6 PPC Strategies You Need To Use In Today’s Marketing Landscape

Pay-per-click or PPC is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay every time a user clicks their online ad. One of the most common types of PPC is paid search ads, which appears every time people make a query on search engines, like Google. This includes mobile searches (searches made using a mobile phone) and local searches (searches for something in the area), all of which trigger PPC ads.

Importance of PPC to website ranking

While there’s no direct link between PPC campaigns and website ranking, businesses need to optimize both to improve their SEO. PPC and search engine optimization or SEO go well together to target the same keywords for the same audiences and on the same platforms.

Here are some indirect reasons that prove using both PPC and SEO makes a lot of sense.

• Every time a user clicks on a paid ad, it helps get your webpage to the first page of the search results, which can lead to more sharing, more backlinks.
• Users that see a brand’s paid ad are more likely to click on its organic listing.
• Clicks on a PPC ad help improve a business’ recognition, increasing SEO conversion.

PPC also allows advertisers to gather data from keyword research, A/B ad testing, impression share, keyword performance, conversions, and the like – the results of which can be used to finetune SEO campaigns.

Another advantage of PPC is that it offers results in just a matter of weeks as opposed to SEO, which can take months. PPC also allows you to test keyword strategies you want to try and then use traffic data and conversion rate to determine whether similar strategies will work to organically boost your rankings.

PPC strategies that will surprisingly help you overcome today’s challenges

It’s a given that PPC best practices, like using data to optimize and choosing the best keywords, work all the time. However, change is the only constant thing in this world, and companies, marketing strategies, customer behaviors, and platforms do, too.

Over the last few years, a lot of challenging changes have surfaced. To help you overcome today’s tough marketing landscape, there are a few creative PPC strategies that you can use. While these strategies/tools may not be new, their importance has become emphasized nowadays.

1. Broad match with audience targeting

Google has retired modified broad in February of this year after their claim that “broad match is now more effective at driving performance.” Google also said that modified broad and phrase matches often have the same use. However, the PPC community would disagree with this. To them, broad match will always have the risk of wasting precious marketing dollars on low-converting traffic. Thankfully, there’s a way to work around it.

You can use broad match at much lower risk by pairing it with larger affinity, in-market, and custom audiences. In short, your ad will show for any search that contextually matches up to your keyword. However, it is only if it comes from a user in your custom audience. Through this strategy, your ad will at least show to the right person, giving you some level of brand exposure.

2. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence getting you new keyword ideas

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is a keyword planner tool that can be accessed through an Excel plugin. It provides a nauseating amount of information but, if used right, can help you discover new keywords.

To use this tool, you need to paste a list of keywords into the Excel interface. You’ll then get a list of keyword suggestions with volume, bid estimates, and other metrics. You can also find keywords that other advertisers are bidding on to check whether you can compete for them. With this tool, you’ll be able to add a list of new keywords into the Google Keyword Planner without the low-volume keywords.

3. Display ads to get more than just brand awareness

This strategy allows advertisers to show clients how their display ads are affecting their campaigns.

The first thing you need to do to use this strategy is to set up your Display campaigns to always include “display”. This is so you can create a Traffic Source Audience or tag your Display URLs manually with a specific medium and source. Your Traffic Source must also be added to both Google Analytics and Google Ads to ensure the metrics will appear in the report. This will show you which users do not convert from your Display campaigns and which ones returned to your site via other channels.

4. Lead generation ads for first-party data collection

Third-party cookies will be scrapped forever soon, which means that collecting first-party data will be the new priority for advertisers. While it’s important to use lead magnets on your site and collect customer information, you can scale that data collection by using lead form ads, especially on Facebook.

What you need to do is to add custom questions to your Facebook lead ad instant form. You can select fields that auto-populate to make completion of such forms faster. Next, you will need to ask for only their email to capture a large volume of leads and enroll them into your email marketing campaigns to build trust and send them to your site. Once you have customers that trust you, it’s highly likely that they will fill out the forms on your site with additional information. You will need a robust content and email marketing program that allows you to provide offers that your target audience will consider worth exchanging for their personal information.

5. Create B2B personas with LinkedIn Website Demographics

With LinkedIn Website Demographics, you can capture your own first-party intent data to create an effective B2B PPC strategy.

You can segment the users who clicked on your ads on LinkedIn based on job functions. The data you gather can then be compared with your pixel data to measure conversions by function. By doing so, you can adjust your offer or exclude them in your custom audiences in LinkedIn if you’re getting a large amount of traffic that is not converting.

The LinkedIn Website Demographics tool can also be used to analyze performance based on company size. For example, if you get a high traffic volume from small businesses that don’t have the budget, you can adjust your ad copy to indicate a starting price. You can also use it to filter by job seniority to determine the best types of content to use in your B2B marketing strategies.

6. Take advantage of click-to-Messenger ads

You can use Facebook campaign objectives to do away with conversion events and pixels altogether since they don’t send users to your site. Aside from that, you can do more by turning it into a conversational lead ad.

The first thing you need to do is to select the messages’ objective. Then, go through the standard campaign setup, which includes a headline, primary text, media type, etc. After that, you should scroll down to the Message Template section where you can choose “Generate Leads – Messenger Only.”

You can set up a conditional chat sequence to get more information and qualify your leads further. This approach to gathering information can engage users who ignore a direct response ad. It’s also a more engaging way to appeal to fatigued audiences.

Conclusion

The strategies and tools mentioned above are not new. But their contribution to the PPC world is more in line with Google’s direction toward privacy-first. This is why if you want to keep your business afloat in the near future, you should consider using these strategies and incorporating them into your digital marketing campaigns as early as now.