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PPC Agency Blog

The Electrician’s Guide to Running PPC Ads That Actually Bring In Paying Customers
High-Performance PPC for Roofing Contractors: A Tactical Guide to Lead Generation
PPC Tips to Help Plumbers Get Real Leads Without Wasting Money on Clicks
Strategies for Maximizing ROI with PPC Management
How to Use Google Ads in a Restricted or Sensitive Category
Google Ads vs. Linkedin Ads: Which is Better for Commercial Targeting?
9 Reasons To Fire Your PPC Agency
How To Start A PPC Agency?
What are the Right PPC KPIs to Track?
How to Write Great PPC Landing Page Headlines
Basic Guide to Retargeting in Google Ads PPC
Display URLs: Optimizing Display URLs for Google Ads & PPC
What Marketers Should Know About Automated Bid Algorithms in PPC
Ultimate Guide to PPC Remarketing: Bring Users Back When They Don’t Convert
Should You Avoid Automated Bidding With Google Ads?
How To Dial In Your Cost-Per-Lead Using PPC?
How to Find the Best Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Services
PPC Management Pricing: What Should I Pay My PPC Agency?
How Much Does it Cost to Sell On Amazon?
10 Most Important PPC Metrics to Track
What Makes a Good Click-Through-Rate in Google Ads PPC?
Implementing Flexible Bid Strategies in PPC
How to Set Up Facebook Retargeting
How to Increase Landing Page Conversions
Understanding Google’s Ad Rank Formula in PPC
How to Improve Facebook Ads Conversions
How to Implement a Successful Video Ad Campaign
Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads: Which is the Better Advertising Medium for Your Business?
Negative Keywords: The How & Why of Negative Keywords List Building in Google Ads
How to Use “Not Provided Keywords” to Maximize Google Ad’s Impact
How to Avoid Choosing the Wrong Ad Rotation Setting
Chiropractor PPC: Google Ads Guide for Chiropractors
PPC Keyword Match Types & Why They Matter
PPC Marketing Management for Law Firms: A Comprehensive Guide
Broad Match: Best Practices for Targeting Broad Match Keywords in PPC
How to Use Shared Campaign Budget in Google Ads
How to Adjust for Seasonality in PPC Advertising
7 Alternative PPC Ad Networks
Improve Your PPC with Conversion Funnels
How to Use Google Keyword Planner
How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization in PPC
12 Best Tips for PPC Calls to Action
Dynamic Search Ads for Beginners
How to Take Over Management of an Existing Google Ads Account
How & Why To Leverage Amazon Sponsored Brand Video Ads
Dayparting: Setting Up Time Of Day Bid Adjustments In PPC
How to Use Video Ads to Build Trust
How To Warm Up Your Instagram Audience
8 Tools for Analyzing Your Competitors in PPC
How To Create Better Ad Groups In PPC
How to Target Competitors On Facebook With Interest-Based Audiences
Most Common PPC Questions & a Few Answers
8 Best Link Building Tools for SEO
How To Calculate The ROI For PPC & Improve It
Strategies for Increasing Click-Through Rate in PPC
Exact Match Keywords: How to Target Exact Match Keywords in PPC
How to Perform B2B Lead Generation on Linkedin
Google Ads Suspension: ‘How-to’ Guide for Fixing a Suspended Google Ads Account
The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads Quality Score
How Often Should You Update Your Google Ads Campaigns?
How To Estimate Conversions In Google Ads
eCommerce PPC Strategies for Maximum Sales Growth
What Is ROAS? Complete Guide To Return-On-Ad-Spend For PPC
How to Scale Your PPC Campaigns
9 Pointers For Increasing The CTR For Google Ads
13 Tips for Optimizing Paid Search Campaigns
Why Aren’t My Google Ads Showing & What to Do About it
PPC for Accountants & CPAs: A Beginner’s Guide
8 Reasons to Bid on Branded Keywords in PPC
PPC Automation Tools for Scaling Campaigns
SEO vs. PPC: 21 Best Practices for Organic & Paid Marketing
When to Increase Your Bid in PPC (Pay Per Click)
Branded Search: Why Branded Searches Give the Best Conversions
How to Create Your Own PPC Project Checklist for Optimizing Time Management
5 Reasons to Use Dynamic Keyword Insertions in Google Ads
11 Effective Pop Up Ad Strategies in Paid Marketing
5 Local Lead Generation Tactics Using PPC
Complete Guide to Local PPC: How to Target for Local Paid Search
A Guide To PPC Competitor Analysis in Paid Search
Why You Should Use Dynamic Landing Pages in PPC
How to Improve Google Ads Conversions
How Much Do Instagram Ads Cost
What is Cost Per Click in PPC?
Google Ad Extensions Explained
Understanding Ineligible Clicks in Google Ads
Optimizing “People Also Search For” in PPC
Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization for SEM/PPC Campaigns
How to Perform Keyword Research with Google Ads Keyword Tool
Optimizing PPC Campaigns for SaaS Businesses
8 Landing Page Test Ideas for PPC
9 Excel & Spreadsheet Tips for PPC Managers
How to Beat PPC Seasonality Issues
How to Do Cross Channel Lead Generation With PPC
How to Use Micro Conversions for Lead Generation with PPC
The Eventual Deprecation of Third Party Cookies
A/B Testing for PPC Lead Generation Success
12 Must Have PPC Certifications
Optimizing for Profit (Instead of CPA, CPL, or even ROI) in PPC
How to Get a Lower Cost Per Click for Your Google Ads
How to Manage Low Volume Keywords in Your Google Ads

