Obviously, landing pages play a key role in any marketing campaign. But they won’t be useful if visitors don’t get to them. This is where you have to contribute something innovative that makes your product or service stand out.
Have you heard of pay per click (PPC) marketing? What’s that? You must have seen small text ads that appear at the top when you search for something on any search engine. PPC marketing is one of the best ways to reach the best prospects or drive clicks to your site instead of earning those clicks organically.
It all starts with a campaign
Running PPC ads is invariably part of a larger marketing campaign that is a series of marketing activities working towards a common goal.
An AdWords campaign contains all of your ad groups, and those same ad groups contain your ads. The most interesting things happen when we get to ad groups that contain all the ads that are targeted to a shared set of keywords, which are actually user search queries. For example, an ad group might have 15 different ads, all targeting keywords like shoes, shirts, shawls, boots and foot gloves, etc.
The Different Types of Keyword Matches
The keyword targeting method is very important to the success of a PPC campaign. AdWords gives you the opportunity to customize how your ads match users’ search queries.
The broad match modifier is a way to refine your standard broad match keywords for tighter targeting and control over your ad spend. Phrase matching will be more exact on that and will only target queries that contain a specific phrase or close variant as specified. For example, “wear shoes” (in quotes) would certainly point to “how to wear shoes”, but not “why don’t you wear something other than shoes”.
Discover the right keywords to target
How can you decide which keywords to primarily target? That is where keyword research should be done. This should be done initially while running each PPC campaign.
Finding the right but great keyword is not easy. There are tools that can help reach them. The AdWords Keyword Planner is a great tool to consider, as it provides information on many things, such as historical search data, estimated traffic forecast, and suggested bid amounts. Competition for generic keywords is generally very high, and it can be difficult to create compelling ads for these types of generic queries. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to long-tail keywords.
It’s All About Ad Rank
Every ad has an Ad Rank, and that Ad Rank determines your ad’s position on the page. The key contributing factors are the amount of your cost-per-click bid and the Quality Score of the keyword.
To achieve a high Quality Score, your PPC ads need to be extremely relevant to the user’s search queries, a high expected click-through rate, and a landing page that is clear about what you offer and trustworthy.
Conclusion
Now you have a clear idea of PPC marketing, but you have to keep learning more. The PPC Landing Pages Guide will not only teach you PPC marketing strategies, it will also show you how to design landing pages that work hand in hand with your ads.
