Mastering PPC: Proven Strategies for Optimal Performance

A proper PPC strategy has helped many companies and advertisers generate revenue for their brands, services or products. But what is PPC? PPC, or pay-per-click, is one of the most common advertising models used to achieve certain campaign goals.

Outcomes include:

• Increasing blog views;
• Driving potential customers to a landing page;
• Improving brand awareness.

Due to the wide applicability of this model, a good PPC strategy will always come in handy. If you want to delve into this topic and find out which strategies work in today’s world, you’re in the right place!

PPC Advertising: An Important Concept to Learn Before Implementing PPC Strategies

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is a type of online advertising model where the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on the ad.

For example, let’s say an ad has 1,000 impressions but no clicks. The advertiser doesn’t pay since the ad has no clicks. No matter if it had 1,000 — or 1 million — impressions! Because of the pricing model for this type of advertising, you need a PPC strategy that ensures every click you receive is from your intended audience. We’ll go into much more detail on that later on. But, for now, let’s focus on the types and components of PPC advertising that exist.

Types of PPC Advertising

You’ll find PPC strategy implementation all over the internet! No matter what your target market looks like, there will always be room for PPC in your digital marketing arsenal. Below are just a few types of advertising that can benefit from a PPC strategy.

• Social ads: Each platform is different, so where you’ll find PPC may vary. However, the benefit of this is that you can target very specific segments of your market.
• Paid search ads: If you’re managing a Google PPC strategy, this is most likely the type of advertising that you’re working on.
• Retargeting ads: This type uses cookies to show ads based on browsing activities. Be aware of any local rules that may limit its effectiveness.

Key Components of a Successful PPC Strategy and Campaign

Your PPC campaign will need these five elements to work harmoniously to generate optimal results.

1. Conversion path: Even if your desired goal is not necessarily a sale, the PPC strategy should still move the audience closer to a purchase.
2. Advertisement: The ad format depends entirely on where it will appear, so this can be text, multimedia or both.
3. Conversion tracking: Knowing the most important stats helps with current and future PPC strategy creation.
4. Monitoring and analysis: Using tracking data helps you get a better sense of your campaign’s effectiveness.
5. Budget: The more effective your ad is, the more you pay. Make sure you have enough cash to yield desirable outcomes.

On Which Advertising Platforms Is a PPC Strategy Most Useful?

For advertisers who want their target audience to take immediate action, PPC serves as a sort of Swiss army knife for their advertising strategy. Therefore, a PPC strategy will find its place on various platforms, including:

• Social media;
• Blogs;
• Video content platforms;
• Email services;
• SMS ads.

Essentially, anywhere an ad can be placed, a PPC strategy can be useful. However, you will need to adapt your approach based on the ad formats and the conventions of your chosen platform.

SEO and PPC Strategy Creation: Can You Do One Without the Other?

The appeal of PPC is its ability to generate results quickly, which is very important for bottom-of-the-funnel initiatives. However, we do not recommend relying solely on your PPC strategy for a few reasons.

• It’s relatively expensive: Paying for clicks to get users to visit your site can be costly.
• You need to diversify: It’s never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. A combined SEO and PPC strategy for eCommerce is better than focusing all of your efforts into one strategy.
• You need to think long term: While PPC is great for immediate results, SEO can help you generate long-term results, making it easier for you to reach customers organically.

Put simply, PPC gets your foot in the door, while SEO makes you a part of the club!

What Is PPC Strategy in Advertising?

PPC strategies are guides for your campaign. These help you get the best results for every dollar spent by zeroing in on the specifics of your campaign. Among the many decisions needed here, your PPC marketing strategy should answer these questions.

• What platforms do you want to use for your ads?
• How much will you allocate for the campaign? How much goes to which platform?
• What are the PPC bidding strategies that you will employ?
• What keywords are you going to target?
• How long are you going to run the campaign?
• What indicators are you looking for to stop the campaign or revisit the strategy?

How to Create an Effective PPC Campaign Strategy in Five Steps

By answering the questions above, you’re well on your way to creating an effective revenue stream using PPC. However, answering those questions isn’t enough. Your next steps will be putting all of these together to formulate a powerful PPC strategy that is aligned with your needs.

Step 1. Set Clear Objectives and Goals

In the previous section, you saw how answering certain questions can help bring you clarity. But before you can dive into specifics, you need to know the answer to the most important question for your PPC strategy: What do you want to achieve?

