The techniques that worked to bring traffic to your website in 2021, may no longer work today. Browsers such as Google constantly change their algorithms because consumer behavior changes with new technology and societal shifts.

Your pay-per-click (PPC) strategy should morph with the times. The last thing you want is to pay more for clicks and not raise your conversions in the process. It’s smart to take a look at your PPC strategy at least a couple of times a year and make a few adjustments.

What Is PPC Optimisation?

Anything you do that results in more clicks improves your advertising campaigns. The better an ad or post performs, the less you’ll spend on promotions. If you haven’t already revamped your PPC ads, now is a great time to work on them and take advantage of new algorithms and market changes.

So, how can you revamp your PPC strategy today and optimise your efforts? Here are our top tips.

1. Research Keywords

Your current keyword list may not work as well as it once did. People’s priorities change, and never so much as during the COVID-19 pandemic. What worked before may not work as well now.

Spend time digging into what’s trending on social media in your industry. Study the trends on your website and blog. What phrases are most popular? Come up with a fresh keyword list every so often. Get rid of the ones not performing well and replace them with something new.

2. Understand VOC

Voice of the customer (VOC) is how your clients think and feel about your brand and products. You can gather a lot of information via surveys, internal data and common sense. How well you revamp your buyer personas impacts customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Around 94% of United States’ consumers state they are more likely to purchase from a brand when they have an excellent customer experience (CX). However, did you know CX starts from the first moment they’re made aware of your brand? Even the headlines you use have an impact on how the consumer feels about you.

3. Expand Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are the ones that you don’t want to accidentally rank for. If you’re selling baseball bats, you don’t want people to click on your ad if they’re searching for the animal. Look for phrases and words you don’t want to rank for and continue to refine your negative keyword list as an optimisation strategy.

You’ll save by not having to pay for extra clicks of no use to you. Update your list as you see you’ve ranked for something that isn’t going to convert into a purchase.

4. Create Ad Groups

When you create ads, what are the keywords you wish to target? In a case study about a ski outfitter, researchers found the brand was able to improve their PPC rate from .26% to 6.32%, or 24 times higher than before the changes.

One of the significant things the company changed was creating around ad groups. Make sure your keywords are relevant to the ads and the ads are relevant to each other. Keep the amount of ads in a group to 30 or fewer.

5. Display Positive Reviews

Do you have five stars and lot of stellar comments about your products and services? Utilise the positive feedback to entice others to click on your ads. You can use a plugin to pull in the reviews to your pay-per-click ads.

Gaining the trust of your core audience is something that never goes out of style. No matter what else is going on in the world, consumers need to feel they can trust you to stand by your word and your product.

Positive reviews show that their peers had positive experiences with your business. The person viewing the ad with five stars under it assumes they’ll have a similar experience as well.

6. Go with Localised Landing Pages

Depending upon what type of business you own, localised landing pages are a smart move to highly target your site visitors. You won’t waste money advertising to people in Spokane, Washington, when you only serve clients in the greater Chicago, Illinois area.

Make your keywords and your landing page as specific as possible. If people see that the service is for a specific location and they don’t live there, they’ll skip past it. You don’t want to pay for clicks you can’t use to earn revenue, so localising your ads is a smart move.

7. Retarget Users

Has someone visited your page in the past? Perhaps they even signed up for your newsletter or engaged in some way. Any interaction not resulting in a sale can be an opportunity to reconnect with those people and drive them back to your site.

If someone took the time to visit you before, they are already interested in what you have to offer. Sift through your old users and see who you might want to retarget. What key words and demographics might best get your offer in front of them again?

You may want to reach them on multiple platforms, too. For example, if they visit your site and you track them to Facebook or YouTube, how can you reach out again and get your name in front of them in a new way?

Spend a Few Minutes Every Day

You don’t have to invest untold hours into revamping your PPC marketing strategy. Utilise a few extra minutes here and there to study keyword effectiveness, what people respond best to and even surveying your current customers for feedback. Spend little bits of time to improve your PPC campaigns and you’ll start to see more site visitors turning into leads.

Author Bio

Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.