Running a successful ad campaign is the ultimate goal for many businesses. With organic reach and organic traffic becoming increasingly difficult to obtain in the short term, turning to ads is sometimes the only option.
But how can you be sure you’re creating a campaign that is going to be successful? After all, you’re creating a PPC ad because you want to bring in customers and increase your profits, so learning how to make money with pay-per-click ads is essential.
Our conversion rate experts sat down and created a list of the six key factors that can make or break a campaign. Let’s get started and help you make money with pay-per-click advertising.
The Difference Between PPC vs CPC
When creating a campaign and deciding which metrics to track or utilize, you probably hear PPC vs CPC often. While these two KPIs are relatively the same, there are some key differences between them.
PPC is an abbreviation for pay-per-click, which is often used within online advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook. This metric refers to the method of paying for the ads being served to users on a click-by-click basis.
On the other hand, CPC is an abbreviation that measures the overall cost per click of your PPC ads. For example, if you paid $2,500 for your PPC ad and it receives 1,250 clicks, you're spending $2 per ad click.
While having a low CPC is the goal, in order to make money with pay per click campaigns you first have to create a stellar ad that your audience can’t help but engage and convert with.
6 Easy Tips To Help You Make Money With Pay Per Click Advertising
1. Optimize Your Copy
According to a study done by Unbounce, copy has twice the relative importance compared to design.
While your overall design is important, the words you fill that page with can literally make or break your sales.
Here are six ways to improve your landing page copy for your ad:
Personalize your CTA for your audience and purpose. Don’t use vague words such as “buy now” or “get started.”
Write an actionable headline. It essentially needs to do three things; grab their attention, be straight and to the point, and explain your product or service.
Solve your customer’s pain point. Humans are naturally wired to avoid pain, so it’s safe to assume that if your audience thinks about their pain points when reading your landing page, they will subconsciously seek ways to alleviate it.
Use video and images. According to Wyxowl, 78% of marketers say video has directly helped to increase sales.
Make information easy to digest. Bold information that should be highlighted, use lists and bullets to create scannable copy, and break up paragraphs into small sections.
2. Choose Your Keywords Wisely
The most common way businesses don’t make money with pay per click ads is by choosing keywords that are too competitive or generic for their campaigns.
Remember, even if you pay for ads, you’re still competing with other companies trying to gain conversions for those exact same keywords.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when doing keyword research:
Is the competition for this keyword too competitive?
Do the less competitive keywords still have a good search volume?
What level of buying intent does this keyword have?
3. Select the Right Bidding Strategy for Your Goal
If you’ve never done PPC before, you might want to start with manual bidding. Manual PPC bidding gives you control to set the maximum amount that you could pay for each click on your ads.
While the goal is to make money make money with pay per click ads, manual allows you to ensure you’re not spending too much and ruining the chance of having a successful campaign when first starting out.
Not only that, but you’re also able to prioritize your highest converting keywords by bidding higher while keeping costs down on your middle and low converters.
Two other tips our conversion rate experts suggest are to research negative keywords to eliminate intent mismatch and to aim for the second-highest ad spot instead of the first.
4. Use a Graphic Designer for Your Landing Page or Web Page
Your business’s first impression matters a great deal. And whether you like it or not, many people will form initial opinions about your business based on its appearance. In fact, it only takes less than a second for the average consumer to make a judgment on your brand.
If you want your marketing campaigns to be successful, it’s almost a necessity to hire a great graphic designer to help you avoid simple design failures us non-designers may not even think of.
While copy and products/services have much to do with that as well, bad graphic design can cause audiences to leave and never return - regardless of how fantastic your offer is.
The fundamentals of graphic design are about recognizing and understanding how the qualities of visual materials such as shapes, images, color theory, typography, and layout work, and work together.
5. Customize Your Target Audience, Interests, Location, and Search Terms
While you may want your ad to be seen by anyone within a 50-mile radius, you're much more likely to lower your PPC if you have a targeted, niche audience in mind. You'll want to be as targeted as possible when it comes to your audience.
To choose the most valuable keywords to target, you must first understand the people that use them.
Audience intent is the driving force behind what kind of phrases users put into the search engines. Yet there can be significant variation in why different people type the same keywords into a search engine. That’s where audience targeting helps a great deal.
For example, someone types “San Diego Bakery” into a search engine. The assumption might be that the person is looking for a bakery in San Diego. But what if they’re actually looking to open their own bakery and are checking out the competition?
Creating a more niched and targeted ad campaign can guarantee your costs won’t be wasted or misused by the wrong audience.
6. Improve Your Campaign Based on the Results
Once your ads are up and running, your work still isn't done! In fact, this is when the real work begins
When your ads are finally launched, now it’s time to track them, measuring performance, and making changes as necessary to improve results.
A great way to do this is with A/B testing because it lets you run two near-identical versions of the same ad at the same time, with one important difference.
You can modify just about any element you like, including the copy, CTA, keyword, or even the landing page itself. But once you know which version performs better, make the necessary changes and stop wasting money on the less-effective ad.
Key Takeaways
It isn't excessively challenging, but it does require some knowledge of how the process works and a great deal of planning and research if you want to make money with pay per click.
The key things to remember include optimizing your landing page copy, setting a budget, and choosing a bidding strategy. Then comes the taxing—but achievable—task of researching and choosing the right keywords and audience information.
This is followed by creating your ad. And once the ad launches, you have to track, measure, test, and tweak to make sure that your PPC efforts are producing the traffic, conversions, or leads you were hoping for.
Kellyann Doyle is a Content Marketing Writer at Zoek, an SEO, Web Design, and Digital Marketing Agency that assists small and medium-sized businesses with their online footprint. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in 2013 from the University of Houston with a Major in Communications and a Minor in Marketing and has been working in the Digital Marketing world ever since. When not working, you can find Kellyann trying new recipes, enjoying a good nap, or watching Friends for the 500th time.