Creating a successful pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign that delivers a high ROI is a satisfying feeling. But it doesn’t happen overnight. Often, the path to success can have a few detours. Sometimes you’ll implement an innovative tactic and boost your PPC profits immediately. Other times, you’ll try a new approach and instead of success, you’re met with frustration when your cost-per-click (CPC) soars.

To reduce these detours and create a successful PPC campaign, you have to start with a strong foundation that relies on thorough planning, accompanied by rigorous optimizations. Since trends are quickly evolving, you must embrace change as well as consistently reassess your PPC campaign strategies to be able to achieve the best results.

The best way to boost your campaign’s profit still encompasses numerous micro-wins and long-term goals. To develop high-converting campaigns that generate substantial profits, try to use the tips below:

1. Develop a strategy and stick to it

If you’re a PPC campaign manager, you must resist the urge to constantly adjust your campaigns, especially if you start to see things going south. There’s nothing worse in your PPC campaigns than making reactive decisions and ignoring the ultimate goals for your campaign.

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Having a dedicated PPC strategy may seem simple and trivial, but it’s a crucial element that ensures the success of a PPC campaign. Your strategy should address consumer behavior, trends, and psychological triggers. When you know this information, you’ll be able to develop persuasive ad copy that speaks to your target buyer.

Another important element to consider is aligning your PPC strategy with their buying behavior during different seasons and holidays. The holidays are a vital time for businesses to hit all-year highs in revenue and engage new and returning consumers. As a matter of fact, NRF states that some companies’ holiday sales bring in 30% of their annual income. This Statista survey showed a massive rise in holiday sales income year over year.

It’s never too early to develop a strategy for different seasons and holidays. The best way to start is to look at data buried in your previous campaigns and identify the periodical shifts and trends in your niche or industry, then create a plan around it.

Your PPC campaign strategy must be a long-term project and you must stick to it to see results.

2. Proper Tracking Setup

How you set up your tracking tools can either break or make your PPC campaign. If you want to identify areas that need improvements and track the success of your campaigns, you need to use software like Google Analytics or Google Ads. Within these programs, you can establish goals for your campaigns and monitor conversions.

However, simply analyzing click-through-rates and the number of clicks isn’t always enough. While it’s interesting to see the engagement on your campaigns, it’s not a surefire way to track their success or ROI. You need access to metrics that will allow you to analyze and optimize your campaigns to be more efficient.

Take for example, conversions. You must first accurately identify what a conversion is and isn’t. Focusing on an unimportant type of conversion isn’t going to impact your bottom line. Someone may download a whitepaper or visit a page, but you need to identify which conversions result in highly qualified leads. Once you do, you can then set up goals to track that metric.

For instance, a recent study by Dialogtech showed that even in the modern digital movement, phone calls are still one of the best methods to make sales. For many websites, up to 63% of their traffic comes from smartphones.

Hence, for any PPC campaign to succeed, phone calls should at least be considered. Now, imagine that your campaign does not include using the telephone to drive leads or conversions. If that’s important to your business, then you’ll have no idea why you’re losing sales because you’re not tracking it.

You may feel compelled to streamline conversions to “definite” actions like verified sales. But it’s important to keep an open-mind and look at the bigger picture. You need to understand your customer’s journey and behavior. Take a look at the image below for a clearer understanding:

Analyzing data and tracking conversions isn’t the only thing that will boost your PPC sales. However, it will help you make better decisions that will help increase your campaign’s profits.

For example, Payoneer is one of the fastest growing payment processors worldwide and they achieved a 4751% growth with a simple PPC campaign that was continuously optimized to customers’ specific needs based on tracked data.

Here are some more mind-blowing stats… HubSpot recently showed that 97% of PPC campaigns with low or no tracking do not achieve positive ROI and a Wordstream study showed that only 50% of Google Ads accounts utilize conversion tracking.

And the Google Ads accounts with adequate tracking had 50% better profit rates than a normal Google Ads account would have. Tracking your campaign in performance and engagement in this digital age is a necessity.

3. Attribution Models

Understanding attribution models in depth and locating the best fit for your brand may be one of the most important additions you can make to your PPC campaign. However, there’s a catch.

