Boost Pay-Per-Click PPC marketing with Google Ads Rank describes effective strategies to lower costs and better performance in search engine advertising through optimizing Google Quality Score. A higher quality score indicates high-quality ads that can rank in a higher position in paid search engine results.
Ad rank determines your ad placement in the search engine results pages with organic search results. It is the product of quality score and cost per click. Hence with a better Google ads quality score and lower bid, you can beat your competitors in the PPC auction real-time bidding.
Optimizing an ad’s quality score and managing your bids properly will allow you to get better results in your pay-per-click advertising. Quality score depends on ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate (CTR). The factors that directly impact ad rank variables and are crucial to a PPC campaign’s success include keyword research for long-tail keywords, quality of your ads, landing pages, and measuring campaign goals.
PPC ads can be performed on search engine platforms like Google, Bing, or social media platforms. Google’s search engine is the most commonly used PPC advertising network in search engine marketing.
Mindset Digital Marketing delivers PPC management services with keyword-targeted ads to your potential customers. Reach your target audience through our paid search marketing campaigns. Analytics is used to monitor success and improve the PPC campaign strategy.
Introduction to Pay-Per-Click PPC Marketing
PPC marketing is a type of online advertising model where advertisers place ads in a click advertising platform and pay-per-click on the ads. Advertisers bid in a real-time auction system for the display of their ads in search engine result pages. The most popular forms of PPC marketing platforms are Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.
Basics of PPC Marketing
The basics of pay-per-click marketing include:
- Keywords: advertisers bid on specific keywords relevant to their target audience.
- Ad auction: the maximum bid does not determine which ads to show, the ad’s relevance and quality contribute to a winner
- Ad rank: is the ad position determined by the bid and quality score
- Ad formats: can be of various formats like text ads, display ads, or shopping ads
- Budget: to control your daily or monthly ad spend
- Targeting: you can target keywords, specific demographics, locations, mobile devices, and even the time your ad is shown
- Landing pages: a click on your ad in the search results will take the user to a landing page. A good landing page user experience is necessary for conversion.
- Ad copy: a compelling copy with relevant keywords will prompt users to take action.
- Tracking: measure the success of your pay-per-click campaigns by tracking marketing campaign goals e.g. sign-up
- Monitoring and Optimization: analyze data, adjust bids, test different ad copy, and refine your strategy based on what works best.
Why PPC is Important in Digital Marketing
PPC is an important digital marketing strategy because it complements search engine optimization. The competition to appear in the top position in organic search is fierce, PPC provides a great way for business owners to beat the competition via digital advertising.
The other reasons why PPC is important in digital marketing include:
- Visibility: PPC offers a better chance of visibility in search engine pages than SEO
- Audience targeting: enables advertisers to reach their target audience
- Budgeting: small businesses can participate in PPC by setting their daily or monthly spending limit
- Flexibility: PPC campaigns can be adjusted in real-time based on performance data for the best results
- Analytics data: like clicks, impressions, conversions, and other metrics can be used to evaluate campaigns and make data-driven decisions
- Multiple campaign goals: Your PPC ad campaign goals can be brand awareness, product consideration, leads, sales or repeat sales. Each goal aligns with the basic sales funnel of awareness, consideration, and purchase.
- Competitive advantage: in competitive industries, PPC can boost sales with a well-optimized campaign
- Remarketing: PPC offers the opportunity to target previous visitors for re-engagement and conversion
- Adapted to trends: PPC campaigns can be adjusted to adapt to market trends and changes in consumer behavior
Overview of Google Ads
Google Ads makes use of Google Search Network and Google Display Network (GDN). The search network consists of the Google search engine and partner websites/blogs in the GDN. The search network is used with Google Search Ads and Google Shopping Ads while the display network is used with banner ads and video ads (YouTube). Users enter a search term in the search network while display network ads are shown to users based on browsing history behavior. Google Ads provides features called ad extensions to enhance the appearance of ads.
Advertisers create accounts in the Google Ads platform. Accounts can be split into campaigns and campaigns are subdivided into ad groups. Each campaign should feature 1 type of ad e.g. search (text), shopping, display or video. We shall focus on search ads and shopping ads in this overview.
