Did you know that Google pay-per click (PPC) visitors are 50 percent more likely to make a purchase than organic visitors? Or for every $1 spent on PPC, a company can earn an average of $2 back in revenue?
For some businesses, these statistics may already come as a surprise. But as you dig deeper into the use of Google PPC, you’ll find there are plenty more secrets to uncover—ones that will help you create the most successful campaigns. This success will feed back into your larger digital marketing strategy, which should include SEO, content marketing and website optimization.
As a Google Partner agency, we’re here to offer some helpful tips on how to make the most of your PPC efforts.
If your keywords are searched 5,000 times a week and your ads only show up in 1,500 searches, your PPC campaign has a search impressions share of 30 percent. This percentage is reflective of a campaign where the targeted keywords are a broad match.
In terms of search impressions share, 80 percent is the ideal marker of a healthy PPC campaign. It’s at this point that you can either choose to turn off part of your ads or increase your budget to meet the demand.
Bonus Google Partner agency tip: With the exception of initial experiments in PPC, the broad match type should never be used.
Click-through rate is an important measure of your ad campaign’s quality score. One of the best ways to boost this metric—an average of 10-20 percent or 20-50 percent with branded search terms—is by leveraging site link extensions in your ad.
With site link extensions, you can give web users multiple routes to access your website. This creates more opportunities to entice the audience with products/services, special offerings and other assets and optimizes the user experience as a whole.
Here's one example from Delta's PPC ads:
Ever notice ads appearing in your online searches just a few days after visiting a website? A Google Partner agency can tell you that’s what search retargeting looks like in action.
This outreach tool allows you to specifically target those individuals who have already expressed an interest in your brand and are more likely to purchase. By limiting your ad audience to a smaller group, you can bid on broader keywords than those you would typically use in search campaigns as well as tailor these ads specifically to that audience.
Gmail is a heavily populated space, with more than 1 billion monthly active users. And with people spending an average of six hours in their inbox each day, there are plenty of benefits to incorporating Gmail ads into your PPC campaign.
Not only do these ads help build brand awareness in a high-volume arena, but they also offer powerful keyword targeting opportunities. For instance, you can target competitors’ brand terms so every time an email from that business arrives in someone’s inbox, they’ll see an ad for your brand as well.
In this Gmail ad, Warby Parker promotes a quiz to find the perfect frames:
Bonus Google Partner agency tip: The tactic of bidding on competitor keywords can also be beneficial to search ads, especially for newer brands looking to get exposure.
To make informed decisions about PPC campaigns, you need to have statistically significant data at your fingertips. That’s why it’s so important to run experiments on your ads—whether it’s A/B testing ad copy or testing out two different landing pages.
In addition to these content-based variations, there is also the option to test different bidding strategies. With the paid search budget split in half, marketers can see which of the targeted keywords is most valuable to the campaign.
Consider how this applies to ad scheduling, as well. By trying out different times for ads to run, businesses can identify which time frame is most applicable to their efforts.
How does the performance of your PPC campaign compare on mobile devices versus computers? It’s a metric that often flies under the radar, but one a Google Partner agency knows can have a big impact on future budget decisions.
In the case that a campaign is performing better on mobile devices, organizations can increase their paid budget in this space. Local services in particular can benefit from this approach as many searches may take place while individuals are on-the-move.
While simple in nature, lookalike audiences are a powerful way to connect with new prospects. The idea is to take existing demographics from your current audience—such as age, gender and interests—and build a similar audience to find qualified customers.
With current audience data provided, Google has the ability to build audiences that mimic a business’s high-value customers. Not only does this expand the reach of the PPC campaign, but it also establishes further confidence in the ability of the ads to inspire customer acquisition.
Every Google PPC campaign is designed with the intent to turn people who are ready to buy into paying customers. But there are a lot of resources that go into this success—from the ability to connect with the right audience on multiple platforms to performing continuous testing and optimization.
Working with a Google Partner agency like Kuno Creative helps meet this need. With years of experience in the PPC world and insight into best practices as well as the latest updates, our demand generation team helps clients achieve big results that exceed their expectations.
Think about it like this. You’ve already invested in the creation of unique website content to generate awareness of your brand and educate customers. By incorporating Google PPC into your digital marketing efforts, you can extend the reach of this content not only to those who aren’t yet part of your audience but also those who have already expressed interest in your brand. This makes it an important part in the “close” phase of the buyer’s journey.
Interested in learning more about how a Google Partner agency can help with your efforts? Get a free copy of our ebook, The New Demand Generation: Personas, Personalization & Programmatic Marketing.
