Can you beat this one?

Snickers have taken their PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this advert that managed to reach 50K audiences in just 3 days.

In addition to this, they even generated a list of over 2,50,000 different misspellings of these words. It was a smart step as the ad managed to garner 5,00,000 ad impressions with a click-through rate of 1.05%.

Smartphone giant, Samsung also dared to come up with a cut-throat advert poking fun at Apple without even mentioning the brand name.

Whenever a user searched for ‘iPhone 6s’, an advert popped up saying, “Awkward… You obviously mean S6 – Samsung.com”.

Later, they took the opportunity to tell visitors what the Samsung S6 had that an iPhone lacked. I think it was a courageous move to turn heads. There’s no concrete evidence stating whether this PPC campaign actually converted iPhone users, but it certainly speaks about Samsung’s innovative content and creativity.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective tools that’s capable of driving traffic and conversion. To create something like the above examples, you need to come up with an innovative approach for a successful PPC campaign.

1. Be wise in selecting your keywords

Keywords play a vital role in your PPC endeavours. They work by bidding on marketing specific keywords to your ad. You have to make sure that you’re bidding on the right keywords that focus on your target audience.

Tools like Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Trends, etc. ushers you with keyword suggestions, giving you a list of the most effective and trendy keywords. Many companies are using the same keywords as yours, but you need to keep this in mind:

It’s important to look for words/phrases linked to the hot keywords and other organic search terms.

Pro tip: Make sure you ask your current clientele and perform thorough online research before finalising your keywords. The next point is an obvious guess!

2. Get your long-tail keywords

Businesses prefer choosing short-tail keywords that are only 1-3 words, such as ‘pre-owned cars’. It’s an easy alternative to make sure that you are bidding to a broad audience and generate more clicks.

On the contrary, long-tail keywords like ‘buy pre-owned cars, India’ is more specific and will appear prevalent to people who’re more likely to convert.

Long-tail keywords are essential because they have:

• Significant search volume
• Less competition
• Less inappropriate search terms
• Higher conversion rate
• High chances of profitable advertising

It’s a better way to connect with your audience and improve your brand value.

3. Learn to be diligent

Time is everything, and everything takes time!

No advertisement will give you results in a few minutes. To yield good returns, you need to invest more planning and innovative approach to it.

Search engines like Google will tell you that their site can help your advertisement run within a few minutes. To make the mark, you need to have a thought-out plan on how you’re planning to send your PPC campaigns to the world.

It would be better to hire a PPC agency to help you create an organized strategy and oversee your campaign’s success after pushing it into the marketplace.

4. Think about adding ‘value’ to your campaign

This one is a solid tactic that works for all marketing niches. Your actual ad copy should have a value-based approach while your keywords can aim at the details and descriptions of what you offer.

Add creativity to your copy by describing the values and benefits of the service to increase your traffic, grow your conversions and enhance your impressions. Don’t follow the crowd and create a copy that simply describes your services as a social media marketing company.

Tell your audience what value your products and services offer and how you’ll be making their lives better.

Ask yourself: Will your products/services solve their problems?

5. Add call-to-action (CTAs)

It’s advisable to end your ad with actionable CTAs. The main body should contain value-based content to reach the right audience. You need to show why people should use your services and what they will be going to get.

CTAs should clearly give the potential to convert and take action after reading. Try to add a sense of urgency in the ad (in a way that there’s something for them to capitalize on it right now!).

Your CTA should have the following characteristics:

• Have a clear benefit for the target audience
• Have a compelling body content
• Have the power to continue the conversion momentum
• Have the art of provoking to take an action

Even simple CTAs like ‘download now’, ‘sign up today’ or ‘start your free consultation’ is a lot more useful than ads without CTAs. The word ‘free’ states that they have nothing to lose anything to click on the button and fill out your consultation form.

For example: Netflix has mastered the art of adding compelling CTAs. Their website says:

Don’t forget to add a button to help them get started with their free month subscription.

6. Set a budget

Before creating your pay per click strategy, you should start by setting a budget for your PPC business. Don’t hesitate about going big.

It’s obvious for many of you to skimp out on this arena but believe me it can be a game-changer for your business. You will have to invest in order to obtain a significant return.

Several companies tend to become hesitant in venturing off into different marketing areas that they’ve never tried before. This can lead to a sizable return in the first month.

Try to split your PPC ad budgeting for every month and spend more in the first month to establish your brand and then set a budget to use for every month.

7. Understand the concept of the marketing funnel

According to this concept, you need to convert people present at the different stages in the funnel. The first stage speaks about building brand awareness and interest – this is where PPC campaigns want to achieve. Keywords are used to target those who’ve no idea what their business provides.

People present in the latter stages know exactly what you provide and have purchasing intent. They tend to use keywords for people in the commitment stage of the marketing funnel. More the purchasing intent, there are more chances of conversions.

8. Identify your ad groups

To have a better quality score, your ad group needs to be relevant and reliable. Your ad groups should fit a specific purpose. If your business provides both social media marketing (SMM) and search engine optimization (SEO) services, then you can brand them under digital marketing.

However, you’re likely to get more conversions and traffic, if you create a separate ad group for SEO and SMM each.

It’s simple: Ad groups work well when they have a narrow target. A diverse range of keywords will make it difficult to work efficiently.

9. Opt for quality over quantity

Along with the amount spent on creating ads, it’s essential to work on the quality of your ads. You need to get a quality score.

Several tools include your click-through rate, the relevance of the ads to the chosen keywords and the site of the ads.

10. Landing pages are a must!

Never waste money on ads for specific products or services that take you to the homepage of your website. Converting visitors can be considered as a return on investment as you’re making it easy for your customers to click on your ad and take action.

As said above, you should use individual landing pages for your ad groups that are customer-centric. All of your service pages need a different ad group with its own keyword and landing page. If you don’t do this, then you add barriers to your potential customers.

Over to you!

PPC campaigns are the backbone of digital marketing – you need to have the right strategies in hand to bring results from these campaigns. I have learned that in this field, you need to put more effort to get good rewards.

I try to introduce new PPC strategies every year. This time I am focusing on voice search. Not many advertisers are investing in this strategy because of the insufficient volume of voice searches and inaccessibility to recognise search queries accurately.

Did you know?

According to data by comScore, “50% of searches will be mobile centric in 2020.”

Sounds great, right!

My target is to create a winning voice search strategy for my PPC campaigns. How?

• Identify if my campaigns are getting voice searches.
• Attain search query reports from adwords.
• Gauze relevant voice search queries.
• Finalise the keywords.
• Add research-based negative keywords.

I hope this helps you to break new grounds and yield better ROI. Rely on this 10-point list to get started.