By now, everyone knows how important it is for your business to have a website.
Getting people to that website is a totally different story. If you just start a website and launch it without doing any extra promotion, you likely won’t even see enough traffic to pay for your annual domain fee.
There are a number of things you can do to get visitors to your site. One of the most common is online ads. If you’ve ever been on the internet at all, you’ve certainly seen advertisements plastered over just about every bit of digital space.
You may have even looked into getting a similar ad for your own website and you quickly shut the tab because it seemed so expensive.
An online ad campaign doesn’t need to break the bank though. You could use a PPC campaign, or Pay Per Click. With a PPC, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. It’s a great way to minimize the risk in your advertising budget.
But without the right strategies, you could still miss your site’s true potential.
Ready to get more from your website? Here are the best PPC strategies to make the most return on your investment.
Think Locally
The internet has rewritten the rules about business geography. Your market is no longer confined to the people who live close to your business. Now, you can reach people living on the other side of the globe in an instant.
But if you try to reach your global target market, you could spread your advertising budget too thin. Not only are you paying less per potential customer, but you’re also competing with more companies.
And even though people could shop from a company across the country, many people still prefer to support local businesses.
On top of that, Google often customizes results to show local results first. If a user in Chicago googles “pizza places,” Google won’t show results from New York City.
Focusing your PPC campaign on local customers can bring your site to people who are more likely to do business with you.
Intentional Landing Pages
When you’re building your PPC campaign, you might think that if you can just get users to your website, then the rest will take care of itself.
But if your ad takes users to a page that isn’t relevant, they could bounce off of your site in a hurry.
In today’s lightning-paced digital age, users don’t want to have to search for information. They want it right now.
The more steps you put between your customer’s money and your account, the less likely it is that they’ll give it to you.
Let’s say you run a pizza shop. You run a PPC ad telling customers that they can order online. They click the ad, and it sends them to your homepage. They have to search through the menu to find the online order page.
Chances are a fair amount of users who clicked the ad won’t stick around long enough to order a pizza.
On the other hand, if the ad takes them right to the order page, many more of them will follow through.
So think about what you want visitors to do when they come to your website. Then, choose a landing page that will make it as easy as possible.
Do Your Keyword Research
When you go to make your PPC campaign, you can choose a number of keywords to “trigger” your ad. Our Chicago pizza shop might choose keywords like “Chicago pizza” and “Chicago pizza place.”
But that net might not be wide enough. They may not show up when someone searches for “Chicago pizzeria” or “Italian restaurants.”
Or, the net might be too wide. After all, there are a lot of pizza places in Chicago. And if fifty other restaurants are gunning for the same keywords, you could get lost in the shuffle.
Do some homework. Look for what keywords people are already searching for. Ideally, you should choose keywords with high search volume and not very many results.
Learn from Your Data
Once upon a time, you paid a television or radio station to play an ad, or you would pay for space on a billboard. Then, you would just wait.
You had no way of knowing how many people actually saw your ad, or if any actions were taken from it.
That’s all changed in the digital ad. Not only can you see how many people saw your ads, but you can also see how many clicked on it, how many of them clicked to other parts of your website, and what actions they took.
You can even see how people were referred to your website, whether it was through a search engine, a social network, an online directory, or someone else’s website.
Use this data to adjust your PPC strategies. You might find that more users were referred through Bing than Google and adjust your advertising budget accordingly.
For more about choosing between Bing and Google for your PPC campaign, follow the link.
PPC Strategies that Work
Since you only pay when someone takes action on your ad, pay-per-click is a great way to create an effective ad with a minimal amount of risk.
But you want to make sure that you use PPC strategies that work. Otherwise, you might as well just toss your advertising budget in a hole instead.
For more business advice, check out 10 brand promotion ideas you should try.