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Samuel Edwards
|
January 3, 2025
What are the Right PPC KPIs to Track?

It’s that time of year again, budget meetings and market analysis time. With this comes the endless work of figuring out your advertising budget for the year and figuring out whether your advertising is working properly.

The good news is that will all the advancements in technology, there’s more information out there than ever to try and figure out what is and isn’t working.

The downside, of course, is that it is pretty much impossible for someone to actually look through all the information available without wasting a ton of time.

The real trick is not just making sure that you are looking at all the relevant information, but also making sure that you are looking at only the relevant information. In short, when it comes to PPC metrics/PPC campaigns metrics, you want to ensure that you are pinpointing the correct KPIs to focus on.

Understanding Your KPIs

Pay per click advertising is quickly becoming one of the simplest and most cost effective means of getting your brand out there. With all the free extensions that custom tailor your ad experience to reach the customers you need it’s important know what data matters and what to look at.

All PPC’s have KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) that tell you how well that ad is performing. Most of them are fairly standard and should be part of everyone’s advertising report. Number of clicks, sales, return visits, all these things are important to your marketing budgets

Some data though, not so much.

Here is a freebie: the percentage of customers with red hair probably is not a valuable KPI.

The Big Three

There are a ton of different metrics that you can use to evaluate PPC marketing campaigns, but for the most part, they are going to be split into three different categories: traffic data, conversion data, and sale data. We are going to go a little deeper into each category in this article, but here is a simple rundown of the big three:

  • Traffic Data: Traffic data is essentially measuring clicks. There are a lot of different ways of doing that, but at the end of the day, all traffic data is going to be about how many people are visiting your website, when they visit, who they are, and other questions of that nature. The point of traffic data is to figure out why people are clicking on your advertisements, and how you can implement strategies to get even more people to click.
  • Conversion Data: Probably the second most important of the big three, this tells you what users are doing on your site. How long they stay, what page/landing page they visit and whether or not they buy something. This is crucial to not wasting money if users are visiting but not buying, especially when running PPC ads. No one wants only window shoppers.
  • Sales Data: Sale data is probably the most important category but is sometimes the most difficult to track. But, at the end of the day, sales are the most important part of any business performance, and so sale data has a lot of the most vital KPIs. You want clicks, you want customers, but above all you want sales.

Ideally, your marketing analysis should be focused on all three of these categories.

Traffic Data

Traffic data is probably the most dense of the three. You can learn a lot from all this data. User locations, likes, habits, demographics, all sorts of key persona information about potential customers.

This is useful stuff, and is often worth a deep dive, but it is not exactly the magic bullet KPI that we are looking for here. For traffic data, there are basically two major PPC metrics that you are going to want to check first:

  • Click Through Rate (CTR) is one of the simplest but most important KPIs for PPC Campaigns marketing. It represents how many people click on your ad after looking at it and is usually presented as a percentage. The percentage is typically low, with an average of a little over 1%. If you can boost that number up to something like 4% or even 5%, however, then you are definitely cooking. If you are trying to judge the effectiveness of PPC campaigns, CTR is probably the very first thing that you are going to look at.
  • Cost Per Click (CPC) is CTR’s less fun cousin. It is pretty much exactly how it sounds – CPC represents how much you are paying the platform every time somebody clicks on your ad. Obviously, you are going to want a lower CPC, since every click is taking a little bit of cash out of your pocket. A high CPC is a great way to end up with a disastrous ad campaign that costs more than it gets you.

If you’re using a PPC campaign then you probably know at least that much. The trick is figuring out whether or not it’s working.

