How to Effectively Manage PPC Ad Campaigns

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Corralling PPC ad campaigns in an optimal and efficient way is an ambition that any digital marketer should aspire to.

Of course while there are lots of different strategies that might be worth pursuing in this context, only a few will actually get you where you want to be. Here are just a few examples of the right steps to follow when perfecting your PPC portfolio.

Set Targets

Before campaigns get underway, you need to set down exactly what you want to get out of them. This is all about providing you with milestones to aim for, and also enabling you to measure the relative successes or shortcomings of each campaign for which you are responsible.

These targets do not need to be the same for every campaign, and it really depends on what results you want from your paid search marketing efforts. Conversions are commonly used as the yardstick for PPC success, although you might equally want to see a specific increase in site traffic, or perhaps earn a set number of views for a piece of content that you have produced.

Another factor to keep in mind when working out targets for a campaign is that they need to be realistic. While ambitious goal-setting might seem like it will motivate you, in reality it will be less helpful in the long run, both in terms of measuring the campaign’s success and when it comes to the damage done to morale by missing an overly lofty aim.

Research Keywords Carefully

Without an in-depth investigation of the kinds of keywords you should be targeting, your campaign could either fail to hit its mark, or end up costing you a big chunk of cash without actually generating the sales you were looking for.

There are a multitude of PPC software tools designed to assist with this, as well as more broadly with the management of campaigns.

You will also need to use your own common sense and growing experience to pick keywords that will be relevant to your audience, as well as affordable enough for you to bid on without blowing your budget and ultimately failing to stand out alongside more dominant competitors in the same space.

Another aspect of your keyword research is singling out negative keywords, which refers to those that are not actually relevant to the landing pages you are promoting, yet might erroneously be associated with your PPC campaign by the search engine in question. Pinpointing these will ensure that this does not happen, and will minimize budgetary wastage.

Perfect Your Landing Pages

While you might spend a lot of time thinking about the nuts and bolts of your PPC campaign at the technical end, looking into targets and dealing with keyword research, it is also important to remember that landing page optimization is another crucial aspect of the unified whole.

This is about more than just making sure there is a call to action on the page that people who click the ad are presented with; the entire thing needs to be finely tuned to key into what visitors are expecting to see.

The worst thing a landing page can be is irrelevant, so make sure that the ad copy in your campaign represents it appropriately, and that the page includes engaging content that will fulfill the needs of prospective customers.

Always test out landing pages, see which are earning the most conversions and use these as the basis for your campaign, while also remembering that there is always room for improvement.

Final Thoughts

Ideally, over time and with effort and attention to detail, your management of PPC campaigns should improve. Of course this is not always a given, and consulting with specialists in this field will often be the most efficient way to find out where there are deficiencies in your current management tactics so that you can address them.

You should also be eager to cast a critical eye over your own efforts, drilling down into the data and being capable of accepting when something isn’t working, even if you were initially convinced that your great new idea was a surefire hit.

PPC marketing is a mixture of a science and an art, as well as being a discipline which changes rapidly as trends emerge. So you cannot afford to rest on your laurels, or to assume that something which worked in the past will always be effective.

Keep all of this in mind and your path to PPC success should be straightforward, if not without its share of trials and tribulations.

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