25 October 2021
8 Top Tips For Successful Paid Advertising Online, From REAL PPC Pros!
In a previous blog the Seek Social team mentioned how there are adverts everywhere on the internet these days. You’ll find paid advertising online, on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and others, as well as Google – the place where paid advertising online really started. However, just like elsewhere in digital marketing – and advertising in general for that matter – making a paid advertising campaign a success calls for a certain amount of skill, know-how, and specialist knowledge.
Since we’re talking about paid advertising online here too, there is also financial outlay involved – so enacting a badly-planned, badly-executed campaign that won’t yield the results you need essentially means you’re throwing money down the drain. Never fear however, as Seek Social – Greater Manchester’s PPC experts – are here with eight great tips to help you avoid that outcome, and employ paid advertising online successfully!
Tip 1: Make sure you’re including Google responsive search ads
Widespread advertising on the internet started with Google, and ads such as ‘display network ads’, and ‘expanded text ads’. While display network ads are still going strong today, expanded text ads are essentially being phased out in favour of ‘responsive search ads’ – which are now the default option when setting up a Google ad campaign. The good news for you is that these ads are highly versatile, and have a number of advantages over other ads, making them highly successful too.
In short, while you might also want some other types of ads to be included in your campaign (depending what you’re marketing, who you’re marketing it to, and how), you’ll almost certainly want responsive ads to be included in any campaign you run.
Tip 2: Make sure you’re targeting the right keywords
Just like search engine rankings and search engine optimisation, paid advertising online works by identifying ‘keywords’. Essentially, these are the words, phrases or terms that matter to you. Your ad will be eligible to be shown to people when they search for these keywords on Google, so they need to be highly relevant to your product if they are to be successful.
Likewise, you should only use keywords that are relevant to your product too. If you advertise ‘wheel rims’ but you’re actually selling scented candles, nobody’s going to buy via that ad because you’re not actually selling what the person who saw your ad was looking for. You have an ad that doesn’t convert, and an ad that will be costing you more money than it’s earning you.
Tip 3: Don’t stick to the defaults
When setting up ads, you must remember that Google is still a business just like yours. Google wants to make money just like you do, and so the default settings it suggests to you when setting up your paid advertising online are based on what will do Google the most good – and that’s not necessarily what’s best for your business.
That being the case, you need to invest some time checking over those settings and making sure that you’re using the ones that you feel should work best for your business. If you choose to go it alone for your first paid advertising campaign then unfortunately you’ll just need to apply common sense and go with your gut here – at least until the analytics data starts coming in. However, don’t forget that the PPC experts here at Seek Social can apply our wealth of experience and PPC knowledge on your behalf, and help you get paid advertising online right from the very start!
Tip 4: Have multiple options for headlines and copy
Responsive search ads – the ads you really want to be using as part of almost any paid advertising online campaign, don’t forget – are made up of multiple smaller elements. Typically on a desktop device this will be three ‘headlines’ and one ‘description’ – however, the exact content that is shown in a responsive search ad is drawn from two pools – one pool for headlines, and one pool for descriptions.
You can provide Google with up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for it to draw upon to create a responsive search ad. There is an art to writing headlines and descriptions, but Google does guide you as you go, suggesting potential keywords for you to use and offering an opinion on how ‘strong’ the ad is.
Tip 5: Re-use successful copy
Not every ad you write needs to be an original creation. After all, Google will already be evaluating your website’s content and ranking it based on the rules laid out by the algorithm. If you happen to have a product page that’s ranking well organically, then there’s clearly something about it that Google likes. Why not try employing some of that copy (for example, the meta description or SEO title) in an ad to see if you get similar success from paid advertising online?
Likewise, when you see that some of your ad copy is successful (however it was created) keep it on hand. You could create variants of that proven copy to advertise other products with similar success, or create additional quality ad copy for the same product.
Tip 6: Pay attention to your competition
A key early step in defining your campaign and writing your ad copy for paid advertising online is to research your competition. Search for the keywords you want to use, see whose ads pop up for you, and what they look like. This can provide you with some early inspiration for your ad copy. Don’t plagiarise anything of course – but seeing what others wrote to accomplish the same goal as you can definitely help you get a feel for the tone, and the wording you want to use.
This research can also let you find out all kinds of useful information – like who the main players are for a given keyword, a ballpark idea of how much you’ll have to pay for each click your ad earns (‘cost per click’ or ‘CPC’), and so on. The information it provides can then help you gauge whether or not the keyword you’re targeting will be a good keyword for you, or if you should be looking for an alternative.
Again it takes a bit of common sense and experience to know what to look for here, but that’s something that the Seek Social team can provide – and we also know a few useful Google Chrome plugins that will show you the CPC, monthly search traffic, and more details about any term that you search for on Google. What’s more, we use these tools ourselves when we perform research to better inform our initial decisions, and apply our data-driven decision making principles to paid advertising online!
Tip 7: Test, test, test!
As we’ve seen above in tip four, a successful campaign for paid advertising online is going to need more than one ad, and it’s highly likely that more than one initial batch of ads will be needed too – with new ads being created even while the campaign is live. In the situation where you’re creating new ads for a campaign that’s already running, you should perform A/B testing to make sure that you don’t accidentally sabotage your own campaign.
How might you do this? By removing older but successful ads in favour of newer ones which – while you may like them better – actually convert less. This earns you less revenue in conversions for the same financial outlay (or less ‘Return On Ad Spend’ / ‘ROAS’). This is a key metric when it comes to measuring the success of your paid advertising online campaigns and copy – and the general rule is that any new ad that makes your regular rotation should either outperform, or perform equally to the ads you already have in your campaign. The way to check whether new ads meet this requirement or not, is A/B testing versus your current ads.
Tip 8: Let Seek Social help you use paid advertising online successfully
If you can follow them accurately then the seven tips above should certainly help you reap the rewards that a good campaign of paid advertising online can bring you. However, we know that it is a lot to take in, and – especially if you have multiple campaigns live at once – keeping all of those plates spinning can be quite overwhelming.
That’s where Seek Social come in. Our PPC experts do this day in, day out for a number of our digital marketing clients, with great success. Our team are happy to help you in any way that we can – from training you in how to create and enact successful PPC campaigns, to doing the work ourselves on your behalf, and all points in-between. So, to learn more about the expert PPC services we provide, or to tell us more about the support your business needs why not get in touch with us today via Facebook, LinkedIn, or by using the details on our contact us page!
