Pay-per-click (PPC) is an excellent way to gain more traction for your website. As a startup, it’d be great to consider PPC as a marketing strategy for your business. From its name, the concept of PPC is that you’ll only pay the advertiser whenever someone clicks on your ad. You can also say that PPC is a way of buying traffic to your website. This strategy also comes in various forms, the most common being search engine advertising, where you can pay for ad placements in a search engine’s sponsored links.
Once you understand the impact of PPC, you can work towards the success of your website. Essentially, you can boost your website’s click-through rates and conversions through PPC. However, PPC can also be costly, and you might not get high returns from it alone.
It’s also advisable to consult a Google ads specialist, like Claire Jarett, to grasp the ins and outs of launching PPC campaigns. Having established that, here are five guidelines for startups on PPC marketing.
1. Set Parameters
Setting parameters helps an ad to be more targeted and effective. When selecting parameters for your PPC ad, you must consider the goals of your marketing efforts and think about your target market.
Hence, you have to think about what your ads should accomplish. Should it be increased sales, visits, or merely creating brand awareness? Once you’ve decided on the purpose of your PPC campaign, you can determine key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure the success or performance of your campaign.
2. Specify A Bidding Plan
Launching a PPC campaign can get expensive pretty fast. Therefore, managing your budget is crucial to keep costs low. While there are automatic spending options, you’re yet to know what works and what doesn’t for your website. To maximize conversions, you can consider bidding options like manual bidding or enhanced cost per click (ECPC).
Manual bidding is your best shot because you’ll have complete control over your campaign. You can also fix bids for custom keywords and control costs through manual bidding. While this might require you to invest more time, it’s the quickest way to learn the ins and outs of PPC marketing. Therefore, it can help you achieve success in the long term.
3. Develop Effective Keyword Targeting
Choosing the right keywords is a crucial aspect of online marketing, even in PPC marketing. You need to curate and organize the most relevant target keywords to ensure that users can quickly locate your website in the search engine.
Using ‘high intent keywords’ is a good strategy as this targets users who are further along in their research and will likely result in a conversion. Additionally, optimizing keywords is effective because the ad would be visible to people who are likely to engage.
Remember, you’ll be paying for every click that your ad gets so if you want returns on your marketing investment, it’s important to attract users who are not just going to click, but will engage and make a purchase as well.
4. Create Effective Landing Pages
The landing page is a critical element in PPC because that’s where users end up when they click on an ad. As a startup, you must ensure that the landing page is highly targeted, relevant to the ad, offers what’s promised, and provides a great user experience.
The primary reason why you should create a good landing page is to help in conversion. People who click on your ad and visit your page should find a reason to stay and become customers. Thus, your landing page should have:
- Clear design and layout
- A strong headline that’s similar to the search ad
- Content that’s specific to the target keywords
- Provide valuable content as offered in the ad
5. A/B Test The PPC Ads
You can’t put something out to your clients without testing it first. A/B testing is a good idea since you have to prepare two types of ads and determine which one worked well for search engines and users. Doing this is encouraged because it’ll help increase clickthrough and conversion rates.
In A/B testing, you’ll prepare two landing pages with different headlines, target keywords, descriptions, and calls to action. Any alterations or improvements to these aspects will significantly affect clickthrough and conversion rates. For effective testing, you can tweak one area at a time and track changes to see the results.
Conclusion
As a startup, it’s initially difficult to compete with small and big businesses that have already established their names in the industry. Since your business is still new and quite obscure, you have to invest heavily in raising brand awareness. PPC can be a great strategy to achieve such.
However, you also need to approach PPC strategically. Since it will entail huge marketing costs and resources, you have to know how to optimize the right keywords to gain more mileage. Doing A/B testing and crafting an effective landing page are also necessary to improve conversions.
It would be a waste of time and money if the landing page couldn’t increase the conversion rate of users who have clicked on the ad. Therefore, as a startup, be guided by the discussion above before launching a PPC campaign.
