Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet marketing approach in which advertisers are charged a fee each time one of their adverts is clicked. Essentially, it's a technique of purchasing website traffic rather than trying to "earn" it organically.
Here are some important metrics to keep an eye on in your PPC campaign.
The total amount of clicks on an ad is referred to as clicks. Your keyword selection and the relevancy of your ad copy have an impact on this metric.
The cost per click (CPC) is the amount you pay for each ad click.
The percentage of ad views that result in clicks is known as the clickthrough rate (CTR). The amount you pay is determined by this statistic (CPC). Industry-specific CTR benchmarks exist.
The number of times an advertisement is viewed is referred to as impressions. For every thousand impressions, the cost per mille (CPM) is calculated. For brand awareness efforts, impressions are the most important factor.
AdWords advertisers struggle constantly to keep pace in an ever-changing industry, where Google likes to switch things up with hundreds of changes to the platform each year.
What if you could cut through all the noise, seriously reduce your learning curve, and cut straight to the heart of the most effective and impactful PPC marketing tactics?
I recently led a webinar with Thue Madsen from KissMetrics and shared the 10 top PPC marketing hacks you need to optimize your pay-per-click strategy today. You can keep tweaking copy and testing button placement forever, but those minor changes won't have near the impact as these.
Here we go: these are my all-time top 10 PPC advertising hacks.
AdWords Hack #1: Optimize Quality Score!
Google wants you to think QS isn't all that important, but we know better.
Your Quality Score impacts your click-through rate and ad ranking in a big way. Google actually rewards high QS advertisers with lower costs per click and higher ad positions.
In the illustration above, you can clearly see that Advertiser I, with the highest Quality Score, spends far less per click than the others.
Quality Score also plays a role in how often your ads will appear – and for which keywords. In fact, for every point you improve your Quality Score, you can expect to see a 9% increase in Impression Share.
The opposite is true, as well; for every point lost in QS, you can expect Impression Share to drop 9%.
Remember, QS is just an algorithm and any algorithm can be hacked. Google knows the typical click-through rate for specific types of ads and ad rankings. If you fail to meet their expected click-through rate, you're going to be stuck with low-Quality Scores. Beat that expected CTR and raise your Quality Scores!
The Hack: Get rid of the junk keywords and ads that are dragging your whole account down. Add 10%branded keyword terms to increase your average CTR; these keywords get super-high Quality Scores and lift your whole account. Finally, delete the bottom performing third of your account, reallocating that budget to remarketing.
Hack 2: Write Insane Ads that Appeal to Emotions
Of course, you don't want to write bad ads. You probably don't even think your ads are all that bad.
However, by definition, half of the ads are average or below-average performers. It's true – most ads suck.
See how similar the ads are in the search above? They're boring, they're all the same, and they're getting low single-digit clicks at best.
Then we have ads like this one that get 6x the average number of clicks!
What makes this ad so special? I like to call these Unicorn Ads ads that get exponentially greater clicks because they appeal to people on an emotional level.
If you can make people truly feel something, you can make them click to find out more.
The Hack: Take a page from my friend and expert marketer Perry Marshall's playbook and write better ads using his Swiss Army Knife strategy. Get to know your customer's emotions – who do they love? Who do they hate? Who are their best friends and their worst enemies? What is their biggest problem and most importantly, why are you the one to solve it?
Hack 3: Use Bid Multipliers
Instead of trying to buy as many clicks as possible, you should be cherry-picking the best clicks for your business.
Bid multipliers allow you to do this by attributing greater worth to clicks at specific times of day, otherwise known as dayparting. For example, let's say ad clicks during office hours are more valuable to the advertiser in the image below. They have staff in the office during these hours to answer phone calls and email inquiries. Because they are a B2B company, the people searching their keywords are more likely to be in a buying frame of mind during the workday.
What they've done here is created a schedule so the bids for keywords in their optimal times are higher. If this advertiser were a restaurant, this would probably look completely different. They might place a higher value on clicks in the evening or on the weekend.
This is a great feature for local marketers, as well. You can place a higher bid value for the one-mile radius around your business, for example, or for users in different countries, depending on what your data tells you about the value of those conversions.
Bid multipliers also allow you to adjust your bids based on the device used by the searcher. You might find that clicks from mobile devices are more valuable to your business – maybe people are more motivated when they're searching from mobile, or they're more likely to act on a click-to-call.
The Hack: Be picky and don't try to buy everything. Take advantage of the bid modifiers' capability to bid more on the clicks that make the greatest impact on your business.