For instance, if you have one campaign that costs $2 per click and gets you a CTR of 4% and a second campaign that costs $5 per click but gets you a CTR of 5%, you might think option two is better.

However, the cost per click is more than double so the CTR increase isn’t worth the advertising cost. Knowing this one metric is the difference between brilliance and disaster, unless of course you like throwing money away, but we figure you don’t.

Conversion Data

The most important piece of data here is conversion rate, which is essentially the percentage of people who become customers after visiting your site. The average conversion rate can vary wildly depending on the industry and the services you actually provide, so you would have to look at industry-specific info to figure out whether you are performing well with your ad PPC campaigns or not.

You should be looking at your conversion data alongside your traffic data so that you understand how many users are visiting and out of those, how many are buying. The key question you want to answer is “Is my sight working? “ .

If people are visiting and not buying, then the answer is a flat no. Figuring this out will help you identify the problem instead of changing your ad campaign or throwing more money into advertising. If people are visiting but not buying, then the problem isn’t the ad, it’s your site.

The other big question is “Am I reaching the right people?” This is also best done by looking at traffic data and conversion data together, especially demographic and interest data. If you are a divorce firm with a low conversion rate and a CTR that is highest among the 14-19 age group, then you can probably figure out that the issue is not with your website. You cannot sell divorce to teenagers, no matter how good your site design is.

Sale’s Data

So, since your business makes money through sales and not through clicks, sale data is going to be the ultimate arbiter of whether or not your PPC marketing strategies approach is working for you. You do not just want to know if your Google ads are catching eyes, or creating customers, you want to know if they are driving sales.

The best metric for this is going to be ROAS, or “return on ad spend.” Basically, you’re finding out if what you’re spending on Google ads is translating to more sales for your business. We all have to make money to stay afloat, but if your advertising is costing more or even almost as much as you’re making from customers, then it’s not working.

At that point, it’s about taking an inventory of what ads are working and aren’t and eliminating waste. It’s easy to just let ad campaigns go since PPC is easy to automate, but at the end of the day, you’re ad spend or spending money hoping to make more than you’re spending, if that isn’t the case, your business won’t last.

Final Thoughts

While most KPIs include quantitative data analysis, there may be some qualitative issues you should track that may not be included here. For instance, understanding how your online brand is perceived and working to fix that may be more important than CTR. After all, who would convert to a brand who’s preceded reputation was sullied and irreparably harmed?

A KPI that is important to one company may not matter right now for another. What performance is considered “good” for you, another company may not care about. Track what matters for revenue, but also consider tracking areas that are sometimes hard to measure and not easily understood.

So, now you know what data to focus on. Hopefully, this makes managing your marketing budget a little easier and points you in the right direction when deciding on your next PPC campaign.

Samuel Edwards
|
January 3, 2025
How to Write Great PPC Landing Page Headlines

In the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and sales, it’s easy to get so caught up in the top of the funnel that you totally forget the bottom of the funnel and everything that happens in the “post-click” environment.

As important as pre-click elements are – including ad optimization and audience targeting /target audience– the reality is that you can’t complete the conversion without a compelling landing page. And one of the most significant elements of a great landing page is the effective landing page headlines.

The Importance of the Landing Page Headline

Every landing pages has a number of vital elements that are integral to creating a meaningful onsite experience and ultimately driving conversions. They include:

  • Effective copy
  • Engaging visuals
  • Intentional color scheme
  • Trust indicators
  • Strong call-to-action
  • Lead capture or conversion form
  • Negative space
  • No outside distractions

But all of these important factors are a waste if you don’t get the headline right.

The PPC landing page headline is the very first thing a visitor sees after clicking the PPC ad and landing on the page. If it’s irrelevant, inaccurate, vague, or boring, you have almost no chance of converting.

Outside of page loading speed, the headline is arguably the first decision point for a visitor. It gives a reason to either stick around and learn more, or bolt for something else.

Headlines, regardless of whether it’s a landing pages or newspaper, have always been treated like gold by copywriters and marketers. David Ogilvy, who is known as one of history’s greatest copywriters, was adamant that headlines are to be given the focus they deserve.

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar

he once said.

And while most marketers and copywriters think about headlines after everything else has been created, Ogilvy and other industry legends have always been adamant that the headline commands more attention.

Ogilvy had an unofficial principle that he called the 50/50 Rule. This rule states that you should spend at least half of your time and effort developing and iterating the headline. In other words, if it takes you two hours to write copy for the rest of the page, you should spend one hour brainstorming and optimizing the headline.

