With more business-to-business B2B interactions happening online, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns have become one of the most preferred marketing tools in today’s world for lead generation. Tracking and Measuring PPC success is a popular and widely known digital marketing strategy that can drive traffic to your website and generate business.
What is PPC?
PPC stands for pay-per-click advertising. The most widely used type of PPC advertising occurs on search engines like Google Ads. In this setup, advertisers compete by bidding on specific keywords, and their ads typically show up at the very top of search engine results when users enter those keywords.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is more like a digital marketing strategy where you must pay a small fee every time someone clicks on your online ad. If the ad works well, you’ll make more money from the people who visit your website through these clicks than what you spent on the clicks.
For instance, you profit well if you pay $3 for a click, but that click leads to a $300 sale. It’s all about getting more value from the clicks than what you put in. These PPC ads can be made up of images, text, videos, or a combination. Mostly, they can appear on social media platforms, websites, and search engines.
These search engines then use a complex algorithm to decide in what order and in what ads to show. The algorithm of this takes into these factors such as:
- PPC campaign planning and strategy
- Top PPC platforms
- How to learn PPC
- Advertiser’s bid amount
- Relevance of the ad to the keyword
- Quality of the ad
5 Key Guidelines for Creating Successful PPC Campaigns
Selecting Relevant Keywords
One of the most crucial practices in PPC marketing is thorough keyword research and strategically using those keywords to attract the most relevant clicks. Selecting the right keyword is the best step to ensure your ads reach the right audience to your relevant keywords, increasing the chances of successful campaigns.
The types of keywords you should consider are given as follows:
- Long Tail Keywords
- Negative Keywords
- Obscure/ Too Specific Keyword
- Dynamic Keyword or keyword optimation strategy
Learn PPC Campaign Structure
Familiarize yourself with the structure of PPC campaigns, which typically include campaigns, ad groups/ad sets, ads, and keywords. Understanding how these components work together will help you effectively organize and optimize your campaigns.
Target Right
Always keep your target audience and craft PPC ads on point, providing a blueprint for tailoring your drive to the specific demographic you want to reach. Below are a few options for how to narrow down your audience:
- Geographic location
- Interests
- Type of Device they’re using
- Demographic
- Behaviour
Create High-quality Ad Content
One of the most invaluable tips in PPC marketing is prioritizing creating exceptional content. Incorporate the most pertinent keywords into your ad copy, igniting curiosity and inspiring users to click. Broaden your horizons by crafting diverse creatives and PPC ads designed for different audiences, ensuring they skilfully grab the user’s attention.
Crafting compelling ad copy is crucial for attracting clicks and driving conversions. Learn how to write concise, persuasive ad headlines and descriptions highlighting your unique selling points and encouraging users to click on your ads.
Optimize your Website and Landing Pages
A webpage or landing page optimization is where users land after clicking on your ad. Optimizing your landing pages by aligning them with the ad’s message, ensuring clear calls-to-action, and providing relevant content can enhance the conversion rate of your PPC campaigns.
Content on your landing page carries tremendous importance, often rivalling or surpassing your ad copy’s significance. It must engage and convert visitors and be optimized for search engine traffic.
Each ad’s quality score articulates the alignment of keywords between the landing page and the ad, which is a critical factor in achieving higher rankings in search engine results pages, also known as (SERPs).
Do you know what makes a good landing page? A good landing page does the following:
- Enhances your Conversion Rates
- Contains targeted content marketing
- Makes use of data-driven insights
- Provides optimal user experience
- It has a mobile-friendly design
Monitor Your Clicks
Keeping a close eye on your clicks is an intelligent PPC marketing practice that can maximize your budget. It’s essential to allocate minimal funds to sources where many clicks may stem from automated or multiple sources. This vigilance ensures you can effectively manage your budget while achieving your campaign goals.
While monitoring your clicks, keep an eye out for conversion metrics. Conversion tracking enables you to measure and analyze the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns by tracking actions or goals completed by users, such as purchases, sign-ups, or form submissions. It helps in optimizing your campaigns for better results.
In the same way, familiarize yourself with key performance metrics in PPC advertising, such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per click (CPC), and return on ad spend (ROAS). Monitoring all these metrics will help you evaluate your campaigns’ success and make data-driven decisions.
By following all the above steps, you will be equipped with the necessary knowledge to maximize your experience with PPC tools and achieve success with your campaigns. You should know how to leverage these tools to boost your campaign performance and maximize your return on investment (ROI).
7 Free PPC Tools You Should Know
Google Ads
Google Ads is a widely used PPC platform offering various tools and features. It provides keyword research, ad creation, and performance-tracking capabilities.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is known as a free within Google Ads. It provides keyword suggestions, search volume data, and competition insights to optimize ad targeting.
