ppc campaign management

PPC Campaign Management

Pay-per-click, or PPC, campaign management can be a daunting task, especially if you’re already busy running a business. Here are some tips straight from the mouth of Google on how to achieve success with Google AdWords.

 

Ad Formats

When advertising with Google AdWords, you have the option of advertising in their Search Network (text-based ads that appear alongside search results), their Display Network (image-based ads that appear on popular websites or in front of YouTube videos), or both. And within those two networks, you have plenty of choices in terms of what type of ad formats you’d like to utilize (in fact, we’re only going to cover three of the nine possible ad types).
 

Text Ads

ppc campaign management
 
Text ads are the most common type of ad. The main building blocks of a text ad are the headline, website URL, and a brief description that is usually some form of call-to-action, like “Buy now” or “Register and save 20%.” Relevance is key, so you want the keywords in the ad to match type of search terms that your future customers are searching for.
 

Image Ads

ppc campaign management
 
Image ads are the ads that you see when viewing a popular site or blog. These are great for building brand awareness and can be used to target individuals who are spending time on websites that relate to your business. Suppose you sell high-end jewellery, it makes a lot more sense to advertise image based ads showcasing your products on fashion related blogs rather than creating a text based ad. Why? Because in the case of jewellery it helps to show off what your products look like as opposed to describing your products, and that goes for any product that has a visual appeal. Clothes, cars, you get the point. An image ad is worth a thousand words, but a text ad has a limit of 80 characters.
 

Ads with Extensions

ppc campaign management
 
Ads with extensions are similar to text ads, but they provide extra tidbits of information such as a phone number or business address. Extensions can be really helpful to guide people to specific pages of your website. Say you’re a car dealership that offers both used and new cars: sitelinks (a type of extension, don’t worry we’ll get to this) can be used to include separate links to pages for both used and new cars. Or maybe you run a restaurant: you can include your address so people quickly know where your business is located, and you could also include a call extension so that a “call” button appears beside your ad for mobile users. Let’s dive into these a bit further.
 

Ad Extensions

 

Sitelinks

ppc campaign management
 
As mentioned above, sitelinks give your customers easy access to a number of different pages of your website. Let’s stick with the car dealership example: say you want to create an ad that promotes your fleet of new vehicles, but you have a range of models that you want to advertise. You could definitely create ads that are targeted specifically to each model you’re trying to sell, but sometimes people don’t know exactly what kind of car they want. So to spark the interest of someone generically searching “new vehicles,” you could use sitelinks to advertise the different models you have.
 

Call Extensions

ppc campaign management
 
Simply put, call extensions add a button to your ad so that people can call you directly from the search query. Maybe you run a restaurant and your goal is to increase the number of calls you receive: you could include a call extension so that a big “call” button appears beside your ad for mobile users within a certain radius of your business.
 
Quick! Someone hungry just searched for “pizza delivery” and it triggered your ad to show with a call extension. Get those ovens pumping because you’re going to have some orders coming your way.
 

Seller Ratings

ppc campaign management
 
Showing off your Google reviews in your ad instantly adds credibility to your organization (albeit if you have good ratings!). It’s a great way to show your potential customers that other people have already gone down the same path they’re about to, and they came out the other side happy and satisfied.
 

App Extensions

ppc campaign management
 
App extensions are pretty much dedicated for companies building mobile and desktop applications. The link will send them right to the app store where they can download your app. There’s not much else to it.
 

Location Extensions

ppc campaign management
 
Location extensions are very useful for businesses that deal with foot traffic. Remember that restaurant you’ve been running? Well, on top of adding a call extension to your ads, you could also include a location extension for those who would rather eat in. You can even choose to highlight the distance between the user and your business. Maybe your customers are searching for a restaurant within walking distance, and you’re advertising that your business is only own 0.5km away, perfect! You’ve got some hungry folks to feed.
 
Now, let’s find out how to make those ad extensions even more effective by targeting our ads a little more precisely.
 

Ad Targeting

 

Keyword Targeting

This is the basis of text based ads. When people search for things on Google, the search terms they enter into the little search box are called “keywords,” and these keywords are what you build your ads around because you want your ads to appear when people are searching terms that are relevant to your business. So if you work for a company that sells social media management software, you’d probably want to use “social media management software” as a keyword in your targeting.
 

Location Targeting

Your restaurant is seeing lots of success from those ads you were running, but you’re noticing that most of your customers are located near your business. If that’s the case, you can use location targeting so that you’re putting more effort towards targeting individuals within a 3km of your radius, or any size of radius you want. Random fact of the day: the plural of radius is radii. Cool word.
 

Device Targeting

While noticing that most of your customers are already close to you, you also realize that most of your conversions (the number of people doing the thing you want them to) are coming from those users who are searching from mobile devices. You can use this insight to spend more money targeting users on mobile versus desktop computers. It’s all about getting the best return on investment for your ad dollars.
 

Audience Targeting

So you know most of your customers are searching for you on their phone and that they’re typically nearby when doing so, but you also realize that most of your customers are teenagers. So what do you do? Use audience targeting to target based on demographics! That way you can pursue the users who are most likely to convert into customers, and all of this insight can be gathered by analyzing your AdWords reports. Pretty useful tools, huh?
 
And that’s just the beginning of AdWords! We didn’t even get a chance to get into match types.
 
“Match types!? What are match types?!” you’re thinking. Annnnnnd the suspense starts to build…
 
If you want to learn more about running a pay-per-click campaign shoot us a message and we’d be happy to chat with you about your goals, and in the mean time you can check out this article with some tips for creating ads.
 

PPC Campaign Management