While Ogilvy created this rule with ad copywriting in mind, it’s still a valuable rule of thumb for landing pages/landing page headline. And with all of the advanced split testing that we can do with same landing pages, the value of spending more time with headlines is clear. The more headlines you can drum up, the more likely it is that you’ll laser in on the recipe that works for your target audience.

11 Tips and Tricks for Better PPC Landing Page Headline

Headline writing is a mixture of art, logic, psychology, and persistence. It takes time and experimentation to land on the right “formula.” And while experience is the ultimate weapon in this war, here are some tips and tricks you can use to shorten the learning curve and get better results in less time:

1. Get These 3 Characteristics Right

There are three main characteristics that every headline should always possess:

  • Clarity. There’s nothing wrong with evoking curiosity, but a PPC landing page headline should never be vague or ambiguous. Clarity is extremely important in connecting the visitor with your message as quickly as possible.
  • Relevance. You have to think of the pre- and post-click parts of a PPC ad campaign as one continuous line. If there’s any inconsistency between the ad a visitor clicked and the landing page they land on, they’ll bounce. Thus your headline must be relevant to the ad. Keep the ad CTA in mind when drafting the headline.
  • Empathy. Every visitor has a problem that you’re hoping to solve. Whether it’s something frivolous – like providing entertainment to quell boredom – or something more serious – like solving a chronic health issue – empathy is a must-have ingredient. The headline needs to demonstrate that you understand their problem and are equipped to provide a solution.

Think of your headline like a three-legged stool. If it’s missing any one of these elements, the stool loses its stability and topples over. You might be able to prop it up, but you won’t be able to sit on it.

As you craft your headlines, keep these three characteristics at the core. It’ll serve you well as you learn to develop high-converting landing pages.

2. Understand the Goal of the Headline

The headline is important, but do you know what the goal of the headline is? (Hint: It’s not to generate a conversion or produce a sale.)

The only objective of the headline is to get a visitor to read the subheading. And then the main objective of the subheading is to get the visitor to read the next line of copy, and so on.

Don’t feel the weight of trying to convert someone in 10 words or less – there’s ample room to do this below the fold. Your goal is to reaffirm their decision to click on the ad and give them a reason to keep reading. If you can do that, it’s a win.

3. Write a Subheader

It’s difficult to hit on everything you want to cover in one headline. Thankfully, you also have the option of creating a subheader (which is basically just a smaller heading that goes directly beneath the heading).

The subheading can be a bit longer and include more characters. It’s used to clarify, restate, or expound upon what was stated in the headline. In many cases, it lists off additional benefits and, as previously stated, serves the purpose of pushing a visitor’s eyes further down the landing page.

4. Specificity Converts

Specificity converts and generalities tank.

If you want to generate better results with your headlines and drive higher conversion rates for your landing page, it starts with being very clear. You might push some people away, but your clarity will bring the right people into the fold.

Think in terms of specific claims and clarifying language. If you’re selling consulting services, don’t talk in terms of serving “business owners” or “entrepreneurs.” Get super specific about the types of business owners and entrepreneurs you’re communicating with. Are they small local restaurant owners? Are they growing digital marketing agencies?

Don’t make vague claims about how something works. Instead, use data, statistics, or quotes from customers. Always avoid the macro language when you have the opportunity to go macro. You’ll speak to a smaller group, but that group will be so much more invested in what you have to say.

5. Aim for the Sweet Spot

Length is another important element in headline writing. You want the headline to be short enough for a visitor to focus and long enough to include everything that needs to be mentioned. Where does the sweet spot lie?

According to one study, the human brain only has a certain capacity to process information. And if you want to grab peak focus and engagement, seven words is the bullseye. However, anything within the five to nine range generally performs quite well.

Don’t get too caught up on making headlines five to seven words in length, but avoid extremes. Anything super short – like one to three words – probably isn’t enough. Likewise, anything that’s 15 to 20 words is going to miss the mark.

6. Focus on the Visitor

The worst mistake – and one that’s unfortunately quite common – is to focus the headline on your brand or product. (Intuitively, this seems like the very thing you should be doing. But realistically, it’s a huge misstep that’s difficult to recover from.)

When you write a headline that’s brand-focused, you’re basically making yourself the focal point. You’re like the kid who stands on the table at a high school party and screams, “Look at me!” People might look, but they’re rolling their eyes.

Headlines should always, always, always be focused on your target customer. Your product might solve their problems, but leave the product out of it. Focus on benefits instead of solutions.

The best brands don’t try to position themselves as the hero. Instead, they position the customer as a hero and offer to be a guide who points them to a solution that makes their problem go away and/or fulfills their underlying desire. (This solution just so happens to be the product.)

