How to Win at PPC in 2019 - Kaweb

How to Win at PPC in 2019

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We’re just about snuggly settled into 2019 and, if you haven’t already, it’s about time to get serious about your pay-per-click (PPC) plans for the year.

It’s essential to map out a strategy for the foreseeing months, after analysing what has and hasn’t worked from last year’s results.

You can do this by checking if you hit your goals last year – if not, why not?

Change your tests, channels and budgets accordingly.

If you have years worth of data, can you see any trends or patterns that you can follow this year? These could be seasonal, or timely, and all to be taken note of and used wisely.

For example, if one of your products is ‘winter coats’ and your ad for these gets more clicks in winter, than over summer, it’s probably worth investing more to that ad in the chillier months.

The resulting plan will ensure that you are set out to achieve your goals and outline how you are going to go ahead with the structure.

Mat Walters, our PPC expert here at Kaweb, tells us how to go about this powerful PPC process from the basics.


Mat’s 5 Top Tips

1. Research and understand your product, know the values of your brand and its competitors. Recognise who is smashing it from your industry in auction insights and determine why they’re doing so well. Look at what terms they’re bidding on and what their ads look like.

2. Define what you want to achieve, i.e brand awareness, lead generation and/or sales. Use the campaign goal setting on ads to help you create a campaign which is most likely going to hit your targets.

3. Decide how you are going to structure your campaign/s with a variation of different ad groups. These could be different brands, products, or keyword based.

4. Ensure you do thorough keyword research using a variety of different online tools, such as Google Ads keyword planner, ahrefs, Ubersuggest or simply type something into a search engine, like Google, and see what suggestions arise. (In the case that your keywords are too costly, go for longer tail keywords but ensure there is enough volume).

5. Apply the appropriate bids based on your goals, and apply the appropriate keyword match type dependent on your goals. (I wouldn’t recommend using an auto strategy straight away unless it’s max clicks. However, this is dependent on campaign goals because campaigns need conversion data to optimise the auto strategies).


Side notes:

– Ensure your landing pages are relevant. The content on them must include the same terms that are applied in the adgroup which leads to that landing page.

– Ensure your ad copy has keywords from the adgroup applied in the title or description.

– Make use of negative keywords, as these help to avoid popping up for unnecessary searches.

– Make use of all extensions, but definitely try to include site-links, structured snippets and call extensions should you need them. Make use of promotion extensions when running any offers but, again, this is dependent on the campaign goals.

– Create mobile extension versions. These need to be made shorter than usual extensions because there’s less ad space available on a mobile platform. If you’re going for it, you need to cater to mobile ads like a waiter to their restaurant customers. Over 60 per cent of people now use internet on their phones.

Check out the demographics of mobile internet users below:

Whatever gender or age, your target audience is most likely tucked into these statistics.

– Target locations if you want to attract people from specific geographical areas.

– Select devices if you want to target specific tech gadgets like tablets or mobiles, as well as desktops.

– Get to grips with ad schedules if you want your ads to show at certain times. For example, you could research the peak times your audience are online and adjust your ads to show within those times.

– Always check campaign recommendations but only apply them if you feel they are relevant to the goals you want to achieve.

– Create an audience list for search ads to retarget previous visitors, buyers, non buyers etc…. In the digital marketing world these are called remarking lists for search ads (RLSA).

– Use “prefer best performing ads” in all new campaigns from the ad rotation settings.

– Create three – five ads per adgroup for top optimisation.

Mat’s above advice is mainly for targeting Google Ads, however the tips can be applied to other PPC platforms, like Bing.

Another thing to always be wary of if you want to stay on top of your PPC campaigns – THINGS CHANGE!

And in digital marketing, they can change pretty quickly, so be sure to keep an eye on your competitive landscape, keep up with and create trends.
As always, give the team here at Kaweb a shout if you’d like our help with your PPC campaigns.

We’d be more than happy to!

Other than that – get cracking!

Written by kaweb in Digital Marketing