Improving Your PPC Campaigns

by Jeremy Banks Evolutesix

Pay-per-click campaigns are one of the most common, and as proven, one of the most highly effective advertising campaigns. It's an innovative way to drive traffic to your website all while racking up the viewing points on its different pages (given that your site kept the viewer's interest).

However, there are times that no matter how much heart and soul you pour into your PPC campaign, they don't do as well as you expect. But it's okay; it happens to even the best of us.

Don't beat a dead horse with your old tactics if your PPC campaigns aren't performing up to par. Instead, brainstorm with your PPC campaign service provider and look at famous examples of big companies with effective PPC methods to get yours up and running again.

Ensure the relevance of your keywords to your ad

When you type in your keyword/s, which is for example 'lawnmowers in Davao city,' you will notice that there is a subset of links resting above the usual websites listed on the search engine. These links are called Ad groups — An ad group contains one or more ads that share similar targets. As a marketer, you will know that some ads are performing well, and others aren't based on their position on the group.

Be clear about your ads because PPC campaigns that underperform usually fall to the bottom of the ad group, quite literally. If you're marketing 'lawnmowers in Davao City' be careful not to add seemingly irrelevant details such as 'flamethrower' to the meta description.

The "iceberg effect" an oldie but a goodie

The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on live events, with minimal context or interpretation. However, from a marketing perspective, the iceberg effect refers to a search term to keyword ratio. For a quick and easy fix to an underperforming PPC campaign you need to have a 132:1 ratio, that's 132 search terms to 1 keyword.

Gauge your competitors regularly

In a world as competitive as digital marketing, there's no shame in stalking. The goal is to do your competitor out and drive traffic towards your website and not theirs. There are many different programs you can use to run sample analytics to get stats on your competitor and use it to get ahead of them.

Get creative with your PPC campaigns because the search engine is like a funnel. The densest part stays on top the longest and the others fall through into a bowl waiting to be picked up again.