7. Use Numbers

Listicles have emerged as a favorite style of copywriting in recent years. And though they can feel generic and repetitive, the truth is that they work. And the reason why is tied to the specificity of numbers.

Numbers are psychologically proven to generate a response in the brain. When the brain sees a digit amongst a sea of words, it has no choice but to slow down and process the number. It also establishes parameters and allows for easy classification. If you’re giving someone the “5 Reason Eating Red Meat is Good for Your Health,” it tells people exactly what to expect. They don’t have to go searching for the takeaways. They know there will be five – end of story.

Numbers are especially powerful when attached to a data point. Statistics and percentages are powerful on many levels – use them to your advantage.

8. Use Creative Wording

Generic and boring words won’t get you very far. Your headline is the curb appeal. If it doesn’t pull people in on an emotional level and communicate tangible value, people aren’t going to read on.

Creative wording doesn’t mean lying or embellishing. It doesn’t mean being flowery and over-the-top. It does, however, require you to improve your word choice.

Don’t have the deepest vocabulary? Use an online thesaurus or a book like Words That Sell to get ideas for more impactful language. Sometimes upgrading a single word can make a major difference in the perception of your landing page headline.

9. Ensure Body Copy Alignment

The headline is so important that you should dedicate a specific amount of time to brainstorming options and creating different options. (As Ogilvy’s rule states, you should spend at least half the amount of time it takes you to write the accompanying copy on the headline.) However, don’t get so lost in headline writing that you forget about the rest of the PPC landing page.

A headline is only effective if it has proper alignment with the body copy. Never mislead a visitor or make someone search for relevance. The headline can evoke curiosity and intrigue, but it can’t deliberately lead someone astray. You might get people to spend time on the landing page, but they won’t convert.

10. “Dress Up” Your Words for Emphasis

Word choice, sentence structure, and grammar are only part of what it takes to write a good headline. Sometimes you have to get creative with how a headline looks to the eye. And whether you realize it or not, you have a number of powerful tools you can leverage to analyze competitors and get results. They include:

  • Bold or underline when you want to double-down on specific words in the headline or draw attention to part of the copy.
  • Use italics when there’s part of the headline that you want to accentuate without totally breaking up the flow of the copy.
  • Use dashes and ellipses to set elements apart or create a natural pause in how the visitor reads the headline.
  • Use different colors to use the power of color psychology and influence how visitors perceive a particular headline.

As you can see, there are countless ways to improve a Search engines headline without even changing a word of copy. Success is in the details!

11. Study What Others Are Doing

Everyone wants to be original and flex their own creative muscles, but when it comes to writing headlines, your decision to leave the herd may actually hurt your ability to convert. This is one area of life where following the pack and mimicking what’s already been done helps.

According to one study, 200 of the best ads that produced significant sales and gained global recognition across a wide swath of industries were actually very similar to one another. In fact, 89 percent of these Google ads could be classified into one of six headline formulas.

It’s rare that you need to reinvent the wheel – simply installing the wheel correctly is enough to get you to where you need to be. Become a student of the game and build up your own library of effective formulas and examples to pull from. Never copy, but always mirror.

Formulas and Examples for High-Converting Landing Page Headlines

amy poehler GIF by Late Night with Seth Meyers

Now that we’ve thoroughly dissected some elements and tips for crafting superior landing page headlines, let’s take a look at a few copy-and-paste formulas and high-converting examples that you can use to improve your results.

  • Did you know [blank]?
    Did you know this entrepreneur is the first self-made woman billionaire?
  • Did you know [blank] is [blank]?
    Did you know that wine is good for your heart?
  • How to [blank] and [benefit]
    How to buy a brand new car and impress your friends
  • The ultimate guide to [blank]: How to [blank] and [benefit]
    The ultimate guide to cash flow banking: How to take control and thrive
  • The #1 secret behind [blank]
    The #1 secret behind raising high-IQ children
  • The X secrets that [blank] don’t want you to know about [blank]
    The 7 secrets that mortgage companies don’t want you to know about low rates
  • Little known facts about [blank] (and why you should [blank])
    Little know facts about deep sea fishing (and why you should swap out your gear)
  • You’ll never be the same after discovering [blank]
    You’ll never be the same after discovering this brand new diet
  • Is your [blank] making you [blank]?
    Is your doctor making you sicker?

Feel free to add these formulas to your own personal swipe file and/or experiment with a few of them on your next landing page project. As always, you’ll want to tweak and test until you find the best fit for your landing page.

