How to build an effective PPC strategy

Chat with SearchBot

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be highly effective and efficient for brands and marketers.

However, it’s also easy to quickly waste a lot of money without any sales or conversions to show for it. 

You need a strategy before you launch your first campaign.

Here are some things you’ll need to prepare your PPC strategy.

Goals

As with any marketing effort, it’s key to establish the business goals for your campaigns first.

In PPC, this is particularly important because those goals often inform the structure of your campaigns.

One way to structure your campaigns, for example, is to do so based on where people are in your marketing funnel.

Figure out what you want to achieve with your paid search campaigns: Is it to:

  • Build awareness and consideration among prospects? 
  • Generate leads? 
  • Sell products? 
  • Increase average order value? 
  • Upsell existing customers? 
  • Increase loyalty? 
  • Drive app installs or in-app actions? 

Whatever your goals, map those out first.

Adequate budget

Without a sufficient budget, your ads won’t show often.

There are many ways to control spend in Google Ads, but doing it by limiting budget is just about the worst way to do so.

It also means you won’t get enough clicks or conversion data to learn and optimize your campaigns, let alone meet your business goals.

Landing pages

The best campaign structure, the best ads and all the optimization levers in Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising or any other platform won’t make a difference if you don’t have good landing pages. 

As mobile now makes up a majority of searches and ad clicks, mobile landing page speed is a factor. It’s critical to have landing pages load quickly on all devices and provide a good user experience that’s relevant to their search query and provides an intuitive path to the action you want them to take.

If your business goal is to acquire leads, but you don’t have a lead form or clear call to action on the landing page, your campaigns probably won’t yield the results you want or the user behavior that signals a good user experience to the search engines.

If your site sells baby products and your ad for the search query “baby stroller” takes a user to your home page instead of the baby stroller category page, most visitors won’t spend time figuring out how to find baby strollers on your site. Instead, users will click back to the search results, and that ad’s Quality Score will suffer.

Keyword research

Keyword research is an essential component of any PPC campaign. It involves identifying the most relevant and effective keywords for your target audience to help drive traffic to your website. 

By understanding the keywords your potential customers use to search for products or services similar to yours, you can create more targeted ad campaigns that generate better results.

Several tools are available for keyword research, such as Google Ads Keyword Planner, Semrush, and Ahrefs. These tools can help you discover new keywords, understand search volume and competition, and identify long-tail keyword opportunities. 

When conducting keyword research, focus on finding a mix of high-volume and low-competition keywords, as well as long-tail keywords that are specific to your niche.

Ad platform

Selecting the right ad platform is crucial for the success of your PPC campaigns. The most popular ad platforms are Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, which allow you to target users on Google and Bing search engines, respectively. 

Additionally, social media platforms like Meta (Facebook, Instagram), LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter) also offer paid advertising opportunities.

When choosing an ad platform, consider your target audience, budget, and marketing objectives. For example, if your target audience is more active on LinkedIn than on Facebook, it might be more beneficial to focus your ad budget on LinkedIn. It’s also important to consider the specific features and targeting options each platform offers to ensure they align with your campaign goals.

Ad copy

The ad copy is the text and messaging used in your PPC ads. Writing effective ad copy is crucial to engaging potential customers and encouraging them to click on your ads. 

Some tips to create compelling ad copy:

  • Keep it relevant: Ensure your ad copy is aligned with the keywords you’re targeting and accurately reflects the content on your landing page.
  • Highlight benefits: Clearly communicate the benefits of your product or service and how it can solve your target audience’s pain points.
  • Use strong calls to action (CTAs): Encourage users to take action by including clear CTAs like “Buy Now,” “Sign Up,” or “Learn More.”
  • Test and optimize: Regularly test different ad copy variations to determine which messages resonate best with your target audience. Use the results to optimize your ad copy and improve overall campaign performance.

A testing mindset

Your campaigns may not meet your objectives right out of the gate. Successful search campaigns require ongoing analysis, testing and optimization. 

From bidding to targeting to messaging to landing page strategies, all play a role in performance. And because search engines are constantly testing and introducing new features themselves, there is a constant learning curve and opportunities to try new things.

Dedicated resources (people)

The size of your budget and the complexity of your campaigns will dictate how much time and talent you should dedicate to managing, analyzing and optimizing your paid search efforts. 

It’s incredibly easy to waste money on PPC. Having the right talent in place and resources devoted to your efforts will save money and headache.

In the next chapter of this guide, we dig into tracking and measurement.

Chapter 4 of our guide will teach you about PPC campaign tracking and measurement.

Read more of Search Engine Land’s Complete Guide to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising:

New on Search Engine Land


Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.

Topics

Our events

About

Follow us

© 2024 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Third Door Media, Inc. is a publisher and marketing solutions provider incorporated in Delaware, USA, with an address 88 Schoolhouse Road, PO Box 3103, Edgartown, MA 02539. Third Door Media operates business-to-business media properties and produces events. It is the publisher of Search Engine Land the leading Search Engine Optimization digital publication.