There are various potential desired outcomes you may want to achieve, such as:

• Getting people to sign up to your email list;
• Increasing brand awareness;
• Improving the sales of certain products or services;
• Increasing the traffic to your site or social pages.

Having clear goals and objectives will help you determine whether your PPC strategy will work on its own or in congruence with other advertising tactics.

Step 2. See Where Your Strategy Fits In

Even if you’re only just building up your marketing strategy, your PPC strategy is likely not your only marketing effort. Just like a machine where each part fulfills a certain role, you need to identify what part PPC is in your whole marketing mechanism.

Take the eCommerce PPC strategy example Google shopping ads. While this strategy will display your product right below the search bar, using this on its own will not fully maximize your earning potential. Therefore, by employing other strategies in your marketing plan, you can enhance the returns generated by your PPC strategy.

Step 3. Decide What Campaign Types to Go With

Using the first two steps, you should be able to decide where to set up your campaign. At this point, it’s time to narrow down how you’ll implement your PPC strategy. To do this, look back on your goals for this campaign. We have already discussed a few campaign types earlier in this article. Feel free to use one or a combination of campaign types for your PPC strategy.

Step 4. Formulate Your PPC Keyword Strategy and Perform Keyword Research

You want to expose an interested audience to your ad to increase the likelihood that they’ll click. At the same time, you want to ensure that you can win the bid against other advertisers who are interested in the same keywords. Generic search terms like “flowers” or “cake” will have a lot of competition and are not really useful for a PPC strategy.

Therefore, it’s better to focus on high-intent keywords or key terms, increasing the likelihood of a user taking action, like locating certain information, buying a product or going to a certain site page. The specificity of the search term also indicates high intent. And here’s some good news for every PPC strategy creator: these are usually long-tail keywords with less competition!

Step 5. Set Up Monitoring and Evaluation Processes

What exactly you will use for monitoring and evaluation depends on where you decide to set up your campaign. For PPC strategy, you should focus on metrics and evaluation based on the goals you set for Step 1. In addition, remembering the following tips will help you obtain a clearer picture.

• Use clear PPC strategy metrics (such as a 2% clickthrough rate).
• Make sure the metrics you’ve set are realistic based on past campaign results.
• Set conditions by which you can shift gears and change your strategy.

Advanced PPC Tactics to Try in Your PPC Advertising Strategies

Don’t get us wrong; having a good grasp of the basics is important to attain consistent and sustainable success in using PPC as an advertising method. But if you’re ready to take your PPC strategy to the next level, there are more tactics that you can try. Not sure if you’re ready for the next step? Here are a few signs that you are:

• Your average PPC strategy isn’t bringing the results that you want;
• You have mastered the basics and are ready to take it to the next level;
• You do a lot of retesting and want more options.

Your PPC strategy can be massively enhanced by doing these three things.

Exploring Remarketing and Programmatic Buying

Creating a personalized experience for your potential customers is a great way to drive them to your desired action.. For example, with a PPC strategy, you can acquire potential customers who visited your site but didn’t make a purchase.

Using cookies, you can create tailored ads for users based on their web activity. This is what happens after they leave your site:

• Their activity is automatically tracked through the cookie;
• They leave your site and proceed with browsing;
• The user sees an ad tailored for them on a different site.

With a solid remarketing PPC strategy, you’ll be able to recapture a market that fell off the marketing funnel.

Utilizing AI and Machine Learning in PPC

If you’re running a one-person marketing team, PPC strategy-making can be made much easier with Artificial Intelligence. Apart from bringing great benefits like improved efficiency, it can also help with various aspects of PPC strategy formulation.

• Market segmentation: AI can look at patterns and behaviors to create data-based market segments.
• Fraud detection: This can help prevent fraudulent clicks, which drive spending up without yielding results.
• PPC bidding strategy: AI can analyze real-time data and use it to make decisions on bid amounts, including recalibrating the bid based on incoming information.

Adding Native Advertising in PPC Strategy Creation

Many forms of PPC overtly look like ads, which makes them more susceptible to banner blindness. So, if you want your ad to get noticed, a less conventional PPC strategy, such as native advertising, may be beneficial. The beauty here is that the ad is woven into the organic user experience. By blending in, the ad can stand out! Consequently, your target audience is more likely to interact with your ad, which means getting that click.

PPC Marketing Strategies in 2023 and Beyond: What Two Future Trends Can You Look Forward to?

PPC has truly come a long way! Looking at how the internet has evolved in the last two decades, it’s exciting to think about what a PPC strategy will look like in the future. We can’t say for sure how advertising will evolve, but from how the industry is moving, we predict that advertisers will have these two trends to look forward to.

