How To Develop a Cost-Effective PPC Campaign

We recently had a client approach us as a pay per click company about building a PPC campaign for them. The challenge was that the cost per click (CPC) in their industry was one of the highest with the most targeted keywords costing between $50.00-$60.00 per click. As a result, we were tasked with building a PPC campaign that focuses on maximizing their quality score and going after long tail keywords that have a lower cost per click.

Let’s take a look at the steps we recommend putting into place if you need to develop a highly cost-effective PPC campaign.

1. Determine Your Target Cost Per Sale
The first thing you want to do prior to building a PPC campaign is to understand what the target cost per sale (CPS) is. In other words, the cost that you are willing to pay to acquire a new sale through a PPC campaign. By understanding what your CPS is, you’re able to determine what you can spend on a CPC basis.

2. Use the Right Ad Group Structure
From a quality score perspective, there are three key variables that impact your quality score, including the expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and the landing page experience.

The starting point of maximizing your click-though rate and ad relevance is to develop ad groups that are properly aligned to your keywords. This is a step that many people miss, but it is one of the most important steps to perform correctly. To set up ad groups the right way, you want to place a single keyword into an ad group. And you want the title of your ad to mirror the search term. For example, if someone was searching for the keyword, “SEO company Toronto” and your ad came up with the exact title, the person performing the search would be highly inclined to click through. By structuring your ad groups this way, you achieve a high click-through rate and high ad relevance, which are two of the key variables that impact your quality score. And the higher your quality score, the less you pay per click.

3. Develop Relevant Landing Pages That Get Results
The next thing that you want to do is to drive each ad group to a relevant landing page. For example, as an Internet marketing company, our SEO ad groups should be linked to an SEO landing page, while our PPC ad groups should be linked to a PPC landing page. Here’s where it gets a little bit tricky. Google is not interested in generating leads for businesses. They are interested in providing a good experience for users of their search engine. This means that they look at the average time spent on your Website as well as the quality of your content. So, for you to be successful, you have to balance three things. First, you want to provide good quality content. Second, there needs to be enough content to achieve a decent average time spent on page. Third, since we have to convert at the highest rate possible, you need to have a good offer and Web form above the fold, which brings us to the importance of developing a powerful offer.

4. Use Offers That Maximize Lead Volume
There are two variables that have the greatest impact on your optin rate and the volume of leads that you generate. The first is your headline and the second is your offer. Your offer can be in the form of a free eBook, Webinar, video series, or even a free 6-point analysis. Depending on where prospects are in their decision-making process, you want to use the right offer. For example, for prospects that are at the attention or information gathering phase of their decision-making, an eBook could work well. For those that are at a more mature phase in the decision-making process, such as comparison shopping, a free analysis may work better.

5. Respond Quickly to Campaign Performance
Once your campaign is running, you want to manage your campaign properly. This means that you need to look at the click-through rates on your ads and the cost per lead. Campaigns that are generating a high cost per lead should be paused. For the keywords that have performed poorly, negative keywords should be added, so you don’t come up for those keywords in the future. For top performing keywords, increase your bids, so that you can drive more traffic and generate more leads. For ads that are performing well, split test against them to see if you can continue to improve results. For keywords that are performing well, perform a search using those keywords to uncover additional keywords that are similar.

The steps that we have outlined here do take some work, but this is how you can develop cost-effective campaigns that get results. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. We’re here to help.