Search Ads
A search campaign should include the following:
- Bids: set max cost per click (CPC)
- Targeting: keyword and audience targeting
- Messaging: use the right keywords to describe the prospect’s intent. The message should be persuasive to get the searcher to click on your ads. The website or landing page should convince prospects to take action.
- Keyword research: check competitors for the same keywords
Search Campaigns
Search campaigns consist of at least 1 ad group with at least 1 ad and keywords. A campaign goal can be any sales, leads, web traffic, brand awareness, app download, or app install. A search campaign can be split further depending on the intent of the searcher like information query, comparison query, and buyer intent or location.
Targeting is an integral part of search campaigns and can be done as follows:
- Upload a CSV file of the customer email list, those recognized by Google will be targeted with the ads
- Remarketing: showing an ad to a previous visitor
- Audience targeting
Keyword Research
The essence of keyword research is to discover words that may match a user’s intent in a search query. Google keyword planner is a good tool to perform keyword research for Google’s search engine paid ad campaign.
The following are different types of search query matches:
- Exact match will show ads for only the keyword phrase
- Phrase match will show ads for words preceding the phrase and after the phrase
- Broad match will show ads for all words in the phrase regardless of the order
- Modified broad match is like broad match except that some words preceded with a plus sign must be present for the ads to show.
Ad Copy
Ad copy can be regular with fewer headlines and descriptions than responsive ads. Responsive ads use machine learning to decide which ads to show for search queries. Ads copy should contain some of the following:
- Call-to-actions verbs like maximize, grab, claim, download
- Benefits and features of a product
- Unique seller preposition
- Special offer
- Scarcity or urgency
- Be specific without a trace of ambiguity
Shopping Ads
Square image ads featuring images of the product, name of store, price, product title, and optional promotion text.
- Create a data feed, a special file containing a list of your products, price, brand, image, and availability. E-commerce platforms have plugins and extensions to ease the process.
- Open a Google Merchant Center account and plug in the data feed to your account
- Link your Google merchant account to your Google Ads account
- Create a shopping campaign
Your products will automatically be placed in 1 ad group called “All Products”. All the items will have the same bid price. It’s a good idea to divide them into subgroups based on attributes the products might share. You do not create ads for a shopping campaign, ads are automatically built for you based on information in your data feed.
Set bids on a target return on ads spent (ROAS) and monitor and increase bids incrementally for performing products while reducing bids for non-performing products. You can add keywords to prevent ads from showing for particular negative keywords
Techniques to Boost PPC Marketing with Google Ads Rank
Ads rank depends on quality score and the bid amount. Quality score depends on ad quality, landing page experience, and expected CTR. Improving ads rank to boost PPC marketing will entail optimizing any variables that impact on quality score.
Techniques to boost PPC marketing with Google ads rank include:
- Keyword selection: Use Google Keyword Planner to select relevant, high-volume, low-competition keywords for your industry
- Landing pages: create a high-quality landing page relevant to your ads, user-friendly, has a clear call to action, and is mobile responsive.
- Quality score: improve your quality score by using relevant keywords, writing compelling ad copy, and creating high-quality landing pages
- Ad extensions: adds information like site links, callouts, and reviews that can help improve your ad’s visibility and CTR
- Ad scheduling: you can schedule your ads to appear on days and times that perform best
- Bid adjustments: increase or decrease your bids for certain keywords, devices, and locations based on performance
- Monitoring: track your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and cost per conversion. You may need to make changes to your keywords, ads, landing pages, or bidding strategy if performance is below expectation.
Maximizing Google Ads Rank
Google ad rank determines ad position at the top of search results. By optimizing the quality score even with lower ad spend you can win the real-time bidding. The key to boosting Google Ads Rank for best ROI in PPC marketing lies in optimizing the variables affecting quality score.
The more compelling your ad copy, the more likely users will click on it. This will result in a higher expected click-through rate for your ads. If your landing page meets visitors’ expectations, then both the landing page experience and ad relevance will be high. The result will be a high-quality score for your ads, and lower ad spending to get the best returns in your PPC marketing campaign.
Getting the best returns in your PPC campaigns requires expertise. You may wish to contract your PPC campaign to our PPC Management Services to help you with your campaign while concentrating on your business process. This way you can reduce your PPC costs to the barest minimum with a better conversion rate.