Developing an effective bid strategy is one essential aspect of your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad campaign.
Google offers ‘smart campaigns’ but devising a click-and-go advertising or PPC campaigns that actually works is still a fantasy.
So, having success with your manual bidding or automated bidding largely comes down to your strategy.
Of course, bid strategies are more complex than years ago and there are more features to consider.
As much as Google tries to make our lives simpler with automated bidding, you will still need to do your research.
Below is more information about bid strategy and when to increase your PPC bid.
The perfect way to begin your Google Ad bidding journey is to use everything Google puts at your fingertips.
And that starts with the Keyword Planner.
This wonderful free tool will help you find new long tail keywords you didn’t consider – and it gives you a suggested bid based on how you set your advertising account.
Many experts recommend beginning viewing by looking at every keyword’s page 1 bid. Then maybe increase it by 25% to get to the middle of the page/landing page.
This will ensure your PPC ads are more visible but aren’t at the top of the heap (which will greatly increase your ad appears expenditures).
Let’s take a close look at several of the most popular automated or manual bidding strategies:
This is a popular Google Ad Manual or automated bidding strategy that can boost your conversions while focusing on a specific desired result on the home page. If your goal is to reduce costs to generate more sales, Target CPA is a worthwhile choice.
That keyword that costs less per click doesn’t always mean it’s superior to one with a higher manual CPC bidding.
Additional site traffic at a lower CPC will not necessarily net your firm more money.
Return on Ad Spend is also a great automatic bidding strategy that will help you reach the desired ROI.
With ROAS, you set your eyes on a certain dollar amount from total sales and not how many items your customers purchase. This is a useful method for products that cost more.
ROAS will adjust your strategy automatically and is based on your desired outcome or goal. Google will utilize conversion data from old PPC campaign to estimate possible conversion chances in the future.
This is an automated Google Ad strategy. It means the site uses AI to increase conversions and their values in your digital marketing campaign. Google looks at signals during the auction, including OS, device location, time of day, and more to boost your conversions.
Many marketers say Maximize Conversion’s can be best if you already have some conversion history in the books. But it’s not essential. Note, however, that this method could increase your costs a lot if the average spend is below the average daily budget.
This is like maximizing conversion’s is similar to Maximize Conversions. But the focus is on clicks, obviously. This can be what you want to drive prospects to your new website, so it works well for building audience and brand awareness. If your site doesn’t have conversion tracking set up, this strategy will set ad bids/adjust bids/manage bids to get as many clicks as possible.
It’s generally considered prudent to raise your bids when you can net the most profitable traffic from the keyword. And you should probably lower your PPC bid when you can get traffic that converts but it’s too expensive.
Some additional factors regarding when to raise and lower bids:
Further, if your company goal is to reduce your cost per action or CPA, you should allow the keyword-level CPAs to tell you when to raise or lower your bids. Naturally, what you do will be different based on the keyword, but here are some guidelines:
If the CPA for a keyword is below your goal and is showing a lower ad position, many say to increase the bid. This boosts your ad higher on the page. Then, you have better advertisement visibility and additional clicks and conversions.
However, if the keyword has a higher CPA and is still in a top position, think about lowering the bid. Fewer conversions will be the result but it will reduce your CPAs.
Now that you know when it makes sense to raise your ad bid, let’s review how you figure out which bid strategy is best:
Establishing a Google Ad bidding strategy and knowing when to increase or decrease bids is complex.
That’s why many growing companies turn their PPC advertising strategy and campaign to a skilled and experienced contractor.
Need help with Google Ads management? Contact us, we can help!
Your brand is your company’s identity.
It’s a keystone for most of your marketing and advertising strategies.
At the center of every message you send, every advertisement you display, and every new marketing tactic you try is going to be your brand name, big and prominent.
Despite this, people commonly neglect branded terms when practicing search engines optimization (SEO). Traditionally, SEO strategies focus on commonly searched keywords and phrases, as well as phrases that cleanly reveal user search intent.
For example, you might optimize for phrases like “good pancakes near me” or “auto repair shop Austin.” No branded keywords are necessary here, because you’re intentionally generating a list of brands to consider in your forthcoming purchase.
But if you want to get more value out of your SEO strategies, and earn even more valuable conversions, you need to start optimizing for branded search.
What exactly does this mean? And how can you do it?
First, what makes a conversion valuable?
On some level, all conversions are valuable.
In case you’re not familiar with the term, a conversion is just a meaningful action taken by one of your users. Depending on your organization and your strategy, a conversion could be a product purchase, a newsletter signup, or an interaction with a meaningful piece of optimize existing content on your own website.
Conversions will either give you revenue immediately or represent one step on the journey to getting revenue.
Our claim is that branded keyword and branded searches give better conversions, so what do better conversions look like?
Ultimately, branded searches are good for your conversion strategy for a few different reasons:
Branded search optimization, the practice of optimizing your website specifically for branded keywords, offers some other benefits as well:
Are there any weaknesses associated with branded search optimization?
