to implement heat maps for mouse tracking. You can also use other types of on-page tools that can give you a strong indication of why potential leads abandon your website before converting.
