Pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns are among the top methods to market a business, product, or service. Unlike other strategies requiring a considerable amount of time to produce results, a PPC campaign can yield outcomes within months or even weeks. When formulated properly, a good PPC campaign will change the game for a business. From attracting traffic to acquiring leads and building your customer base, the process of launching and running the campaign requires a good deal of planning.
Compared to other paid advertisements and organic traffic, visitors drawn in through PPC campaigns are more likely to make a purchase. Moreover, PPC opens more avenues for buyers to engage with the product and encourages old customers to revisit the business’s website. It is a great tool that facilitates customer acquisition and improves the rate of customer retention.
But to see a PPC campaign succeed requires careful preparation, monitoring, and care.
So, let’s consider some of the fundamentals of running a successful PPC ad campaign. I’ll try to explain in a way that someone who has never run one can read this, and pick it up for themselves.
Managing Your Client’s Expectations
Honestly, client expectations are the name of the game when it comes to running a successful digital marketing agency. This is especially true of high-value services like ad campaigns. You need to know their needs and set up their expectations well.
While running a PPC campaign, you will have to develop your understanding of two key areas:
- Your Client’s Expectations
Communicate with your clients and understand their expectations for the outcome of the campaign. At times, the client’s expectations may exceed their budget, and you will have to make them understand the best that can be achieved with their ad spend in an open and transparent way. Misleading clients by omission, exaggeration, and deception are common mistakes that will backfire as your agency’s reputation is tarnished in the future.
- Your Target’s Buying Habits
When a business reaches out to you, its ultimate goal is often to convert traffic drawn through the PPC campaign into sales. To achieve that, you need to understand their target demographic. Considering that, you need to analyze the shopping habits of the potential buyers and create a targeted PPC campaign.
Set a Budget and Make Clear Goals
An adequate budget is an absolute necessity when running marketing campaigns, and this is especially true for PPC advertising. Setting a budget will help your marketing agency understand the extent to which you can offer your services. It will also help you present a set of goals the campaign aims to achieve for your client.
You and your client must be on the same page regarding the expected goals and the proposed budget. You can come up with a time frame regarding every step of the campaign, from formulating the content to launching the PPC campaign and optimizing it. As a rule of thumb, I try to generate $2 of revenue for every $1 the client gives me for ad spend.
Analyzing Results and Analytics
With PPC campaigns, data is generated directly through the ads. This gives a better insight into your audience and the response the ad elicits. Conduct research before formulating your campaign strategy, and study the results after launching the campaign.
You must use analytics data to formulate a performance report for your client. As a marketing agency, record-keeping is one of the most crucial practices that will help you assess your strategies and work towards improving them. Depending on the platform you use for the campaign, (the two most popular being Google Adwords and Facebook) you’ll have a host of analytics tools built into the campaign.
Making Incremental Tweaks to Campaigns
The digital marketing space is a dynamic field. What’s relevant today might not attract viewers tomorrow. As a marketing agency, you need to be on the lookout for new trends, keywords, and customer metrics. A PPC ad campaign requires ongoing tweaks.
Periodical optimization based on your research enhances the performance of your PPC campaign. However, it would be in your best interest if you did not make tweaks to your campaign in a hurry. Give your campaign some time to attract traffic and generate conversions. It’s a gradual process. Subtle updates in Google or Facebook’s algorithm could alter the results or conversions of your campaign.
Therefore, be patient and make calculated decisions after gathering enough data and using analytics software to consider it thoroughly. I typically wait 48 hours before making any changes and only change one aspect of the campaign at once.
Deciding When to Stop or Pause a Campaign
There are two situations where I decide to stop or pause a campaign. The first situation is simply that I run out of ad spend on a successful advertisement. Though it’s tempting to ask the client for more ad spend to keep going while I’m ahead, I don’t. Instead, I come up with a few options for their next steps and present them. For example, I might propose they run another campaign, or improve SEO on their website, or boost their social media presence.
The second situation happens when the campaign fails to perform up to expectations. In this case, the campaign begins to lose money and become more of a liability than an asset. This can happen for multiple reasons. One of the most common occurs when the landing page’s copy and visuals don’t quite match the ads, causing a disconnect when a customer clicks on the ad. So, you pay for their click, but they don’t convert into a sale.
Deciding when to pause a campaign is as vital as working to optimize it. Always be honest with yourself and the client when determining the cause of a failed campaign; this will only benefit you in the long run.
But that’s the worst-case scenario. With these tips in mind, you can run a successful PPC campaign. If you do sufficient research and develop a fool-proof PPC strategy that compliments your SEO, you will witness the inflow of more traffic, better sales conversion rates, and more engagement.
Here’s to your first successful campaign of many!
Further Reading: The Top 5 Alternatives to Google Ads