Google Ads Editor
Google Ads Editor is a desktop application. It allows advertisers to create efficiently, edit, and optimize their ads, keywords, and campaigns offline. The changes can then be uploaded to Google Ads when connected to the internet.
Google Analytics
While primarily a web analytics tool, Google Analytics can provide valuable insights for PPC campaigns. By linking your campaigns to Google Analytics, you can track website traffic, conversions, and user behaviour to evaluate the effectiveness of your ads.
Bing Ads
Bing Ads is a PPC platform by Microsoft that allows you to create and manage your PPC campaigns on the Bing search engine and its partner networks. It offers similar features to Google Ads and provides an alternative advertising channel.
Facebook Ads Manager
Facebook Ads Manager is a free platform for creating and managing campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. It offers targeting options, ad creation tools, and performance-tracking features to help optimize your social media advertising.
Ubersuggest
Uber Suggest is a free keyword research tool that provides keyword suggestions, search volume data, and competition insights. It can help you identify relevant keywords for your campaigns and understand their potential performance.
Know What Works for You Even Before Hitting Send
With the collective intelligence feature, sellers can gain insights into which document sections get the most customer attention. This lets sellers handpick specific slides that capture the audience’s interest and easily create a custom presentation directly within Paperflite.
You should know exactly how popular a specific content has been across the organization, from views, downloads, and completion percentage to average time spent.
Key Metrics to Measure PPC Campaign Success You Need to Track
PPC metrics are essential to help you measure your ads’ performance. Once your tracking and analytics tools are set up, you must regularly monitor and compare your data. Using dashboards, reports, and filters, you can modify and see your data to fit your needs and preferences. You should also use benchmarks, segments, and attribution models to compare your numbers across different dimensions, such as periods, channels, devices, audiences, or campaigns.
They will show you things like:
- How easily targeted audience can view your ad?
- How many times are they being clicked on?
- How many people are doing what you want?
- Whether the ads make money or not
Here are some key metrics to consider for PPC campaigns:
Impressions
Impressions are counted by keeping track of how many times your ad has been shown in a certain amount of time. This information is available on pay-per-click advertising site analytics like Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, and LinkedIn Campaign Manager, which are mentioned above.
Click Throughs Rate (CTR)
I recently asked 17 PPC pros to tell me the three most important PPC metrics they use to analyze their AdWords accounts. The answer that came up most often was “click-through rate.” CTR is important because, among other things:
- It is one of the most important things that affect your Quality Scores.
- It tells you if your ads are helpful to users or not.
Conversion Rate (CVR)
Remember that a change in your conversion rate can be caused by something as simple as the seasons or as complicated as a change in how business is done in your field.
Some quick checks you can do to figure out why your conversion rates are dropping are:
- Checking to see if the tracking code is still valid
- Checking home page URLs to make sure they are still working
- Checking search terms to see if your ads show up for searches that have nothing to do with them
- Ensure that an ad’s text is updated (by using expired offer codes, old prices, etc.).
- Check to see if any of your keywords or ads have been turned down.
- Check to see if there are any problems with positive and wrong keywords.
Cost per Conversion (CPV)
Cost per Conversion is the cost an advertiser incurs to make a sale or get a new lead. Let’s say you spent $80 on clicks and made two sales. Your Cost per Conversion would be $40. If you were selling t-shirts, where the average order might be $20, this would be a high Cost per Conversion. If you were selling warehouse shelves, where the middle order might be $2,000, this would be a low Cost per Conversion.
When running PPC ads, there is no single Cost per Conversion that you should aim for. Instead, it all comes down to how much you value a sale. This means you need to look at your earning margins and determine a reasonable Cost per Conversion for each of your product lines.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
To figure out ROAS, you must also know how much the ads cost. In addition to the money spent on the ad site itself, partners and vendors also charge fees and take a cut. If you don’t count these extra costs, your ROAS will be bigger than it should be.
Reports need to be consistent. If you include the extra costs when you figure out ROAS, you’ll need to do this again the next time you figure out ROAS. When you improve your ad campaigns, you ensure that your return on ad spend (ROAS) goes up because of the changes you made.
ROAS is easy to figure out. You divide the amount of money your ad effort brought in by how much it cost. For example, if you spend $1,000 on ads and make $2,000 in sales, you divide $2,000 by $1,000 to figure out ROAS. This creates a ratio of 2 to 1, or 200%.
Frequently Asked Question
There are some questions related to Tracking and Measuring PPC success are as follows:
Why is tracking PPC campaigns critical?
Marketing campaigns are about effectiveness that will increase conversions, and your website will do better.
Why are PPC campaigns important?
PPC is a type of digital advertising in which an advertiser pays a fee each time a user clicks on one of their advertisements and increases organic traffic on the website.
What is the formula used by PPC?
Pay-per-click ($) = Total Advertising Cost ($) ÷ Number of Ads clicked.
