Set Parameters

First and foremost you need to set certain parameters to avoid your ad being untargeted and ineffective. You want to consider your overall business goals and the impact of your paid campaign on said goals. Think of what you want to accomplish with your ad campaigns — visits, sales, brand awareness — and how much you’re willing to spend to achieve these goals.

Before creating each ad campaign you should set these parameters:

• The specific audience you intend to target
• The theme of your ad campaigns
• The success metrics that will measure effectiveness
• The types of campaigns you want to run

Goals and Goal Metrics

With each ad campaign creation you need to have specific goals in mind for your advertising efforts. Most PPC campaigns have common benefits such as:

Site traffic – one of the primary goals of paid ads is to direct traffic to your website, as most marketers struggle with bringing in enough organic traffic to make a difference. But first, If you’re going to spend money getting people to visit your site, you want to have properly designed and written landing pages that can keep potential customers there and eventually convert them into profitable leads.

Brand awareness – If you want to get your brand in front of as many eyes as possible search ads won’t be your friend, without breaking the bank of course. It might be a better idea to look into display ads where you can create eye-catching copy with engaging imagery. A great channel for boosting your brand awareness is social media and social ads. Appearing in your target audience’s feed will get you new followers along with their trust as a noteworthy brand.

Lead generation – if your goal revolves around generating quality leads the first step is to have a relevant and engaging landing page to support your paid ad. If you intend to create separate landing pages for each ad group, you can easily track your lead generation efforts either with a tracking pixel, or through UTM parameters.

Sales – And the most important goal metric of them all: generating sales. You can measure by how much of your product or service are being sold based on your paid ads. You should be able to track this through a quality CMS software or with attribution reporting.

Set Your Budget

Before moving on with the rest of the strategy, one important point you need to consider is your potential budget. We all know how hard it is to spend your precious ad money and get nothing for it. Your budgeting and bidding strategy are a key component of your overall paid strategy as many people make the biggest mistake right here rather than later on. 

The pay-per-click marketing cost includes two methods for setting your budget: daily budget and bidding.

Budget – the total amount you’re willing to spend per campaign for one day

Bid – the total amount you’re willing to spend for a specific keyword 

When starting out, it’s better to spread your budget across all of your campaigns and as you start to get results from your campaigns, you can analyze the outcome and on higher-performing keywords and campaigns.

Do Keyword Research

Keyword research can be incredibly time-consuming, and require a lot of resources. But your entire PPC strategy is built on keywords, and even the most successful advertisers constantly update their keyword lists not to miss out on hundreds of thousands of profitable, low-cost and valuable keywords that could be driving real visitors to your site. 

Once you set your campaign structure, look for keyword sets to use in your ad groups. Conduct keyword research to identify the top performing keywords in your industry. Each campaign and each ad group needs to target a set of keywords — that’s how your ad will be displayed in case of a search query. The general rule of thumb is to assign from one to five keywords per ad group. But remember, you’re not forever stuck with the keywords you started with. You can closely monitor your keyword list throughout your entire campaign — setting negative keywords, eliminating ones that don’t bring in desired results and increasing your bids on keywords that do. 

Write Steller Ad Copy

Bidding on well-researched targeted keywords will get your advert in front of the right people; attention-commanding ad copy will get them to click on your ad. Just like the keywords you choose, you need to keep the user intent in mind when creating ad copy. You can’t make the most out of your ad without knowing what people pay attention to. 

There are usually 4 main parts of the actual ads you place.

Headline – The title of your content/landing page

Description – Why the user should click on your link

URL – The webpage you’re sending your visitors when they click

Network-specific elements – Things like sitelinks, hashtags, likes, and shares.

As I’ve mentioned before some networks are more text-based, like search engines, while social media ads are typically more image or video-based. Still there are some general guidelines that will make sure your ad copy is commanding attention:

• Address your audience’s objectives
• Speak directly to your potential visitor
• Avoid keyword stuffing
• Include the main keyword you’re bidding on
• Focus on the headline, it’s what everyone sees first
• Make sure your ad copy and page copy match
• Include actionable CTAs 
• Tell a story in your description
• Make an offer
• Show testimonials and reviews
• Appeal to FOMO
• Use emojis
• Optimise for location
• A/B Split tests to optimise for your target people

Craft Landing Pages that Convert

We have our goals, we have the keywords, we have the copy, you feel like you’re done. Not so fast. Yes, your ad is ready and running, you are getting traffic but where are you directing these visitors? Your homepage? Big mistake.

You need to create a super targeted, highly relevant to your campaign landing page that will make sure to convert site visitors into profitable leads. If your landing page is not up to scratch, or worse, you direct all of that expensive traffic to your homepage, what is the point in spending so much resources on PPC ads?

The digital ad campaign is only half the picture; without your landing page and your sales funnel coming to the rescue.

Managing Your PPC Campaigns

Once all your ad campaigns are created, you’ll need to manage and analyze them regularly to ensure their effectiveness. You should be continuously analyze ad group performances and separate keyword performances by making the following adjustments to optimize your campaigns:

Add PPC Keywords: Expand the reach of your campaigns by adding new, untapped keywords 

Set Negative Keywords: Set non-converting keywords as negative to improve campaign performance and ROAS.

Review Costly PPC Keywords: Review under-performing, costly keywords that don’t seem to convert well and shut them off.

Split Ad Groups: Split up your ad groups into smaller, more targeted ad groups, which help you create more relevant ad copy and landing pages.

Refine Landing Pages: Modify the content and calls-to-action (CTAs) of your landing pages to align with individual search queries in order to boost conversion rates.