Ten of the Best PPC Hacks Out There - AdWords advertisers struggle constantly to keep pace in an ever-changing industry, where Google likes to switch things up with hundreds of changes to the platform each year. What if you could cut through all the noise, seriously reduce your learning curve, and cut straight to the heart of the most effective and impactful PPC marketing tactics? In a recent WordStream webinar with Thue Madsen from KissMetrics, we shared the 10 top PPC hacks for marketing you need to optimize your pay-per-click (PPC) strategy today. You can keep tweaking copy and testing button placement forever, but those minor changes won’t have near the impact as these – our all-time top 10 PPC hacks. AdWords Hack #1: Optimize Quality Score Google wants you to think QS isn’t all that important, but we know better. Your Quality Score impacts your click-through rate and ad ranking in a big way. Google actually rewards high QS advertisers with lower costs per click and higher ad positions. In the illustration above, you can clearly see that Advertiser I, with the highest Quality Score, spends far less per click than the others. Quality Score also plays a role in how often your ads will appear – and for which keywords. In fact, for every point you improve your Quality Score, you can expect to see a 9% increase in Impression Share. The opposite is true, as well; for every point lost in QS, you can expect Impression Share to drop 9%. Quality Score also has a huge impact on cost per conversion. Remember, QS is just an algorithm and any algorithm can be hacked. Google knows the typical click-through rate for specific types of ads and ad rankings. If you fail to meet their expected click-through rate, you’re going to be stuck with low Quality Scores. Beat that expected CTR and raise your Quality Scores. The PPC Hack Get rid of the junk keywords and ads that are dragging your whole account down. Add 10% branded keyword terms to increase your average CTR; these keywords get super-high Quality Scores and lift your whole account. Finally, delete the bottom performing third of your account, reallocating that budget to remarketing. AdWords Hack #2: Write Insane Ads That Appeal To Emotions Of course, you don’t want to write bad ads. You probably don’t even think your ads are all that bad. However, by definition, half of ads are average or below average performers. It’s true – most ads suck. See how similar the ads are in the search above? They’re boring, they’re all the same, and they’re getting low single-digit clicks at best. Then we have ads like this one that get 6x the average number of clicks: What makes this ad so special? We like to call these Unicorn Ads – ads that get exponentially greater clicks because they appeal to people on an emotional level: If you can make people truly feel something, you can make them click to find out more. The PPC Hack Take a page from our friend and expert marketer Perry Marshall’s playbook and write better ads using his Swiss Army Knife strategy. Get to know your customer’s emotions – who do they love? Who do they hate? Who are their best friends and their worst enemies? What is their biggest problem and most importantly, why are you the one to solve it? AdWords Hack #3: Use Bid Multipliers Instead of trying to buy as many clicks as possible, you should be cherry-picking the best clicks for your business. Bid multipliers allow you to do this by attributing greater worth to clicks at specific times of day, otherwise known as dayparting. For example, let’s say ad clicks during office hours are more valuable to the advertiser in the image below. They have staff in the office during these hours to answer phone calls and email inquiries. Because they are a B2B company, the people searching on their keywords are more likely to be in a buying frame of mind during the workday. What they’ve done here is created a schedule so the bids for keywords in their optimal times are higher. If this advertiser were a restaurant, this would probably look completely different. They might place a higher value on clicks in the evening or on the weekend. This is a great feature for local marketers, as well. You can place a higher bid value for the one-mile radius around your business, for example, or for users in different countries, depending on what your data tells you about the value of those conversions. Bid multipliers also allow you to adjust your bids based on the device used by the searcher. You might find that clicks from mobile devices are more valuable to your business – maybe people are more motivated when they’re searching from mobile, or they’re more likely to act on a click-to-call. The PPC Hack Be picky and don’t try to buy everything. Take advantage of the bid modifiers capability to bid more on the clicks that make the greatest impact for your business. AdWords Hack #4: Optimize For Mobile Next year, half of all searches will come from a mobile device. The greatest opportunity here for AdWords advertisers is the Click-to-Call button: Click-to-call is a game changer. Think of the differences between the desktop and the mobile conversion funnels: Mobile typically already has greater intent – people are on the go and they have a need to fulfill right now. In addition, you don’t lose people with the extra clicks through the process of visiting the site and finding your contact information. You get people on the line right away, which is why this is definitely a feature worth testing. The PPC Hack Mobile is super competitive, far more than desktop, thanks to the limited amount of space on the page. Aim for the top three positions so your ads have a chance to be seen by these valuable mobile searchers. How do you do that? Go back to Hack #1 and optimize your Quality Score, or you’re going to