The short answer is yes, but most of them present opportunities for compensation.
Now to the heart of the matter.
How do you optimize for branded search?
How can you make sure you remain competitively dominant in the landscape of branded search terms relevant to your brand name?
Is your brand in need of further online marketing support? Is there a missing ingredient in your existing branded search engines optimization (SEO) strategy? You’re in the right place: SEO.co is here to help. Contact us for a free consultation today!
No matter how much experience you have running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, a checklist will help you manage your time.
Trying to manage your responsibilities without a checklist can make you skip important tasks even when you’ve performed them routinely for years.
There’s a reason professionals in various industries use checklists – they work. Although the consequences for mistakes are more serious in other industries, checklists are the perfect companion for digital marketers.
Technically, you can’t manage time because it will go on whether you like it or not. We all have the same 24 hours in the day and that won’t change. However, you can manage your tasks within time and that’s what time management is really all about. In other words, it’s about managing your tasks within the boundaries of time.
Time management strategies vary, but they all fall back on the reliability of lists and written tasks. When you’re managing a PPC ad campaigns, time management matters. There are so many different components to set up, manage, and optimize, that if you don’t strictly manage your time and tasks, your campaigns will suffer.
The main purpose of a PPC audit checklist is to help you track recurring tasks within your PPC ad campaigns. Most of the time, you’ll have weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and bi-monthly tasks. If you haven’t already organized your tasks into a schedule, this article will provide you with an outline to get you started.
Here are some common weekly PPC tasks to add to your PPC audit checklist:
If your projections indicate that you’re going to overspend, decrease your keyword bids and/or budgets. If your conversions are lacking, adjust your keyword bids or put all of your PPC budget into your highest performing campaigns.
Also, check to see if your campaigns exclude site categories where you don’t want your Google ads to run. For example, you may not want your Google ads to run on sites with content related to sexually suggestive content, sensitive social issues, or in-game placements on mobile apps. Many advertisers exclude mobile apps completely because they tend to eat ad budgets due to lower click and conversion rates.
Here are some common bi-weekly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:
This data will help you stop running google ads that don’t perform well and add new ad variations to see if you can beat your control for your highest-performing Google ads.
Don’t forget to check in on your retargeting/remarketing ads. And if you haven’t started running these better-performing ads yet, it’s something to seriously consider.
Studies have shown that using remarketing ads generate a higher ROI because they bring back potential customers that didn’t convert the first time. Many people who come back to a brand through remarketing end up converting.
Here are some common monthly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:
Check your account to ensure you’re targeting the right google search network, devices, languages, locations, and any other specific demographics you have set.
Hopefully, you’ve been testing different landing pages with your ads. If so, run a Final URL report to identify underperforming landing pages and send your traffic to the pages that are converting better. Then, look at your landing pages to see if you can identify why they’re not performing as well. Continue your split testing by creating more landing pages based on the ones that perform the best and keep testing your page elements.
Here are some common bi-monthly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:
When you identify locations that aren’t performing well, add negative keyword modifiers to eliminate untargeted or ineligible clicks. Then, add positive bid modifiers on your locations that are performing well.
As you can see, there are plenty of tasks to perform on regular schedules in order to keep your PPC ad campaigns running optimally. By creating your PPC setup checklist, you’ll be giving yourself a valuable tool that will keep track of your tasks better than your memory.
Countless studies have proven that human memory is unreliable, especially when it comes to details. This is seen most clearly in experiments designed to determine eyewitness reliability. In these experiments, witnesses struggle to remember basic things like the color of a suspect’s clothing, their height, and even their physical features.
Don’t rely on your memory to manage your PPC ad campaigns. While you might be able to remember some things, you’ll never remember everything. Additionally, having a checklist makes your job easier because you can simply go down the list and check things off as you complete each task.
Having a list also makes it easier for you to ad scheduling your tasks in your calendar and set those tasks as recurring items. Having a to-do list is great, but if you don’t also schedule your tasks you’re likely to skip important things.
Running a PPC campaign takes a lot of work and isn’t really suited as a one-person job. If you want big results from your PPC ads, you need a team to manage your PPC campaign.
Less than 25% of PPC search ads produce conversions, but that’s because most campaigns aren’t properly set up or optimized. When you work with us, we’ll get you the results you want.
We work with businesses in a variety of industries to create effective PPC campaigns that drive leads and sales. We’ll not only create effective ad copy, but we’ll also optimize your landing pages with effective ad copy. This is where most people get PPC ads wrong. A high click-through rate is only worthwhile when your landing pages convert. We’ll make sure your CTR improves along with your landing page conversions.
If you’re ready to take your PPC campaigns to the next level, get in touch with us and tell us about your goals. We’d love to help you generate the impressive results you’re after.
You’ve probably visited a website that accurately displayed the time and date of your visit. This web feature has been around for a while and is fairly common, especially on sales pages. However, dynamic content isn’t limited to times and dates – you can use this amazing feature for dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) into your Google ads.
Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) ads is an advanced Google AdWords feature that inserts part of a user searches query into your PPC ads/only ads. It’s quite effective at getting more clicks. Imagine being a user searching for something specific and seeing the same ad group/ad groups that reflects the specifics of your search. You’ll be more likely to click on that ad, right?
If you haven’t used this feature, you’re missing out on clicks and revenue. Here are 5 reasons to start using dynamic keyword insertion work with your Google ads.
In your digital marketing campaigns, you want your prospects to think, “this product or service is for me.” When prospects feel like a product, service, or web content is meant for them, they’re more likely to convert.
You can get people to recognize that something is meant for them with professionally written sales ad copy that speaks directly to their needs, desires, keyword insertion and pain points. However, you can also achieve this through what’s commonly referred to as “keyword backtracking” in neurolinguistics programming (NLP) terms. Use Dynamic keyword insertion is essentially automated keyword list backtracking for paid ads.
Keyword backtracking is a form of active listening, and it’s when you repeat someone’s words back to them in order to make them feel heard. In a live conversation, keyword insertion this makes a prospect trust you more. When used in Google ads, it has the same general effect, but since there’s no live conversation it tells prospects your one ad is exactly what they’re looking for.
There are two reasons dynamic keyword insertion increases CTR. The first reason is that Google automatically bolds dynamic keyword insertion in ads that match the user search. When you use dynamic keyword, your ads will show up with bolded keywords more often, which means more click’s.
The second reason DKI increases your click through rate is because it increases the relevancy of your ad, which brings up the next point.
Ads with high relevancy get more clicks, period. When you publish standard ads, it’s possible to make them relevant ad/hyper relevant ads to your audience, but nothing makes an ad more relevant than automatically inserting part of the user’s search team into the ad.
Here’s an example of how this works. Say you’re running a pre-owned car dealership and you specialize in selling Jeeps. You can program your ad headline to insert the words “Jeep, Cherokee, Wrangler, Gladiator, Rubicon, SUV,” etc. when a user includes them in their search. This way, your ad headline will customize itself to always reflect the user’s specific search. It would look like this:
Your headline template: “Buy Used {keyword: Jeep}
Search phrase: “Used Jeep Cherokee for sale near me”
Your displayed headline: “Buy Used Jeep Cherokee”
Search phrase: “Used Jeep Wrangler for sale near me”
Your displayed headline: “Buy Used Jeep Wrangler”
If no keyword can be inserted dynamically, your ad will default to your specified target keywords or competitor keywords, in this case it would be ‘Jeep.” The ad will still be relevant, just not highly specific.
Google is always focused on quality, and PPC ads are no exception. Google assigns a Quality Score to all PPC advertisers based on the quality and ad relevance and quality of their dynamic keyword insertion, ad text, default keyword insertion text or ad text and landing pages/landing page url. You might be familiar with this already, but if not, it’s important to understand how Google’s Quality Scores works.
Your Quality Scores is more important than you may realize because it’s used to calculate your cost per click (CPC) and multiplied by your max bid to set your ad rank during the ad auction process.
Getting a higher Quality Scores will reduce your CPC and help you reach more people with your ads by giving you a higher ad position. This is what makes use dynamic keyword insertion so valuable – it’s an excellent way to increase the relevance of your ads in order to help you earn a higher Quality Score.
It’s easy to spend hours on end creating ad variations, but that’s not necessary when you use DKI. DKI makes it easy to create ads that target a large number of multiple keywords. It’s essentially automation for ad variations.
Since time is money, it makes sense to use dynamic keywords insertion DKI whenever possible. Think of all the time you’ll save that you can use to work on other, more exciting aspects of your business.
Although dynamic keyword insertion is an excellent strategy, DKI isn’t a substitute for targeting relevant demographics, having relevant content, and creating a persuasive ad copy. It’s simply a tool to capture more attention from your target market. If your ads use broad match keywords in a misleading way, DKI will get you clicks, but not conversions.
Be digital marketing cautious about accidentally creating clickbait with your PPC ads. Not only will this kill your Quality Score by reducing the relevance of your ads, but it will make people stop trusting your brand.
Sometimes clickbait is unintentional, and that’s why it’s important to review your ads to make sure they’re accurately representing whatever content you’re sending your visitors to on the other side. There’s nothing wrong with being clever, but don’t be so clever that your visitors get a good chuckle out of your ad group/tightly themed ad groups and then bounce.
Running a PPC ad campaigns on any platform can be daunting when you’re trying to learn everything on your own. No matter how many tutorial videos you watch, the learning curve is steep and mistakes are plenty. Normally, mistakes are just opportunities to learn. However, paid ads cost money, and mistakes are expensive.
There’s a reason less than 25% of PPC single word keywords/same keyword ad groups convert; paid advertising is a skilled profession that requires expertise to get results. If you’re not getting results, dynamic search ads or if you haven’t launched a PPC ad campaign yet, it’s time to get started.
At PPC.co ad description, we can help you get the conversions you deserve using established best practices and advanced techniques that get results. Contact us today to learn more about our services and receive a free proposal from our PPC team.
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