Paid Search: Common Mistakes, Tips and Best Practices

The ultimate goal and the biggest struggle at the same time for businesses is the subject of converting website visitors into potential leads and then clients. You may and should resort to social media marketing to build an online presence and enhance brand engagement. This modern tool can help you achieve marvelous growth indeed, but, face it, the ROI of social media is fickle and fairly unstable.

So, is there any alternative to it that can facilitate your business’s growth? Well, there is. Pay-per-click and paid search have emerged as effective and powerful strategies that help drive more traffic to the website. However, it bears the sweetest fruit when done right.

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Paid Search Best Practices That Help You Do It Right

Over the last few years, there’s a lot has happened in the PPC world. However, if you have been living in the cave and don’t know how things are and where you should start, then go through these paid search best practices. These surefire strategies can facilitate better results and provide immense growth for your business. Read on!

1. Incorporate Video Ads

About 80% of marketers proudly claim that video ads have helped them boost their sales. In addition to this, 83% of marketers say that videos have enhanced their lead generation endeavors. The fact that information presented through visual content is remembered more by users further increases the importance of incorporating video ads in the advertising strategy.

2. Use Automation

When it comes to PPC campaigns, begin with clear processes and consider automation. It is worthwhile to search for ways to automate the manual tasks that are performed time and again. These tasks may include testing, reporting, and bidding. With Google Ads, you can streamline your PPC process with helpful features like automated rules that allow you to boost bids for low-cost keywords with high-converting potential.

3. Implement Smart Bidding

With machine learning, you can manage your ad spend and optimize your conversion rates. Simply convey to the search engine (Google) about your advertising goal, and your bidding will be placed by Smart Bidding on your behalf while taking your budget into account.

4. Personalize your Ads

When it comes to grabbing the attention of the customer, you can’t ignore personalization. It makes sure you are reaching the right folks. You can rely on Google Customer Match upload and build Similar Audiences to find and reach people that manifest the same behavior and have similar demographics as the ones from your current audience.

5. Single Keywords Ad Group

SKAG is a fantastic way of giving a boost to your PPC campaign, and it instantly creates a solid keyword foundation. There’s no denying the fact that Google AdWords has become immensely competitive, and the CPC is also constantly rising. To enhance the CTR, you must direct your ad campaign towards a SKAG (single keyword ad group).

6. Optimize for Mobile

Smartphones and mobile devices are here to stay. Most of the paid search impressions are received from mobile devices only, which only reiterates further the importance of crafting ad campaigns that support mobile platforms. To relish success in this constantly evolving and highly competitive business landscape, optimizing PPC ads for mobile devices is crucial. This may include incorporating Click-to-Call buttons in the ads and ensuring they operate well on smaller screens.

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Common Paid Search Mistakes You Must Watch Out For

Now that we have fleshed out the significance and potential of paid search or PPC advertising, it is time to know how to do it right. Half of the strategy goes great when you are aware of the mistakes people usually commit and ways to avoid them. If you are thinking of launching a new paid search campaign for your company, review these common mistakes and learn how to avoid them. Read on!

1. Neglecting remarketing

With retargeting, aka remarketing, you can send ads to people who have already viewed and visited your website. The strategy works by using a specific code throughout the entire website, and then a cookie is added to the web visitors’ device automatically after satisfying the desired criteria, such as visiting the homepage.

2. Ignoring critical campaign settings

While refining or setting up a campaign, one must carefully review the campaign settings and features available on the platform. Neglecting the campaign setting can trigger many issues with budgeting, targeting, and content.

3. Not having a conversion tracking setup

Conversion tracking enables marketers to the number of conversions they are getting and their sources. Without a proper conversion tracking setup, you will face difficulty in reckoning the efficacy of your PPC campaign’s ROI and judging which keywords and ads hog the most potential.

4. Not using keyword match types effectively

To ensure your investment in PPC campaigns is not going down the drain, you should use proper keyword match types. Not only improper keyword usage can prove detrimental to your overall budget, but your budget as well. Keyword match types one can utilize include phrase match, broad match, and exact match.

Paid search or PPC is a powerful tool for anyone looking to expand and grow their business on the Internet. With this strategy, you can instantly bring your site to prominent positions in SERPs and thus, attract more potential customers. However, one has to do it the right way to reap impressive results and avoid mistakes that degrade the efficacy and potential of the PPC campaign.

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MTS Staff Writer

MarTech Series (MTS) is a business publication dedicated to helping marketers get more from marketing technology through in-depth journalism, expert author blogs and research reports.

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