PPC ads are becoming more and more popular among marketers using search engine marketing (SEM). Google’s ad revenue has increased dramatically each year because of this. In 2021, 81% of Alphabet’s total sales were from Google’s advertising revenue.
Ad placement in the search engine result pages is almost always assured by price-per-click or PPC campaigns. PPC campaigns done right can help you create leads. Additionally, you may nurture leads throughout their purchase experience using insights from your advertising data if your CRM and advertisements platform are securely integrated.
What is PPC Campaign?
In a PPC campaign, you build an ad that targets specific keywords and pay for it by the click as part of your search engine marketing plan. These campaigns are frequently created by marketers using tools like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
So, how do you succeed in PPC advertising? Create the best strategy first, and then educate yourself on the management mistakes you should avoid.
How to Build a PPC Campaign Strategy
- Choose a structure for your PPC campaign.
- Identify, create, and improve the landing pages for your campaign.
- Based on your investigation, develop a keyword approach.
- Produce advertising using the knowledge gained from the previous phases.
- Explain your marketing strategy to prominent stakeholders.
Keep in mind that ineffective PPC campaign management costs money and produces poor lead generation outcomes.
Here are a few ways marketers go wrong with PPC campaign management:
- Creating a single, simple campaign without using the Ad Groups feature in Google Ads.
- Coming up with keywords based purely on instinct rather than research.
- Not monitoring advertising or adding "negative keywords" to avoid wasting money.
- Using a campaign homepage or uninteresting landing pages to create prospects.
- Launching campaigns, establishing spending limits, and imposing budget constraints without consulting internal or external stakeholders.
You may prevent these challenges by creating a strong campaign framework. Luckily, a systematic PPC template will help you grasp this campaign structure.
What is PPC management?
The management and monitoring of a company’s pay-per-click advertising budget and campaigns is known as pay-per-click (PPC) management. PPC management tactics involve the use of keywords to optimize outcomes and are often managed by marketing teams or a marketing agency.
You and your clients may set up a full-funnel campaign structure that adheres to PPC best practices with the aid of the PPC Campaign Management Template. You’ll be in a better position to maximize the return on your PPC investment once you’ve done so. Ads Planner and Ads Results are the two divisions we made in the template.
Your ad campaign information, including the campaign name, keywords, and negative keywords (keywords you don’t want ads to appear for), should be included in this area of the PPC template.
You can track pertinent campaign KPIs using this section of the PPC template. Use it to keep track of your overall ad spending and to evaluate the effectiveness of impressions, conversions, cost-per-click data, and other metrics.
How to Manage a PPC Campaign
PPC campaign templates can also serve as job management checklists. In this blog article, we’ll demonstrate how to use the PPC template.
Here are two hints that will make utilizing this template simple before we begin:
- You should remove the example data from the template. That includes the names of the campaigns and AdGroups, the ads, and the final URLs.
- Take care not to change the variables in the advertising planner's columns F, J, and N. They include the characters needed for headlines, descriptions, URL routesBuild backlinks the right way, and final URLs as specified by Google Ads.
Let’s now get into managing PPC campaigns.
The tools available for administering your PPC campaign are numerous. Start with one platform, experts advice. This strategy works since it keeps your expenses down while you’re still developing your PPC campaigns.
You can natively manage your campaigns through the platform you use for displaying advertisements rather than paying for an external campaign management service.
However, you’ll require powerful PPC campaign management software when you broaden your approach to incorporate more websites. You can use this application to keep a central record of each platform, budget, and group of creative.
Here are some of our favorite tools for the job:
- Marin Software: Integrates with Google and Facebook — two of the most popular PPC platforms.
- WordStream Advisor: Analyzes Google and Facebook ad spend to keep you on budget.
- SpyFu: Analyzes your competitor’s campaigns to help you build a well-rounded strategy.
It’s crucial to comprehend the PPC campaign structure. Typically, some marketers open an account, make an ad, direct it to their home page, choose a few keywords, and press the send button. This PPC strategy is incorrect.
Multiple campaigns can be made with Google Ads. Several AdGroups may be present in your campaigns. There may be a few ads and several related keywords in each AdGroup.
Setting daily spending limits, day-parting, and choosing geo-targeted areas are all possible with many campaigns. You should create separate campaigns for generic and branded keywords if you plan to use them for bidding. These two categories of keywords will likely have distinct criteria.
The website where your PPC traffic ends up is known as the “final URL.”
Avoid sending PPC visitors to your website or blog in the hopes that they will notice and complete a lead generating form. That is what organic search is for. Drive people to a landing page that has a form instead. Additionally, include a tracking token or UTM parameter on the page so you can track the origin of your leads.
Remember that regardless of the keyword or ad, the final URL within an AdGroup will remain the same. If you wish to direct a keyword to a different landing page, you can build another AdGroup. Create a second campaign for that keyword if you want to be even more specific.
Choose only keywords that are relevant to your landing page and offer. Relevant search terms are crucial because they raise the likelihood that site visitors will submit the form on your landing page.
Despite the fact that you might want to, you shouldn’t use one landing page to rank for several keywords. Why? A landing page will only address a small number of keywords and will have a targeted message. Your advertising spend will be wasted if a term is unrelated to a landing page since users who search for and click the keyword won’t convert. In this situation, it might be preferable to develop a different offer and landing page that particularly targets new keywords.
Use tools like the Google Ads Keyword Tool to understand search volumes and prices associated with desired keywords.
The exciting part is now.
You can create more than one ad for each Ad Group in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads (thus the word “group”).
These tools allow you to create many ads, display the variations to your audience, and track which variation has the highest click through rate (CTR). A/B testing is the term for this. Although using A/B tests is optional, doing so could enhance the effectiveness and return on investment of your campaign.
Remember that you only have 30 characters for each headline, 30 for the display URL (which is not to be mistaken with the final URL), and 90 for each line of material.
Pay close attention to your headline when composing your advertisement. The headline has the biggest impact on the CTR of an advertisement. To grab a user’s attention, make sure your title contains a term.
Dynamic keyword insertion is an even better method. Additionally, you should offer searchers a seamless experience from the moment they see your advertisement in search engine results to the moment they submit the form on your landing page. Everything should be designed to encourage them to click through.
The display URL is another challenging issue. Although you only have 30 characters to work with, it’s doubtful that your landing page’s actual URL, once UTM parameters have been included, would be that short.
Because of this, search engines like Google let you construct a display URL that may not actually be a URL on your website. However, your final URL’s domain must match the domain in your display URL. When consumers click your ad and arrive at your landing page, they may be sure they’re there for the proper reasons thanks to this.
Your finished template needs to be in line with stakeholders’ expectations and effective PPC campaign components.
This template will assist a PPC campaign stakeholder with two things. A bird’s eye view of what the individual running the advertisements is doing is provided by the ads planner template in the first place. Second, the ad results template displays your PPC budget. This allows you to quickly reallocate and change your budget in response to market fluctuations.
