Generating Website Traffic Using PPC

Pay per click or PPC as it is also known is a great digital marketing tool that can really increase and drive traffic to your website and can also recapture previous website visitors via dynamic remarketing ads.

Paid search has been a popular tool for digital marketers for many years now since Google first released the platform to 350 selected advertisers back in 2000. In the 18 years since then AdWords has really developed and when used and managed correctly can be a really useful tool. In my entry today, I want to talk a little about some of the features of AdWords and offer some advice and guidance when building and developing these campaigns.

AdWords has many features, so in my entry today I am going to talk about only a select number of its features that I feel are really important to get right. Each piece of advice that is covered here I have personally used in other eCommerce businesses that I have owned and run so I have tried and tested these techniques.

Negative Keywords: When adding keywords, it’s important to remember that you also need to add negatives to either your ad group or across your whole campaign. Negative keywords stop your ads from showing for similar search times. For example, if you own a cycle shop and run ads with the word ‘cycle’ in, you don’t want your ads to show up for the search term ‘motorcycle’ – so the negative keyword that you would add here would be ‘motor’. When adding these within AdWords you can choose to apply this setting at the ad group level or campaign wide. Be sure to check your ads and other keywords as sometimes you may block your actual keyword that you want to show for if you apply this setting campaign wide. Having said this though, the AdWords platform will flag up an error message if you do this.

This short video by Neil Patel offers some other good points and ideas on AdWords.

Organise Your Campaigns: This might sound really obvious but keep your campaigns organised and separated so that they are easier to work on and make changes to. As a very general rule, I have always tried to match my campaigns within my AdWords account with each section on my website and then within the campaign, I create ad groups that match subsections on my website. This has a number of benefits, principally it makes it much easier to work on and it also allows me to be more efficient when editing and changing my ads.

Dynamic Remarketing: Set up dynamic remarketing ads if you don’t already have them. These are the small ads that appear on Google’s display network websites that show off your products or services that previous website visitors have looked when visiting your website. This feature offers a number of benefits, such as increased brand awareness and also increased conversions. In terms of costs, these remarketing ads are generally cheaper than other forms of PPC ads.

Use exact match keyword for your search term settings. This gives you more control over your ads and only displays your ads when search engine users type in an exact match of your keyword search term.

On your ads, be sure to use callout extensions – these allow you to add more information to your ads that help you stand out from your competition. Add strong CTA statements and unique selling points such as P&P offers and even brief returns information. Look at it as if you are building trust with a new customer or client. Add extensions allow you to add up to four different extensions and these can really help with CTR and conversions.

Monitor Your Account: Once the account has been running for a period and you are seeing a consistent ROI it is important to review, amend and update your ads. This needs doing for a number of reasons and will help you get the most out of your AdWords account. The main reason I like to review my account is to ensure that my ads are converting at an acceptable cost and to monitor this I generally check it once a week, depending upon seasonal shopping trends and the business type. For larger eCommerce websites these will need reviewing and checking on a more regular basis.

Schedule Your Ads: Only run your ads at times of the day when you know your target customers will be online shopping. The easiest example of this is B2B customers and B2C customers. As a very general rule B2B customers won’t be searching at night time so why run your ads when your target audience might not be online?

My last tip here this, don’t just use Google. Open an account with Bing and make the most out of their network. It might not be as popular as Google; however, this means that the average CPC is cheaper, meaning that you may get more website visitors for your money. It is always worth opening an account on Bing and recently they were matching Google offer and giving away £75 worth of advertising budget once you spent a certain amount with them.

Pay per click can be a daunting tool for novices but if used and managed correctly it can be a very powerful tool that will help you grow your presence online. Here at Herd Marketing, we have been involved in various PPC campaigns for over 12 years. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency to help you manage your campaign and you want to grow your presence online, then please feel free to contact us for a free no obligation chat about your digital marketing.

PS: If you feel I have missed anything or have any questions on this blog entry please comment in the box below and I will try my best to explain and answer any questions you may have.