PPC Advertising – What to do in 2022

As with all advertising, nothing works in isolation. Your PPC campaign needs to be buoyed by other strategies that support your overall campaign objectives. PPC is a cost-effective method for reaching customers.

Audience targeting and remarketing have become major factors in PPC advertising, as well as improvements in AI and voice search technology, and automation tools.

PPC advertising is an important part of any digital marketing campaign for medium-sized businesses in the B2B or B2C sectors, as the highly targeted ads and curated content can reach your key audience fast. However, there are many ways that you can optimize your PPC advertising, making your marketing really work as intended to connect with customers and guide new traffic to your website.

Reach Your Audience with Keywords

The internet is built on keywords. Search engines have advanced far from the early ’00s when knowing the right keywords as a user was important. Now, it is on the website owner to ensure that they understand how their traffic finds them using keywords. For businesses, analyzing how their ideal customer finds them, what content they respond to and what motivates them to take action, such as signing up for newsletters or making purchases.

Profiling your audience and understanding how you can motivate them to action is one of the most important PPC advertising tips you can implement:

• Create eye-catching content to encourage engagement
• Target your audience’s reading/shopping/browsing habits
• Using the language of your target audience

Optimize your PPC campaign for your audience. Your keywords should be second to your goal, meaning that your focus should be on overall high-quality content that includes keywords, not content structured around keywords.

Remarketing

Remarketing means targeting people who have previously visited your site or made a purchase, with content that motivates them to action.

Remarketing is an important element of your campaign strategy. It means reaching out to those who you know are interested in your brand, and inviting them to make another purchase or otherwise show their loyalty to your brand, such as signing up for a subscription or loyalty program.

Google Ads remarketing allows you to target visitors in several ways:

• Standard – Displays an ad on the GDN to visitors who have previously visited your site (based on your criteria).
• Dynamic – This allows you to personalize the ad based on the page or product they viewed.
• Search engine ads – Your ad pops up as a result in the Google SERPs, optimized for remarketing.
• Distribution lists – Uses your customer list to target searchers.
• Video – If people have interacted with a video ad, they will then see an ad either on YouTube or on partner sites.
• Mobile apps – For mobile apps and websites.

Automated Rules

PPC ads offer many options for tailoring the targeting of ads. Wading through the mountain of options can seem overwhelming, but there are a few automation rules that, if you understand, will make the selection process easier.

Here are some of the automation options:

• Scheduling

The time you choose to push your ads matters. Some businesses need to connect with their audiences early in the morning, while others will find their customers more responsive in the evening. These statistics are easy to research for your industry and then cross-reference with your data to determine the optimal times to boost your advertising.

• Auto-pausing keywords

You can set up rules that stop your low-performing keywords, or those that are out of your budget, from burning your budget. And you can also set up an auto-stop on ads with a poor CTR.

• Adjusting bids

If you have a keyword that is performing well, you can add rules that adjust your bid amount by a set percentage over a period of time. If you’re aiming to maintain the no.1 position for your ad, you can set rules that change the bid price to maintain your visibility. You can also boost your keyword bid at specific times of the day.

• Budget based rules

Working with your budget is important, and automating elements make it easy to keep track. You can cut off your campaign when the ad spends hits a certain amount or boost spending on a campaign that is performing well.

• Keyword Exclusion

You can also exclude certain keywords from some of the rules, and use scripts to manage bidding rules.

Assign Cost Per Acquisition – CPA

Google Ads’ cost per acquisition means that you only pay for a click when the customer completes the checkout. The tool isn’t made available to all businesses, it needs to be worth it for Google as well.

A successful CPA campaign needs a good ad score, an algorithm that Google assigns your campaign based on your hook, landing page, and other factors. The PPC tool can help add an extra element to your campaign for businesses that are ready to take their digital marketing to that level.

Conversion Actions Analysis

Understanding your sales funnel, and where people are stuck, is an important part of your marketing campaign. You need to understand what messages are resonating and driving sales, and which are falling on deaf ears. If you’re running more than one PPC campaign, you are likely targeting customers at different stages of the decision-making journey, so CTAs will be different according to your strategy. That is why it’s important to segment CTAs according to the funnel stage and nurture leads using your most effective content.

A digital business might target potential customers with the following CTAs.

• Awareness or Discovery: Watch – Read
• Interest or Browse: Benefits – Download
• Decision or Compare: Add to Cart – Price
• Action or Buy: Sale – Offer

Optimizing CTAs is relatively new to marketing and even some of the biggest brands are struggling to understand their customers’ responses. By understanding how CTAs resonate with your customers, you can better use your PPC actions to push leads through the sales funnel.

For example, in the Browse category, are you offering your leads a reason to stay on the site by providing value-adding content that answers questions, provides new information, and engages your core customers? Is that content easily accessible, and motivating? Does it explain the benefits of your brand and motivate sales?

Examine your content, how it is presented, and its alignment with your brand values. It also needs to be understood in context with the CTA. When you do analysis it is likely that you will discover elements of your camping that need improvements such as landing page optimization, audience targeting, and CTA placement.

Manage Your Budget

Responding to breaking developments is a useful PPC strategy. Use keyword planners like Google Trends to see what people are searching for. This helps you to boost your brand and make your brand relevant in your industry. PPC ads are fast to create, and when a topic is trending, it is important that your business leverages the opportunity to be visible. By responding to events and running fast ads when an important subject related to your industry is trending, you are likely to reach a new audience and secure loyal customers. This strategy helps your brand stand out as an industry leader if capitalized in the right way.

Turn Off Audience/Display Network

The Display Network for Google or Audience Network for Facebook are great ways to boost your brand visibility by displaying your ads on partner websites and apps, but it can increase your exposure to click fraud and ad fraud. With 1 in 5 clicks on PPC ad campaigns found to be fraudulent, this can increase your ad spend without achieving any goals.

Both Google and Facebook’s audience networks can expand your reach, but neither gives you control over which sites you appear on. You can block sites that you believe are acting nefariously; and if you suspect fraud, you can apply for a refund. This can take time and for medium-sized businesses, might not be a cost-effective solution.

You can use click fraud protection software. Such software purports to identify fraudulent activity, block the source from clicking on any of your ads in the future and apply to Google for a refund on your behalf.

PPC Trends

There are always new developments in marketing on social media and search engines. While some of the biggest players are aggressively releasing new ways to monetize their sites through ads, selling, and data aggregation, there are some trends that are likely to gather attention in the coming years.

• AI

AI and machine learning in PPC marketing is growing. Google’s automation options use features of machine learning, and it’s becoming more advanced. Automation options in Google Ads rely on machine learning, and the technology is designed to improve with use as it gathers data and improves responses based on what has been learned.

• Visual search

Scanning products or images using apps like Google Lens is making search faster, and sales easier. Shoppers can scan a picture of a celebrity, find out what they are wearing, then choose to purchase the item, all in a few clicks. The technology promises to be an exciting development for brands that sell clothes and homewares.