PPC.co: Your Partner in Conversions

Did you know that less than 25 percent of PPC ads produce any conversions? Yes, that’s right…more than 75 out of 100 PPC ad campaigns are able to convert clicks into customers. This means the majority of ad campaigns are a waste of time and money or your PPC agency is simply doing it wrong.

When your ad campaigns don’t work, it’s easy to blame the medium and assume that PPC ads or effective PPC landing page headlines don’t work. But if we’re being frank, it’s not that PPC doesn’t work – it’s that most agencies are doing it wrong.

At PPC.co, we work with small businesses and enterprise companies on a daily basis. And because we have such a large sample size and experienced track record working with a variety of brands in all industries, niches, and stages of growth, we know that PPC landing pages advertising works. We’ve also discovered that so much of the results depend on the post-click experience.

Want to learn more about how you can develop winning ad campaigns that meld compelling pre- and post-click experiences to generate results for your business? We’d love to fix your broken ad spend and help you boost the bottom line.

Contact PPC.co today and get a no-strings-attached audit and proposal for your next campaign! We have great incentives for those just starting out in PPC that may need some white label assistance!

Samuel Edwards
|
January 3, 2025
Basic Guide to Retargeting in Google Ads PPC

We’ve all been there: sitting in front of the computer or scrolling along on your phone and seeing the one-millionth ad of the day. You can often ignore them but sometimes the ads jump out, not because they use bold fonts or bright colors but because you were just thinking about the very same product or service that’s being advertised via PPC.

As the consumer this can feel wild, like the device is inside your head, watching your every move and making note of your every thought. But as a business owner, you should know better.

This is the practice of retargeting ads and it’s a valuable one. No witchcraft of telepathy required.

When you’re paying to advertise your product or service, you want those ads to cut through all the noise and actually reach people who are interested in buying what you’re selling. That’s why you need retargeting.

What is Retargeting?

First, let’s start with a typical series of events without retargeting.

A customer is looking for something similar to what your business provides. They enter some keywords into a search engine and end up on your website. Great news, right? This is a success of SEO and maybe even pay-per-click advertising. Not so quick.

The customer browses around the site, maybe even adds items to their cart or chats with the support, but ultimately leaves without making any purchases.

Without retargeting, this story ends there. So close to making a sale, yet still so far away. It’s frustrating and it can happen over and over again with piles of potential customers slipping through the cracks.

Here’s how the story can end differently, with a happy ending for everyone involved.

The same sequence of events takes place, but in this version, your business practices retargeting.

After the customer leaves your website, they are shown additional ads, often specifically referencing the items or pages they originally viewed on your site. You use the information you gleaned about them to show them just the right ad to make the conversion.

One of these ads catches their attention, so they click on it, come back to the website, and make the purchase, sign up for the email list, fill out a form, whatever the final desired action is. They’re happy, you’re happy; it’s all worked out and the credit goes to retargeting ads.

Although, if you want to tell people it’s all due to your superior business skills and product, we won’t argue.

The simple premise of retargeting is to show potential customers who have expressed some interest in your business highly relevant ads that convert them from potential customers to customers.

This can take a variety of forms so let’s look at some of them and compare.

Different Types of Retargeting

Pixel

Pixel marketing is the most common kind of retargeting. And no, it doesn’t mean the ads are blurry and pixelated.

Pixel-based retargeting works by putting a line of code (otherwise known as a pixel) on your website. The pixel then puts an anonymous browser cookie in each of the visitors’ browsers as they come to your website or landing page.

They then leave the site but the pixel allows your ad provider (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook retargeting) to start showing your specific ads to these visitors.

You’ll be able to glean lots of information about visitors to your website through this method and retarget them accordingly. Want to target a visitor who clicked on a specific product page but didn’t follow through to adding to the cart or checking out? You can do it with pixel retargeting.

Sometimes pixel retargeting can come in the form of serving very specific ads showing visitors the exact products they viewed on your site, a practice called dynamic retargeting. It can be beneficial in that potential customers are reminded of the exact thing they were interested in, but some may find it intrusive and disquieting.

Lists

List-based retargeting is a more traditional kind of retargeting where you show ads to existing customers or visitors who provided you with some level of personal information like an email address.

You can email these people directly or upload the list to your retargeting platform of choice and have the retargeting campaign address them according to what you already know. It’s a slightly less sophisticated technique but it can still be extremely effective.

The major con with list-based retargeting is that you won’t be able to go after customers who have only minimally engaged with your website, but you can achieve that through other methods.

On-Platform

On-platform retargeting is most used on social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. If you post a video on Facebook, you can choose to retarget specifically those who watched the majority of the video.

