Use Checklists to Show Your PPC Campaign Success

Do you want to run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns like a pro? Then use a checklist.

This guide reveals five steps to PPC success, whether you are a beginner or an experienced business owner.

A Comprehensive Checklist to Running a PPC Campaign

For many reasons, PPC remains one of the most popular and effective paid advertising techniques. It complements search engine optimization (SEO), helps you target the right customers, and—if done correctly—generates leads quickly.

However, it can also be complicated. And if you are not careful, it can drain your budget without producing any positive results. You can design a PPC campaign from scratch using this roadmap:

1. Begin with Your PPC Marketing Goals

You can never underestimate the power of having clear, well-defined PPC marketing objectives. With it, you can:

• Identify the channels and campaigns that best suit your marketing strategy
• Monitor progress and make adjustments throughout the entire process
• Determine the best audience to target
• Craft messages that align with every stage of the customer’s buying journey
• Forecast your growth and know your returns
• Learn to compare your growth with the industry

But how do you set these goals? Get SMART with it.

Let us say you want to increase the revenue of your Etsy shop by 20% in 2023. Plotting your SMART objective may look like this:

2. Convert and Nurture Leads at Every Sales Stage Using Ad Groups

What is an ad group? It is a cluster of related ads created to target specific audiences. Each ad group has its own budget and set of keywords, and you can have multiple ad groups in one campaign.

For Peter Deveraux of Digital Authority Partners (DAP), this is crucial to PPC marketing success. You can target and convert customers at the various stages of their lifecycle with relevant and personalized messages.

A typical ad group has the following elements:

• Keywords: Broad, exact, and phrase match
• Ads: Text, images, and videos
• Landing page: Where customers are directed to when they click your ad
• Budget: How much you are willing to spend per day, week, or month

3. Use Ad Extensions to Improve Visibility

If content is king, context is queen. But when you are limited to only a few characters per ad, it is difficult to tell the audience why they should click on or even buy your product or service.

Fortunately, search engines have a change of heart and are giving you options, such as ad extensions. As their name suggests, these are extra pieces of information that tell you more about your copies and offers. Because of their nature:

• They appear bigger on the search results, so your target market is less likely to miss them.
• The ads contain more data, which can further engage the audience or help them make purchase decisions quickly.
• They may improve your chances of getting a higher quality score because ad extensions are well-known for increasing click-through rates (CTRs).

In general, ad extensions come in two forms: manual and automated.

Google currently has several ad extensions you can choose from, but not all can be automated. The good news is that the search engine has adjusted its policies as of February 2022. Some manual ad extensions can run alongside automated ones. These include structured snippets, callouts, and site links.

4. Take Advantage of Visual Ads

Visual ads drive engagement and conversions. This is especially true when you use images or videos that show a product’s or service’s benefits instead of simply listing them at face value. Also, visuals are the best way to grab people’s attention in an increasingly cluttered online space.

Google and Bing provide you with various ad formats that are effective for specific PPC marketing campaigns:

• Responsive ads to make your copies easily adjust to various screen sizes or devices
• Dynamic search ads to display ads according to user behavior
• Showcase shopping ads if you have an e-commerce store
• Video ads when you want a mix of visual and audio content
• Carousel ads to display several products or services in one interactive copy

5. Track, Test, and Adjust PPC Marketing Campaigns

A solid PPC marketing plan is never complete without tracking. But monitoring your progress alone does not contribute much to your campaign’s effectiveness if you do not test and adjust your techniques according to outcomes.

But how do you combine these three to-dos seamlessly? Here are the best tips:

• Set up goals for data collection and create benchmarks. Depending on your campaign, the metrics can be CTR, CPA, cost per click (CPC), or return on ad spend (ROAS).

• Define a timeline for testing, tracking, and adjusting. Consider taking a glimpse of your performance three times a week. Then generate extensive reports every week, month, and quarter.

• Perform A/B tests. If you want to improve some numbers or sustain growth, conduct A/B testing. Use the tracking results for benchmarking and determining what works best.

• Adjust some of your PPC techniques. Based on your metrics and A/B tests, you have a better idea of what and how to change certain elements of your marketing campaigns. It can be your keywords, ad groups, images, videos, or landing pages.

Summing Up

PPC marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with potential customers—provided that you do it right. With a good plan, strategy, and techniques, you can send and receive more leads than ever before.

Take your time setting up campaigns and continually assessing their performance. Test different elements and adjust PPC tactics based on the results. If you feel stuck, get professional advice from a digital marketing agency.