Advertisers Will Use AI Even More

Today, you can already use AI for many things. However, we expect that your PPC strategy will become less reliant on human input. This means you’ll be able to:

• Process more data in a shorter period;
• Avoid human errors during every part of PPC strategy formulation;
• Expand perspectives on making strategic advertising decisions.

Perhaps there will come a time when all advertisers have a role closer to that of a manager, with AI taking care of the more time-consuming tasks while they focus on bigger-picture decisions.

A Mobile-First PPC Strategy Will Reign Supreme

With more people using smartphones to access the internet and make purchases, any advertiser will do well to consider and prioritize a PPC strategy designed for mobile users. Therefore, you should consider these things when you use PPC:

• Ensure that the landing page and ads are mobile-friendly;
• Consider ad formats specific to mobile devices, like ad installs;
• Try to use location information for your mobile PPC strategy to show more relevant ads.

Advertisements on desktops will always have an audience. However, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table by not implementing mobile-first strategies.

FAQs on PPC Strategy

What is PPC, and how does it differ from other online advertising methods?

PPC, which stands for pay-per-click, is an advertising model where you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. Unlike most advertising methods, you don’t pay based on the exposure of your advertisement to an audience.

Why is a PPC strategy essential in digital marketing?

PPC lets you advertise to an audience that’s more likely to be interested in your product. Having a good strategy for this allows you to gather as many of these interested individuals as possible.

What are some common challenges businesses face with a PPC strategy or campaign, and how can they be overcome?

Some of the most common issues businesses face include:

• Low clickthrough rate: This can be solved by looking at the relevance of your ad to your intended audience.
• Not generating leads: This can be addressed by improving landing page copy, bidding for more relevant queries or improving the call-to-action.
• High wasted spend: This can mean you need to look for bots “clicking” on your ad or low-quality monitoring and evaluation processes.

How can businesses determine the right budget for implementing their PPC strategy?

Identifying the ads that you want to target is the easiest way to determine your budget. If the keywords you’re interested in have low competition, then you may not have to spend as much to implement your PPC strategy. It’s also worth exploring how much you want or are projecting to earn from PPC. If you’re using it to expand the readership of your blog, it may not make much sense to spend a lot.

What role do keywords play in a PPC strategy, and how can they be effectively researched and optimized?

In many forms of PPC as an advertising strategy, keywords play a central role because they determine the audience your ad will be exposed to. Here are a few tips for researching keywords for your PPC strategy.

• Consider brand terms, both yours and your competitor’s.
• Focus on high-intent keywords.
• Go from broad to specific in looking for search terms.
• Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
• Include synonyms and variations of key terms in the search terms that you’re interested in.

Are there specific industries or business sizes that benefit more from having a PPC strategy, and why is that the case?

All industries have the capacity to earn from PPC. However, industries with high customer lifetime value and eCommerce benefit the most. A flexible PPC bid strategy is only possible with larger budgets. This gives bigger companies with larger marketing budgets an edge over startups and small businesses.

How can businesses measure the success of their PPC strategy, and what key performance indicators (KPIs) should they focus on?

How you measure your success will depend on what goals you set at the beginning of your PPC strategy creation process. For example, low profitability may be acceptable if your goal is to increase site traffic. Below are some KPIs that you may want to look at.

• Clickthrough rate
• Quality score (applicable for Google PPC strategy)
• Impression score
• Average cost per click
• Conversion rate
• Cost per action
• Average position

Again, the applicability will depend on the goals that you have when creating your PPC strategy. You don’t have to “score” high on all of these for your campaign to be considered successful.

Can someone forego SEO efforts and just focus on building a solid PPC strategy?

No. PPC is great for getting that quick boost in your site traffic. However, if you want long-term results, you will want to invest in PPC as well.

Maximize Results with SEO and PPC Strategies

PPC is a crucial marketing tool if you’re looking for immediate results. Every click matters, so make sure that you have clear goals for what you want your PPC strategy to accomplish. To achieve long-term and sustainable growth, it’s still worth investing in SEO, and if you want to smoothly integrate your ad into the browsing experience, using native advertising as part of your PPC strategy is the way to go. Register on the MGID platform to get access to everything you need to crush your campaign goals. With sophisticated tools, an expert manager, a team of creative experts and a wide network of high-quality publishers, success from your PPC strategy is more attainable. To learn more about the advertising services provided by MGID, click here.