Many small businesses view pay-per-click as a complex moving target. This is true but there’s a strategy for managing campaigns, making them searchable and keeping the cost low. All too often entrepreneurs will take on this task themselves, only to exhaust their efforts and their finances in the process. That’s where we come in! As a Google Partner, we have a few tips to pass along to those of you who want to explore pay-per-click campaigns on a smaller scale and who enjoy doing it yourself.  

Keywords & Negative Keywords

Keywords are words that best define your business. They are important, but overloading ads with too many keywords can cause a negative effect. That’s why it’s good to identify words and phrases that make your company unique. You increase the chances of being seen when a potential customer searches for those keywords. Now, let’s talk about negative keywords. Negative keywords are words that may be misinterpreted by Google’s search engine. For instance, if you’re an indoor/outdoor painting company and your ads contain the words “paint”, you want to make sure your ads aren’t being shown to people searching for face painting or any other variations that might include that keyword. By negating those words in your Google ads dashboard, you ensure that you’re not wasting money serving up campaigns to people who are not really searching for your products/services.  

Bid Adjustments

When launching a campaign, you’re able to monitor the activity through your Google dashboard. If you notice that your ad is popular on mobile, you can make a bid adjustment to serve your ads to more people on mobile rather than desktop or tablets. Even though mobile search tends to be popular, stats show that desktop and mobile are neck and neck when it comes to e-commerce. We recommend keeping a close eye on what’s working throughout your campaign and adjusting to fit those trends as you go.

Messaging

We’ve already covered the importance of choosing unique keywords. It’s also good to use those words in your messaging whenever appropriate. It’s not a bad idea to look at your competitors’ verbiage. By defining your keywords and descriptors (separate from your competition) this allows you to obtain a competitive edge while serving up the high-quality leads at a lower cost. Another tactic to create a sense of urgency with your messaging is implementing timely deals. By adding verbiage such as, “Offer ends soon” or “Hurry, limited time deal won’t last forever,” can help create a time-sensitive need to click.

Drive traffic in-store

Some local businesses’ main goal is to drive traffic to their brick-and-mortar location. When advertising with Google, consider using local inventory ads to show customers that you have what they’re looking for, confirming their decision to make a trip to your store. Also, use those Google ad extensions to the max! Add in the location extension to make it easy for customers to find you.

Website & Mobile

Whenever using PPC, it’s important to think about the entire picture. If you run Google ads to bring in more potential customers, you must be able to provide them with a pleasant click-through experience, whether that’s leading to your website or one of your social channels. If your ads are driving traffic to your website, it’s important the keywords used in your ads match up to the language that’s on your website. This is where a lot of companies miss the mark. They spend so much money driving traffic to a website that is not optimized so they fail to close the deal. For instance, stats show that if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load (that’s desktop and mobile), customers are highly likely to bounce.

Make sure your catching customers eyes with your creative, your keywords and providing a good click-through experience all the way through to purchase. Also, make sure your experience matches what’s in your ads. You can do this by creating custom landing pages for evergreen and seasonal campaigns. This only helps increase the quality of your ad, resulting in a potential lead. This relevance is reflected in your quality score. The higher the number, the more relevant the content, and the lower click-through cost to you!

We hope we’ve given you a glimpse into some tips and trick for managing your pay-per-click campaigns. Check back soon for more useful tips on how to leverage your small business in a big world of competition. If you need help managing certain aspects of your small business or you’d like to know more about the services ARK Marketing has to offer, email us or comment below! Also, follow us on Facebook and Instagram for industry news, inspiration, and helpful tidbits for finding small business success.

Sincerely,

The ARK Crew