The PPC Ecosystem: How To Optimise Your Conversions With Effective Ads

When you cast your mind towards Pay Per Click advertising, it’s likely to conjure thoughts about optimised keywords that are designed to pull the right traffic towards your website. However, PPC is a wide and varied world that operates on a much deeper level for practitioners and audiences alike.

Social advertising is a rich and competitive market that has the power to consolidate revenue streams in an effective manner. With this in mind, it’s imperative that businesses actively look towards the type of traffic they aim to lure into making conversions on site. 

The digital world is oftentimes a congested one, and PPC marketing is no exception to this trend. Because of this, it’s important for businesses to use the tools available to them in order to gain an advantage over their competitors when it comes to the business of advertising online. Let’s take a deeper look into some of the best ways that companies can fend off competitors and create memorable campaigns to convert traffic into conversions:

Utilise high quality keywords

Google is designed to return the most accurate results for people’s search queries. This operating model applies to both organic searches and the use of Google Ads. 

As a means of actioning this, Google assigns a ‘Quality Score’ to target keywords in a metric that helps to determine your Ad Rank. 

Google bases its Quality Score on your ad relevance, as well as its anticipated click-through rate and the estimated landing page experience for inbound traffic. 

Ad relevance is a metric that’s highly valued by Google, and with this in mind, it’s imperative that your PPC ads are appropriately crafted when it comes to being discoverable for your target audience. Be sure to investigate whether your advertisement’s copy matches the search intent of the various keywords that it intends to cater towards. 

One of the most effective ways of actioning this is to build different ad groups to fit the keywords that you’ve chosen to use. This is known as ‘single keyword ad groups’ and it can help your campaign in suiting the intent of different search engine queries, rather than aiming for a more one-size-fits-all approach to your marketing.

Remember to remarket

Unfortunately, high bounce rates are a common occurrence when running Google Ads campaigns. Visitors can navigate on to your pages while at different stages of their respective customer journeys. For instance, a great call-to-action may be very attractive for a visitor that aims to make a conversion in the near future, but it’s less effective for other users who would rather learn more about their options regarding specific products and services. 

To ensure that no opportunities are missed when it comes to visitors who clicked your ad with little intention of making an immediate purchase, be sure to use your remarketing options accordingly. Remember to cross-sell and down-sell to users who bounced back from your landing page. In these cases it might not be enough to offer free samples to audiences who are still aiming to learn more about your products, but offering content that could anticipate and preemptively answer the questions they have may be ideal in establishing some brand rapport ahead of a purchase being made. 

One particularly actionable approach to this could come in the form of offering eBooks to bounced audiences as a means of encouraging them to learn more about your brand and the services you offer. 

Recognise the importance of ad tracking

Segmenting your ads can be a great way of tracking your conversions more effectively. This approach paves the way for high-quality comparisons between your various segments. 

Fundamentally, segmentation enables marketers to keep track of the various nuances associated with the performance of different ads depending on factors like the hours of the day, or days of the week, or weeks of the month - as well as the costs attached to different campaign approaches. By performing some cost-per-conversion analysis, you can budget your ads to crop up at peak times in order to get the most from your budget.

Marketers can also take a deeper look into the types of conversions that are arriving from headline clicks and embedded links respectively. These insights help to explain scenarios where you may be gaining more conversions but your click-through-rate remains low. In this situation, it may be worth working on boosting the quality of your copy or reapproaching your ads entirely. 

Top Versus Other can act as another useful segment that has the potential to show how ads are performing towards the top of Google’s ranking system. This approach can help to show insights on where adverts are being placed and how much marketers will need to spend in order to reach the highest places. The practical application of this approach can vary based on the businesses that use Top Versus Other, but if a business spends 15% more in a bid to hit Google’s top ranking place, but its conversion rate has risen 60%, it may be worth stretching the budget for.  

Examine traffic sources

(Image: Megalytic)

Monitoring the type of traffic your website is attracting may be a great way of optimising your campaigns. There are plenty of platforms out there that can help to monitor a website’s traffic sources, some provide free solutions while others can be more subscription-based. Better performing analytics platforms like Finteza and Google Analytics are capable of not only helping marketers get to grips with where their traffic is coming from, but also the different types of audiences that are arriving. 

This can be particularly effective for those running multiple campaigns. The act of monitoring where arrivals are coming from can make all the difference in pointing towards which PPC campaign is performing the best when it comes to conversion rates. Studying traffic sources can also help marketers to learn more about the value of the backlinks they’re creating elsewhere as part of their campaign.

Marketers looking to appeal to audiences via social media channels in particular can benefit from the insights offered up by analytics platforms. Approaches towards social media optimisation can vary drastically depending on the type of network being used and the sort of content being posted. Charting arrivals from each social channel can shine a light on what approach is working and what isn’t. 

Spare a thought for negative keywords

When it comes to keyword optimisation, it can be just important to list your negative keywords as well as focusing on the positive ones. Taking this approach in your PPC campaign will help to lower the overall advertising costs as well as boost the quality of your results. Too many marketers find themselves guilty of pumping money into irrelevant searches. 

An effective way of exploring negative keywords is through looking at the search terms people are inputting into Google before seeing your adverts in the results. 

WordStream Advisor and QueryStream are particularly effective tools that can provide relevant data to identify both single and multiple keyword negatives. Platforms like these have the power to add words that could also be worth a marketer bidding on. High quality tools can even help marketers to create new ad groups based on the variations of queries that are being investigated. 

Decisive action on underperforming keywords

If a marketer has been running a PPC campaign for a long enough period of time, it’s likely that they’ve built up enough data to gain an insight into why certain words are performing worse than others. 

If one particular keyword isn’t justifying its spending, it may be worth pausing that particular campaign to focus on allocating your budget towards gaining better results within other campaigns. 

There are many reasons why underperforming keywords occur, and one of the primary reasons is when a specific word has a lower search volume than other campaign keywords. If you find yourself unable to build traffic even when you’re bidding enough, it may be that the chosen keyword may be too long-railed, or simply isn’t searched for enough by target audiences. In these cases it’s advisable to pause the campaign and focus your funds elsewhere.

It’s essential to optimise your PPC campaigns accordingly, particularly when your business is looking to find competitive advantages wherever possible. Make sure you focus on keywords that promise to bring you success with the right audiences. Here, it’s particularly important to take an inward look at your company in order to boost your optimisation efforts.