PPC advertising is the cornerstone marketing strategy for online businesses these days. A rightly optimized PPC ad is equivalent to a pot of digital marketing gold. You win more traffic, leads, and conversions than any other form of digital advertising.
However, it’s only a heavy-hitter for your digital marketing if you do it the right way.
To put PPC ads in perspective for digital marketers, in particular, and businesses, at large, GoodFirms research team conducted a survey of 200+ PPC agencies and experts, globally. The basic idea was to identify the best practices, tips, and guides for PPC Ad Campaign Management, so as to help businesses become comfortable with the idea of PPC campaigns and thereby help come up with a well-executed PPC Campaign strategy in combination with their outsourced company.
So, without much ado, let’s dive right into our survey findings:
Most Popular PPC Tools Used by Businesses Worldwide as per our survey
According to PPC managers, the best and the most efficient tools include Google Ads, WordStream Advisor, and Bing Ads Editor.
A whopping 82% of digital marketers are using Google AdWords Editor for managing PPC campaigns over multiple accounts.
Almost 55% of internet marketers use WordStream Advisor for offering PPC consultancy and management.
But then, what came as a surprise for us is that 36.37% of the PPC agencies leverage Bing Ads Editor as well.
When it came to Keyword research, it was found that Google Keyword Planner was a highly popular tool, with almost 100% of the surveyed PPC marketers and companies opting for it. Plus, the one-stop shop marketing analytics tool, SEMrush is being used by no less than 63.64% of the agencies. Even the competitor research tool SpyFu is slowly spreading its footprint with 27.28% of the PPC companies using it.
5 Common Reasons for PPC Campaign Failures
Marketers are consistently burning their money while running their PPC campaigns, yet they are not able to yield any desirable results, mostly because of the simple mistakes that they keep committing. Some of the most commonly found mistakes include:
PPC ad is not in Alignment with the Landing Page:
Almost ¾ of the surveyed PPC agencies pointed out the fact that the Ad copy that’s not in alignment with the landing page copy is one of the primary reasons for a PPC campaign failure.
Customers quit such landing pages in no time because they realize that the content is not in keeping with the ad copy. This ultimately results in the waste of pay-per-click spending, which, in turn, affects the conversion ratio.
Non-optimized PPC Campaigns
Optimizing PPC campaigns is considered to be one of the major challenges, with almost half of the marketers mentioning that ads are failing because of nonoptimized PPC ads.
Keyword Stuffing
Over one-third of the industry players stated that use of too many keywords is draining their Ad spending. As conventional wisdom already suggests that the majority of the leads get generated from minority keywords. So, bidding on multiple keywords is not required at all because it might divert the attention of the audience. On top of it, you have to pay for those multiple keywords as well.
Ignoring Negative Keywords
Less than one-third of the marketers cited poor conversion rate because they were not taking into account negative keywords. If you don’t make use of negative keywords, your pages will show up to the untargeted audience. And, according to experts, using negative keywords keeps the untargeted audience at bay, thereby enabling you to accelerate your conversion rates and sales.
Bidding too Low
About one-fifth of the surveyed PPC campaign managers feel that bidding too low can also lead to marketing failure. Agreed, bidding low is an intuitive process, but it might result in poor click-through rate which, in turn, might negatively affect the ad rank.
For further clarification on PPC advertising, you can take help of top PPC companies listed by the GoodFirms team.
Tips to Optimize your PPC Campaigns
PPC campaigns are a business-critical task, so if the ads are not generating the desired results then it could lead to problems.
As per GoodFirms’ research team findings following tips could be applied to optimize your PPC Campaigns:
#Track Conversions
Tracking conversions are crucial because if it helps you narrow down the keywords that help drive conversions and do away with those that are wasting your PPC budget.
# Ad Copy Testing
The copy of the ad is what draws the potential customers to the site. So, it’s imp to have the right ad copy. For this, you can think of conducting regular A/B test on different ad copies and see what kind of headlines, description, and keywords work to attract your targeted audience.
#Landing Page Relevancy
PPC Ads and Landing Pages are inextricably linked. So, it’s important to come up with an ad that’s in perfect alignment with the message of your landing page, specifically, in terms of its advantages, highlights and the USP.
#Power Keywords
As it turned out, ads with high QS keywords perform well. In other words, much of your PPC campaign’s success depends on your keyword bidding. So make sure to add high-performing QS keywords, and more than anything, leverage negative keywords.
Wrapping Up
Like it or not, if your business is into digital advertising, don’t look beyond PPC advertising. It’ s THE best digital ad type for businesses looking for traction these days. And, the best part, it brings in the targeted audience to your site.
