Think it takes ages to get to the top of Google? Think again.
Google has an advertising service that allows any website to appear on the first page of Google for competitive keywords almost immediately.
So what’s the catch? Well, you’ll have to pay for every click that your advert receives, hence the name PPC (Pay Per click).
If you’re running ads in a competitive industry, those clicks can quickly become too expensive to run profitably, unless you know how to properly maintain your campaign.
Take the keyword ‘personal injury lawyer’ as an example, a keyword that can cost over £50 per click – and often companies are paying far more than that to ensure that their advert stays prominent at the top of the Google search results.
But the good news is that not every keyword has to cost over £50 per click, and if you know how to get the most out of your PPC campaign, you can pay far less for keywords that are still highly competitive.
At AIMS Media, we run PPC campaigns for businesses in a variety of industries. But how do we run them better than DMC? It’s tricky but, we have our methods:
Keywords
Like most things in Internet marketing, a good PPC campaign starts with identifying relevant keywords that you wish to target. We use the Google Keyword Planner to find keywords related to your business that receive a healthy amount of monthly search terms, and whether or not they would be worthwhile to target based on their competition and relevancy to the services or product that you provide.
Negative Keywords
You’ll already know most of the keywords that you want your business to be found for, but what about the keywords that you don’t want your business to be found for? If your advert is appearing for searches that are completely unrelated to the services that you provide, this could potentially damage your brand and confuse your customers as to what your company actually does.
Choosing negative keywords for your PPC campaign is a crucial step that will prevent your advert appearing for the wrong searches. We used negative keywords with our recent client Real Christmas Trees Glasgow to ensure that their adverts weren’t appearing for searches related to generic terms like ‘Christmas trees’. They wanted to emphasize the fact that their Christmas trees were 100% real, and people who are searching for ‘Christmas trees’ might be looking for artificial trees. This might seem rather petty, but it was vital to the success of their PPC campaign.
Location
Nothing is more important in Internet marketing than relevance. Unless you’re able to provide your services or products globally, chances are you’ll only work with customers within a certain distance. If you’re a plumber in Glasgow but your ads are appearing in front of Londoners, then you’ll be wasting your time and theirs.
Fortunately, Google lets you specify the exact location of the customers that you want your advert to appear in front of. So if you only work within Glasgow, you can make sure your adverts don’t appear in front of anyone that isn’t a Glaswegian.
CTR
Where most companies go wrong is that they approach their PPC campaigns with a ‘set and forget’ mentality; as soon as their adverts start appearing consistently, they close their account and don’t open it again until they take a look at their bank balance and remember that Google is happily guzzling their budget dry.
The truth is that getting your adverts to appear on the first page of Google for searches related to your business is only part of the battle. If nobody is clicking on them, they’ll drop quicker than flies. Google tracks which ads receive clicks and which don’t, and uses this data to decide the ads that should feature front and centre, and which ads should be dropped down the listings.
So how do we get those coveted clicks? Making your advert stand out is essential. The bad news is that we only get a few limited characters to convince searchers to click on our ads. The good news is that effective copywriting can get the point across within a short blurb.
Budget
It doesn’t matter how good your advert looks: as soon as your budget runs out, Google will remove it from the listings. This is why ensuring that you have a sufficient daily budget is vital to the success of any PPC campaign.
The budget that you allocate to your campaign may fluctuate depending on the time of year or how much stock you have available. We frequently had to adjust the daily budget of our PPC campaign for Real Christmas Trees Glasgow as Christmas came closer and their stock decreased. This helped us make the most of their monthly budget and ensure that the advert was always prominent in the listings.
Far too many companies don’t take their PPC campaigns seriously. Trying to maintain a profitable campaign without checking your account on a daily basis is guaranteed to result in a gradual reduction in the effectiveness of your campaign.
But we get it; checking your account every single day isn’t just tiresome, it can be pretty overwhelming too.
At AIMS media, we manage PPC campaigns for businesses to help their adverts appear consistently for relevant searches.
Read about our PPC campaign with Real Christmas Trees Glasgow here, or get in touch with us for more information about our PPC services.
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