Pay per click (PPC) advertising is an effective way of driving traffic to your site. However, as well as driving large volumes of traffic, you want to ensure that you’re driving high quality users to your site.
The following tips will ensure that you attract the right kind of traffic, reducing your bounce rate and improving your Quality Score. Your Quality Score is the search engine’s estimate of the quality of your ad, keywords and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead better ad positions at lower costs.
Create an organised AdWords account structure
A well structured AdWords account will allow you to make edits to your campaigns quickly, give you greater control over your budgets and costs, and help you to determine which ads have the highest conversion rate. You’ll be able to locate keywords quickly, helping you reach your targets and earn a greater ROI.
Organise your campaigns according to theme or product so that your keywords directly relate to the corresponding ad text. You can use AdWords Editor to manage and edit your campaigns; it allows you to add, edit and remove campaigns as well as keywords. The tool will help you to see your performance statistics so you can edit your campaigns accordingly.
Review your keywords
Search behaviour changes over time, meaning that keyword performance can also change. To stay up to date with the most popular search terms, use Google’s Keyword Planner to identify the new better-performing terms and remove the outdated ones.
Keyword Planner helps you see how a list of keywords might perform, as well as helping you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your campaigns. It will also help you identify terms that are relevant to your site and landing page that you may not have thought of before.
Ensuring your keywords are up to date will make your ads and pages more searchable by ranking for the most popular terms.
Find out the highest converting times of day and then schedule your ads
Whilst you want your campaign to be highly visible, it can be unprofitable to run a campaign 24/7. Look at your metrics to determine which time of day you get the most sign ups and conversions and then base your acquisition parameters around this information.
Identify the times of day when people are less likely to search for your keywords and focus on the most popular times of day (e.g. after work and evenings) when your ads are most likely to lead to conversions. Scheduling your ads to be visible at the most popular times of day for your business will maximise your chance of improving your conversion rate
Geo-targeting
Geo-targeting allows you to show your ads to customers in selected geographic locations. You can select which locations you would like your ad to be shown in so that you can target specific groups of people. Location targeting is a valuable tool when optimising your campaigns.It works hand in hand with time scheduling to lower your acquisition costs. It is particularly useful if you are running sites niched by location, as you can tailor your ad copy to be specifically relevant to your ideal target audience in your desired area.
Plan ahead
Take note of important calendar events like Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day so that you can plan your campaigns around them. It’s also worth keeping an eye on current events that you could monetise such as popular film releases. Although the event doesn’t have to be explicitly related to dating, make sure there is a link. For example, dating advertisers capitalised on the release of Love Actually as it created a link between Christmas and finding love. Advertisers tailored their ads around this theme as interest in dating increased dramatically.
Use your Google Analytics or AdWords account to identify current trends. You can also use Google Trends to analyse the volume of specific search from a previous year up to the present. Once you’ve identified your annual peaks, troughs and the months where online searches are high, you can then begin to decide on the most effective ads to use for that season.
Remember that while driving large volumes of traffic to your site is important, it’s more important to focus on driving high quality users to your site. They are the users most likely to convert.
If you would like help with your campaigns, speak to a Partner Manager. We have more advanced PPC tips coming soon, so keep an eye out for them!