Hack 4: Optimize for Mobile
Next year, half of all searches will come from a mobile device. The greatest opportunity here for AdWords advertisers is the Click-to-Call button.
Click-to-call is a game-changer. Think of the differences between the desktop and the mobile conversion funnels:
Mobile typically already has greater intent – people are on the go and they have a need to fulfill right now. In addition, you don't lose people with the extra clicks through the process of visiting the site and finding your contact information. You get people on the line right away, which is why this is definitely a feature worth testing.
The Hack: Mobile is super competitive, far more than desktop, thanks to the limited amount of space on the page. Aim for the top three positions so your ads have a chance to be seen by these valuable mobile searchers. How do you do that? Go back to Hack #1 and optimize your Quality Score, or you're going to be paying far more than you would otherwise for clicks on those top ad positions on mobile.
Hack 5: Remarketing
If you could only choose one AdWords hack on which to focus your efforts, it would have to be remarketing.
Typically, conversion rates suck – that's just the sad truth of it. Ninety-seven percent of people leave a website without taking the action the marketer wanted them to take. That's pretty awful, right?
Remarketing allows you to get back in front of those lost visitors with targeted messaging, appropriate for their place in the conversion funnel.
Here’s how it works: Website visitors are tagged with a cookie when they visit your site, so later you can remind them about your offers in other online locations – while they’re checking their Gmail or reading other websites, for example – to complete the action they had started.
Remarketing exponentially expands your reach and helps to improve not only conversion rates but brand recall, as well.
The Hack: Come up with an audience definition strategy and segment website visitors based on their interests. Create ads for each segment and use the Google Display Network – comprised of the AdSense Publisher Network, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and other Google network properties like YouTube – to reach users with more targeted messaging that aligns with their goals.
- Hack 6: RLSA
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) are great when you want to bid on hopelessly broad terms, including competitor names or other navigational terms. Those broad terms can be problematic, as they tend to get very low clicks and negatively affect Quality Scores.
What you can do to alleviate this applies RLSAs, so you target only your own previous site visitors in search when they seek information on these other terms.
For example, you could target a competitor's name, but only to your remarketing list for search ads list of people who had already visited your site. These people are the most likely to have been comparison shopping and are all ready familiar with your brand, having visited your website. Now, when they search for competitor information, you can get in front of them again with targeted messaging that will appeal to them in that phase of their buying journey.
The Hack: Instead of targeting everyone with your broader, navigational keywords, target only those who have visited your website recently to tap into higher intent clicks and avoid low click Quality Score penalties.
- Hack 7: In-Market Segments
One of the challenges in remarketing is that you have to have an audience to remarket to. What if you're a smaller business with a small amount of website traffic and therefore don't have your own large audience to remarket to?
In-market segments enable you to target people who are already in the market to buy.
Google has a massive amount of audience intelligence at its disposal. They know your search habits, demographic information, and much more that tells Google what it is people are in the market to buy.
Using in-market segments, you can show your real estate video to a person Google has identified as already in the market to buy a house, for example. You can get your parenting content in front of an audience of new parents. The possibilities are endless.
The Hack: Use in-market segments to get in front of a motivated audience with demonstrated intent, even if you don't have a large remarketing list of your own.
- Hack 8: Gmail Ads
Gmail has had ads on the side of the page for years, but now you can appear right in the inbox with ads that look like real emails.
The new Gmail ads have a subject line and teaser and allow you to display a full HTML email to your target audience.
People tend to tune out the ads on the right. Use these new Gmail ads to get real estate where it's far more likely to get their attention – right in the inbox.
The Hack: Use Gmail ads and take advantage of targeting parameters like topic interests and domains they already receive emails from to better appeal to users.
- Hack 9: YouTube Ads
A billion people use YouTube every day. It's crazy that so many companies are ignoring the entire platform! There are really fantastic ad formats available, including the popular TrueView ads.
TrueView ads play before other videos and users have the option to skip after 5 seconds if they don't want to watch it. The targeting options are super precise and powerful – and best of all, you don't pay if a user skips your ad.
You can target specific channels, or target by keywords, interests, search history, and more. There is so much inventory on YouTube, that the prices are very low.
YouTube also offers in-video ads (seen above), video search ads, and more.
The Hack: Use YouTube! Incredibly, so many advertisers pass over the YouTube opportunity considering the competition is relatively lower than other platforms and the audience is so massive.
- Hack 10: First Mover Advantage
This last top AdWords hack sounds simple enough, but considering the rapid pace at which AdWords changes, it's tougher than you might think.
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