When it comes to digital marketing, there are many different approaches you can take. SEO, PPC, influencer marketing – all of these have pros and cons depending on the needs of your business. No single option is necessarily more effective than any other, but some are much quicker. Take pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Building a social media following or doing SEO to climb search rankings can take months to start paying off, but well-written ad copy that reaches the right audience can change a business’s fortunes overnight.
However, paid ads can be expensive. If they don’t land and they fail to convert people into paying customers, it can be a costly mistake. Fortunately, there are strategies you can use on your ad campaigns to spend less and convert more. Here are ten of the most effective.
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Use Expert Knowledge
When you pay for advertising online, that helps ensure that your ad will be seen by the people you choose. However, choosing the right people and crafting copy that appeals to them are skills that require experience and expertise. It takes more than just seeing your ad to turn someone into a paying customer. If you are just starting out, you may be better off paying for those skills as well as the ad space. You will gain an understanding of who your audience are and what kinds of ads appeal to them while your business is earning an income, rather than burning through money running ineffective ads to gain experience. You can find an expert PPC agency in Sydney and many other major cities around the world.
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Target High-Intent Keywords
PPC marketing can be a very effective way to help meet your business goals, whether you want to grow, diversify your customer base, or encourage your existing customers to spend more. Sometimes the goal is simply to have customers sign up or download some free material, but in most cases the goal involves people purchasing something. A mistake that many businesses with this goal make is targeting keywords that do not clearly signal an intention to buy. For instance, they target people searching for “badminton racquets” instead of “buy badminton racquets online Sydney.” The former likely includes many people who are doing research on the best racquets but who are not yet ready to buy one.
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Create a Great Landing Page
When you are targeting people who are actively looking to buy something, it is important to make sure that once they click through to your website, it is as easy as possible for them to do so. Otherwise, they will bail and buy from someone else, costing you money in the process. To make sure they stick around, ensure that the first page they see after clicking on your ad loads very quickly, and that it works on both mobile and desktop browsers. It should match the branding, tone, and messaging that you used in the ad, so that they are confident they have clicked on the right website and not been redirected to somewhere suspicious. Finally, it should have a clear call to action – a button or link that clearly explains that this is where to go next. “Click here to order now” is an example of a call-to-action.
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Stop Your Ads Appearing in Irrelevant Searches
If you are confident that your landing page is optimised and you are targeting high-intent keywords, but you find that some of your ads get lots of clicks and few sales, it may simply be the case that some keywords are less relevant than you thought. What looked like a high-intent keyword in theory turned out not to be so in practice. That is just the way it is sometimes, and it is important that you prevent these from costing you money by regularly excluding them from your PPC campaign. Companies like Google that run the ads for you are able to give you a breakdown of how many clicks your ads get for each search term and how many times they lead to a sale.
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Make Use of Remarketing
Have you ever looked up a product online, not purchased it, and then noticed that lots of the ads you see while you are browsing other sites are for that same company or product? That’s remarketing, and the reason it is such a common strategy is because it is very effective. The reality is that the vast majority of people do not buy things on their first visit to a new website, but the odds of them doing so if they click back on it again in the future are drastically higher. Targeting people who have interacted with your website in the past often leads to a good conversion rate with a lower outlay on the ads.
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Continuously A/B Test
A PPC ad has several different elements, such as the headline, the copy and any calls-to-action and images that you wish to include. Obviously, there are infinite different ideas you could use for each of these elements, and certain combinations will be more effective than others. It is practically impossible to know in advance which is the best, which is why you should A/B test instead. This shows slightly different variations of the ad in each search, so that you can figure out which one works the best and keep improving. As long as your ads comply with government guidelines, you can try as many variations as you like.
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Schedule Your Ads
The time of day when people see your ads can also affect the conversion rate. For example, you might get people who click on your ads while browsing for things to buy during a bout of boredom at work, but they are not actually going to enter their payment details while they are using their work computer. Yet they still cost you money. Make sure you figure out the highest-converting hours and target those instead.
Conclusion
Working smarter is the key to cutting ad spend and getting more conversions, and the two often go hand-in-hand because you are looking for a small subgroup of people who are very likely to buy. The right targeting, timing, landing page, and expertise can help your budget go much further.