It’s a different way of gathering information on the potential customer’s interest in your business and can also work well.

Showing users things they’ve expressed an interest in is already how these sites work, so your ads will generally fit right in.

Does It Really Work?

Going back to our little story from earlier, what if the customer targeted in the retargeted ad campaign sees the ads for the business they were interested in and decides they aren’t actually interested at all? Isn’t it all a big waste of time and money?

Simply put, no. And there are a few reasons for that.

Marketing and advertising are always going to be a numbers game. There may be lots of fish in the sea but you’re never going to catch them all, even the ones right near your boat.

What you can do is narrow the holes in the net you’re casting so fewer fish get away. But enough with the fish metaphors.

Let’s put it into hard numbers. If you liked math in school, this will be your favorite part.

Website visitors who have been retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert by a whopping 70%. That’s 7-0 percent. Not good enough for you?

How about the fact that retargeted ads have a click-through rate that is 10X higher than regular display ads?

What about the evidence that retargeting campaigns can produce crazy returns on investment, as was the case with one company, Watchfinder, which achieved a 1,300% ROI over six months?

Of course, every business will see different conversion levels with their retargeting campaigns, but the numbers show they can be incredibly effective. So effective, in fact, that you’d really be silly not to get in on the action.

But if you really want to increase the success of your remarketing campaign, follow these tips:

Tips for Retargeting & Remarketing

1. Just the Right Number of Impressions

This may be the most important tip of them all, which is why we’ve put it at the top. Do you hear that? If you’re only going to pay attention to one of these, make it this one!

One of the worst things you can do is to bombard potential customers with too many ads. Customers have expressed frustration and annoyance regarding repetitive ads that seem to follow them around wherever they go online.

Don’t be the creepy business harassing would-be customers. It’s not a good look or a good strategy.

On the other side, use too few impressions and your ads may never breakthrough, even to the interested customers you are specifically going after. Show them enough to keep them thinking about your business but not so many you turn them off of it.

Essentially, you want just the right number of impressions. A Goldilocks amount, if you will. Not too many and not too few.

2. Don’t Neglect Ad Design

You may think that just because retargeting goes after customers who have already expressed an interest, that the ads don’t have to be as eye-catching the second (and third and …) time around.

Well, cast that thought from your mind. Lock it out and throw away the key.

Ad design will always be important. It may even be more important in retargeting.

You need to make sure the ads are recognizable and tie directly to your brand. Variety in ad type is also valuable here since customers can find the same ad over and over again much less appealing than a bunch of different ones.

3. Be Mindful of Recent Customers

This goes with tip #1 but it deserves its own shoutout. Don’t go after recent customers right after they’ve made a purchase.

If a customer is won over by your ads, decides to buy something, and then is immediately inundated with more ads, it will feel more like a punishment than a friendly suggestion.

An annoyed customer is not likely to become a repeat customer. And if you happen to make the critical error of serving them an ad for the very product they just purchased? Forget it.

4. Segment, Segment, Segment!

You should be conscious of where each potential customer is in the sale funnel and make sure that your retargeting campaigns reflect that.

The value of the retargeting campaign compared to any ordinary ad campaign is that you already have additional information about the potential customers and their interest in your business.

Don’t waste that information by doing nothing with it. Create specific ads and different campaigns depending on what level of interaction the customers have engaged in and what product types they showed interest in.

5. Watch and Evaluate

As with any marketing campaign, a critical component is consistent monitoring and evaluation.

Tracking conversions, whichever conversion you’re aiming for, whether it’s sales, email signups, or views, is a great way to know how your retargeting campaign is going.

If something’s not working right, this is how you can find out and fix it. And if everything’s perfect, well, you’ll want to know that, too, so you can keep doing what works.

Find the right metrics that work for you and track them religiously.

Getting it Done

As you may be able to see at this point, retargeting, while very beneficial, isn’t always the simplest strategy to implement. There are lots of different factors and best practices to stay on top of to get the process to pay off the way you hope.

If you want to be sure that you get the full rewards of a retargeting ad campaign, go to the professionals.

At PPC.co, we have a team of marketing experts that will help ensure your first-time visitors don’t stay one-time visitors. We do the heavy lifting on the retargeting front so the potential customers who are most likely to make a purchase are right there, ready to be wowed by your business.

Play your cards right and you’ll have swaths of new customers who keep coming back. That’s the potential for a crazy high return on investment.

Don’t leave money on the table by using a poor performing PPC marketing agency. Start using retargeting by engaging our PPC retargeting service.