be paying far more than you would otherwise for clicks on those top ad positions in mobile. AdWords Hack #5: Remarketing If you could only choose one AdWords hack on which to focus your efforts, it would have to be remarketing. Typically, conversion rates suck – that’s just the sad truth of it. Ninety-seven percent of people leave a website without having taking the action the marketer wanted them to take. That’s pretty awful, right? Remarketing allows you to get back in front of those lost visitors with targeted messaging, appropriate for their place in the conversion funnel: Here’s how it works: Website visitors are tagged with a cookie when they visit your site, so later you can remind them about your offers in other online locations – while they’re checking their Gmail or reading other websites, for example – to complete the action they had started. Remarketing exponentially expands your reach and helps to improve not only conversion rates, but brand recall, as well. The PPC Hack Come up with an audience definition strategy and segment website visitors based on their interests. Create ads for each segment and use the Google Display Network – comprised of the AdSense Publisher Network, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and other Google network properties like YouTube – to reach users with more targeted messaging that aligns with their goals. AdWords Hack #6: RLSA Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) are great when you want to bid on hopelessly broad terms, including competitor names or other navigational terms. Those broad terms can be problematic, as they tend to get very low clicks and negatively affect Quality Score. What you can do to alleviate this is apply RLSAs, so you target only your own previous site visitors in search when they seek information on these other terms: For example, you could target a competitor’s name, but only to your remarketing list for search ads list of people who had already visited your site. These people are the most likely to have been comparison shopping and are already familiar with your brand, having visited your website. Now, when they search for competitor information, you can get in front of them again with targeted messaging that will appeal to them in that phase of their buying journey. The PPC Hack Instead of targeting everyone with your broader, navigational keywords, target only those who have visited your website recently to tap into higher intent clicks and avoid low click Quality Score penalties. AdWords Hack #7: In-Market Segments One of the challenges in remarketing is that you have to have an audience to remarket to. What if you’re a smaller business with a small amount of website traffic and therefore don’t have your own large audience to remarket to? In-market segments enable you to target people who are already in the market to buy: Google has a massive amount of audience intelligence at their disposal. They know your search habits, demographic information and much more that tells Google what it is people are in the market to buy. Using in-market segments, you can show your real estate video to a person Google has identified as already in the market to buy a house, for example. You can get your parenting content in front of an audience of new parents. The possibilities are endless. The PPC Hack Use in-market segments to get in front of a motivated audience with demonstrated intent, even if you don’t have a large remarketing list of your own. AdWords Hack #8: Gmail Ads Gmail has had ads on the side of the page for years, but now you can appear right in the inbox with ads that look like real email: The new Gmail ads have a subject line and teaser and allow you to display a full HTML email to your target audience: People tend to tune out the ads on the right. Use these new Gmail ads to get real estate where it’s far more likely to get their attention – right in the inbox. The PPC Hack Use Gmail ads and take advantage of targeting parameters like topic interests and domains they already receive emails from to better appeal to users. AdWords Hack #9: YouTube Ads A billion people use YouTube every day. It’s crazy that so many companies are ignoring the entire platform! There are really fantastic ad formats available, including the popular TrueView ads. TrueView ads play before other videos and users have the option to skip after 5 seconds of they don’t want to watch it. The targeting options are super precise and powerful – and best of all, you don’t pay if a user skips your ad. You can target specific channels, or target by keywords, interests, search history and more. There is so much inventory on YouTube, the prices are very low. YouTube also offers in-video ads (seen above), video search ads and more. The PPC Hack Use YouTube! It’s incredible that so many advertisers pass over the YouTube opportunity considering the competition is relatively lower than other platforms and the audience is so massive. AdWords Hack #10: First Mover Advantage This last top AdWords hack sounds simple enough, but considering the rapid pace at which AdWords changes, it’s tougher than you might think. In the last year, Google released nearly a thousand changes to how the AdWords platform functions. There is a huge advantage in being one of the first advertisers to catch on to a new feature or function. The bids are lower, competition is lower and you can be the first one appearing in front of your audience in a new way. Check out the full Top 10 PPC Hacks webinar below: Republished by permission. Original here. Computer Photo via Shutterstock The post Ten of the Best PPC Hacks Out There appeared first on Small Business Trends.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 09:38:38 +0000
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