One of the best ways to instantly send and control the traffic going to your site, albeit an expensive one, is Google Pay-Per-Click ads. With huge amounts of competition and your budget on the line – It is important that your ads are well optimised and fit for purpose.
We sat down with our resident PPC expert, Faye, to put together a quick guide to getting the most out of your PPC Ads:
Tailor your keywords
One of the first things you should do with your ads is to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords for your business or service or product. You can make your ads as well presented or as relevant as possible, but without targeting the best keywords for you – you’re missing out on untapped potential.
It is best practise to mirror the layout of your website, and the words that you use on your website. You can use Google’s Keyword planner to find estimated impressions, click through rates and costs of your desired keywords as well seeing the competition on the word. We advise doing a lot of research around keywords and search terms to find what would offer the most return from your money!
Call to action
A Call to Action (CTA) should be a hard hitting one liner that tells the reader in a straightforward and to the point way what they should do. Sometimes it isn’t enough to hope that readers will remember and return to your company, you need them to take action on your ad immediately.
Some examples of call to actions could be:
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Improve your quality score
“Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad, keyword and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.”
Improving your quality score essentially means that what people clicking through your ads are being taken to a page that is highly relevant to them. The benefits of a high quality score is that you can achieve higher positions and cheaper cost per click on ads that are relevant to your keywords.
Relevancy
Making your ads more relevant can only be a good thing for both your business, and any potential customers searching for you. Whether you offer 1 product or service, or you bid on hundreds of different keywords for a multitude of services and products, it is important to focus your ad around the exact topic of which your landing page covers. The more you can target your ads towards the consumer base you want to buy from you, the more success you will have.
Landing Page Optimisation
Your ads and your landing pages are the first impressions you put out to your potential customers. Simply optimising your ads may work to encourage people clicking through, but if they turn away as soon as they hit your landing page, it isn’t much use.
Try optimising your landing page so that it answers all the questions a customer may have, looks visually appealing and is relevant to what your ad stated.
Extensions
Adding extensions to your ads can enhance it for any potential customers, and allow you to direct traffic to other relevant or important parts of your site. For example, you could add in some extensions that direct people to your contact page, blog, FAQ’s or related services.
Also, it has an impact on your quality score, as long as each site link goes to a different page on your site. Best practice is to send the extensions to different pages than your main ad destination.
Clean URLs
When you set the destination of your ad, you can also type in a different display URL that is cleaner, and easier on the eyes and much more attractive to potential customers. For example, if you were selling fully automatic defibrillators, the page destination might be http://www.example.com/safety/defibrillators/view-all/sort-black, whereas your chosen display URL could be customised to www.example.com/Black-Defibrillators. Much nicer.
Pay per Click is a consistent, manageable and detailed way to get traffic to your site in a way that you control. These tips will help you get the most out of it!