Samuel Edwards
|
January 3, 2025
Display URLs: Optimizing Display URLs for Google Ads & PPC

Many users may not know the difference between the display URL in a Google Ad and the destination URL. For one, understanding the difference between the two is important for understanding how to use and optimize display URLs for search engines.

Optimizing display URLs is key to the success of your ad campaign, especially if your business is not that well known or does not have a large web footprint. It also helps google tie the ad to your business when your business does not use keywords that describe the type of business that it does.

For example, if you sell toasters, but your website’s URL is dave.com, obviously Google isn’t going to have any clue how to tie an ad for toasters to dave.com if you don’t optimize the display URL.

Display URL versus Destination URL

To be clear, the Display URL is what users see if they look at one of your ads. This is different from the destination URL, which is where the user will land if they click on the ad. A display URL isn’t an actual web address and so, does not have the same requirements or restraints placed on it as a clickable link.

To think of it literally, the display URL is the unique identifier tying that ad to the business that it is associated with. That’s why it is so important to optimize the URL to allow the Google to properly identify the ad and the business it is associated with.

The next question you’re probably going to ask is why this matters in terms of advertisements? It matters because it affects your ad score, high score ads mean better placement, cheaper prices, and other benefits as dictated by Google. A highly optimized display URL improves your score ranking and your overall ad campaigns success as a result.

Rules for Optimizing Your Display URL

Display URLs have some strict guidelines that have to be followed, unlike normal URLs. Learning how to optimize your display URL while staying in these guidelines will take some work.

Google only allows up to 35 characters in display URLs and for mobile WAP ads that limit is cut to 20 characters. That’s right, you read that correctly, characters, not words. This means careful selection of every letter is important when building your URL.

Additionally, the domain name of both the display URL and the destination URL has to match. That means that if the destination is taco.com, then the display URL must also have taco.com in it. This is very specific but it is done to tie the ad to the destination.

The destination URL does not have the same character limit mind you, just the display URL.

One thing that display URLs can do is show folders or subsections. If the character limit allows. This means that your URL could be taco.com/steaktaco. Prefixes for subdomains are also allowed.

How to Optimize Your Display URL

Now that you know the rules that you must follow when building a display URL, you can figure out the best means to optimize the URL. We’ll break down the keys to optimizing your display URL so that it’s easy to digest.

Use Ad Campaign Keywords in Your Display URL

We know you are limited on characters, but the display URL should contain at least one keyword that is also a target in the ad itself. Since the display URL isn’t a live link, you can use prefixes and folder names to reference keywords even though actual pages with those names won’t exist.

This allows you to bend the rules a bit and add keywords to improve PPC optimization.

If you’re an ecommerce business running PPC ads, then a display URL that includes the product in a shortened way may help optimize click-throughs and conversions.

You’ll also want to consider Google ad extensions along with how you choose and showcase your display URLs.

Use Capital Letters in File Names

Another tip is to use Capital letters in filenames to improve search engine visibility. The domain name and prefix are always written in small caps, but you can capitalize the very first letter in a file name and it will be more visible in the Google.

Use All the Characters to Describe the Product or Service

35 characters isn’t a lot, but if your domain name is short, then use the remaining characters to create a files name that will tell users as much as they can about the product.

Here’s an example: “dave.com/lightweight2slicetoasters”. Now if you read the file name at the end of the domain name, you can see that the ad is for lightweight two-slice toasters. If that’s what you were looking for when you saw the ad, then you know exactly what you’re going to get. Examples aside, it’s important to give potential customers as many details as you can for your valuable ad space.

This also minimizes waste, as users who aren’t interested won’t click because they can see what they are getting beforehand. Remember that each click costs money, even if the person clicking doesn’t buy anything from you.

Use Your Data to Judge Your Progress

After you’ve performed all the different tactics to optimize your display URL, it’s a good idea to use Google analytics data to see how your ads are performing and see if there are any other changes that you can make, such as tweaking ad keywords or further improving display URLs. Every bit of data is important to help you rank as high as possible and make the most out of your ad campaigns.

Once you learn the rhythm of designing display URLs, you can improve future campaign success by tailoring the domain, keyword, and URL to each other to form a cohesive and search engine optimized ad structure.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this guide has taught you what you need to know about AdWords display URLs, their value, and how best to optimize them. Using the tips we’ve outlined here you can increase the ad rank of your ads and score more premium ad space and cut marketing costs.

All of these things mean better ad campaigns and marketing success for all of your ads. This will help drive more traffic to your business and best of all, it is more.

Need help with managing your PPC ad spend? We’re here for you! Contact us and start with a free PPC audit.

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