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Are You a PPC Expert? Then You Should be Using These Advanced PPC Tactics

These innovative PPC tactics will elevate your SEM campaigns to the next level. No 101-style tips here; these are all expert-level tactics.

So you consider yourself a PPC Expert? While most search engine marketing professionals know the basics of creating an AdWords account and running PPC campaigns, only the most experienced can really tweak the system to provide outstanding results. Try some of these advanced PPC tactics to take your campaign to the next level:

Apply On-Page SEO Best Practices to The Landing Page Where You Drive Your PPC Traffic

The ultimate goal is to achieve the highest possible AdWords Quality Score, as it is extremely important to an ad campaign. Although it officially exists to ensure that users are only served ads that are relevant to their search queries, it also plays a role in your ad’s position in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and in determining the costs your campaign is charged for keyword clicks. The higher your ad’s Quality Score, the more visible your ad, and the farther your budget will reach. Most marketers concentrate on improving the quality score on the keyword and ad group level through matching the messaging from Keyword to Ad to Landing Page Content.

The most successful PPC professionals also look at the on-page SEO elements of that target landing page. Optimizing the landing page using the same keywords used in the ad and the ad group will help AdWords recognize the relevancy of your page, improving your Quality Score.

PPC, digital marketing, SEMImage Credit: Shutterstock.com. Used under license.

Focus on High Value Keywords

Most AdWords groups use multiple keywords, sometimes hundreds of them. If you have a really high-level keyword, though, dedicate an entire group to it. No long-tail keywords, no similar keywords, just that one individual term. This tactic allows you to perfectly align the ad copy to the keyword, which will help improve your ad’s performance. Furthermore, dedicating an ad group to that keyword allows you to monitor its performance from the ad group level, giving you a deeper insight into that term’s success.

Standardize AdWords Account Names

This suggestion might sound strange, but creating and sticking to a predetermined account structure and naming convention will help your campaigns run more smoothly from beginning to end. Many marketers don’t give a second thought to naming their campaigns and ad groups, and give them arbitrary, generic titles like “Spring Campaign 1”.

Which spring? How many ad groups are under this campaign? What are these ad groups being called? Not only will a specific naming convention help keep you organized when you work within AdWords, but it will allow you to run short and long-term reports easily and to have better oversight into your performance.

When naming your ad groups, it is important to be as detailed as possible. Name all of your campaigns and ad groups in the campaign in the same manner, and you’ll never get two groups mixed up again.

Align Retargeting Frequency to Buying Cycle

While retargeting is a basic PPC tactic that all SEM professionals should know and utilize, there are strategic moves that can maximize the method’s effectiveness. It is important to serve ads to visitors that failed to convert on their first visits. However, if you bombard them too often with ads, you risk alienating them, causing them to mute your ads or shun your company.

Therefore, it is important to think strategically about the frequency and timing of your ads. Match them up to where they are in the buying cycle of your product. For example, a shoe company can run a retargeting ad that features a winter boot successfully in the colder months, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to continue running that ad in July – no one is even thinking about wearing or buying snow boots in the winter.

Additionally, think not only about buying seasons, but the overall buying cycle when planning retargeting. For example, B2B software tends to have a longer buying cycle – you can run more retargeting ads throughout a year-long period than a shoe salesman could, since the buying cycle for shoes is much shorter.

Use Separate Retargeting Cookies for Specific Pages

The main goal of any retargeting campaign is to serve relevant ads that will entice a former visitor to come back to your site and take a desired action. One of the most challenging parts of accomplishing this goal is determining how to make a truly relevant ad for that user. One smart solution: Place unique retargeting cookies on each specific product or service page on your site. That way, you will know exactly what element of your company was interesting to that user, and can write and serve the most relevant ads with the highest chances of converting that user. After all, someone who is looking at snow boots has a much different need than someone looking at cross-trainers on the same site. Different cookies allow marketers to segment their audience, and work within each segment for more precise, targeted results.

While each of these tactics could merit its own in-depth explanation, this overview just highlights a few ways that digital marketers can fine-tune their efforts to create more quality PPC results. All it takes is strategy, planning, and timely execution, and the ROI of your paid advertising can dramatically increase. Good luck!

Featured Image Credit: Shutterstock.com. Used under License.

Category PPC
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VIP CONTRIBUTOR Alexander Kesler Founder & CEO at INFUSEmedia

Alexander Kesler is a visionary B2B digital marketer and an effective CEO with over 20 years of experience in building ...

Are You a PPC Expert? Then You Should be Using These Advanced PPC Tactics

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