Years ago, last-click attribution was one of the default models marketers used. However, it isn’t effective anymore as last-click attribution overvalues that last interaction. In fact, a Salesforce review reveals that it takes 6 to 8 touches in order to create quality sales lead with 60% of a sales cycle concluded before the consumer talks with your salesperson. If you focus on the last click, you are missing a big part of the total picture.

It’s vital to understand the value each step of your cycle introduces to conversions and how you can use this information to increase profits. This was the situation with Confetti, a UK-based wedding site. They were not pulling in enough sales until they decided to focus on clients that fit specific criteria and cut loose others that were wasting their time and effort. This strategy change alone increased revenue by 42.58%.

4. Custom Audiences

It is true that paying attention to ad content, campaign settings, and keyword intent are all important for paid search, but you also need to match all three to well-segmented audiences to get the desired results.

It is also easier to target your campaigns if you have enough knowledge about your users to know what makes them convert. In digital marketing, it’s estimated that 80% of the revenue you get can be linked to 20% of your customers. Even though the percentage may vary by business, it doesn’t negate the fact that a percentage of your customers are worth more than the rest. If you identify the details behind this valuable percentage, then you will be able to increase the profits from your campaigns.

To understand your sales path, you must first understand your audience. If your sales funnel consists of distinct stages over a length of time, you will be able to target the different stages with content that is relevant for each segment. This type of personalization will appeal to them and increase your conversion rates.

You can even use Google’s third-party audiences to target potential customers and find audiences that you would not have access to if you relied solely on your own data.

Instead of banking solely on your own data and findings, make use of Google’s predefined audiences to reach prospective customers. Knowing how to use Google’s insight reports will enable you to convert potential customers at all stages of the sales funnel and increase your ROI.

5. Embrace Machine Learning

A study carried out in 2014 showed that about 70% of businesses are currently using one or more marketing automation platforms and that marketers can generate more leads if they use some kind of automation software. Marketers that use automation software to communicate with their leads get more engagement and conversions than those that use blast email software.

Machine learning, artificial intelligence technologies, and voice recognition software is rapidly growing and being adopted by innovative companies.

There are a lot of smart strategies that Google has made available which include live event targeting, custom in-market audiences, smart data attribution, automated ads, a new and enhanced algorithm for bidding strategies, rotation settings and so on.

In bidding, though, you need to check if you are better off using cost per acquisition bidding, manual bidding, or manual bidding with enhanced cost per click. Don’t worry, computers will do all the hard work and you are likely to have better results rather than doing it all yourself.

Learning how to use a machine to do a major bulk of the work will make you focus on high-value activities that generate higher campaign ROI than the time it takes to perform less productive repetitive tasks.

Plus, you do not need to use only Google tools… if you do not feel comfortable allowing the mega search engine to control your campaigns, then there’s always third-party automated options like Optymzr and Kemshoo.

It is, however, important to note that before you begin using this software that you understand how it works, know its abilities, and its limitations. Because let’s face it, automation is still quite new, and it has its own flaws.

If you do not implement it properly, it can give you negative results. But if you understand how it works and you take the time to implement it properly, then it can really boost your campaign.

Technologies are constantly evolving, and it is important to understand how this constant change can affect your campaigns.

6. Take Remarketing into Consideration

If you want to increase campaign conversions, you can use remarketing campaigns to achieve that.

Remarketing is a PPC feature that enables you to show specific ads to users based on their actions on your website in the past. This is very effective, especially in terms of cost and conversion, because you’re only showing ads to people who have already exhibited an interest in your brand.

Remarketing enables you to create highly targeted ads because you already know what they’re interested in. You can create messaging that resonates with them and persuade them to revisit your brand, have it stay top of mind, and complete the conversion goal.

Instead of wasting money on people who haven’t shown an interest in your brand, you’re only targeting people who are more likely to convert. Your ability to convert these users increases because your brand is not strange to them; they are familiar with it and more likely to convert into lead or sale.

Remarketing also enables you to segment your audience and create different ads for each segment based on the pages that they visited or what they were interested in during the time they visited your site.

Google Analytics offers a remarketing tool that enables you to create a specific remarketing list based on various parameters based in PPC.

Conclusion

Developing a successful PPC strategy is rewarding, but it does take time and testing to get it right. Hopefully this article gave you some ideas on how you can optimize your campaigns and increase your ROI.