With oceans of readily available online content for all kinds of products and services, how do you ride the wave better than your competitors? Well, sustained marketing success depends on clever online strategies to appease both your go-to search engine and the needs of your target audience.
It’s not enough for your ad campaigns to look the part. The key is unlocking powerful ad performance with mechanisms like PPC research and effective PPC ads. But how do you get started with PPC, and what are the latest tips and tricks that work best in a crowded digital marketing landscape?
Read on for insights and the best practices when you want to achieve smart SEO and PPC integration for improved performance.
What Is PPC?
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing happens when advertisers bid for high-value keywords and phrases and then pay publishers every time internet users click on their ads. This exchange is centered on platform authority, the target audience, their search behavior and a strategic selection of competing keywords.
If 47% of global purchases occur online and 74% of shoppers search online before going in-store, digital marketers who neglect the power of PPC are losing out on a lucrative advantage. Moreover, PPC campaigns provide the following major benefits:
- Brand and reputation management.
- Quick, cost-effective results.
- Increased audience reach.
- Measurable ad performance.
- SEO compliance.
- Trackable ad spend.
Google Ads is the leading global PPC marketing system, helping PPC specialists execute targeted PPC campaigns that translate into higher click-through rates (CTR), better conversions, boosted sales and improved cost control.
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What Is PPC Keyword Research?
To initiate successful PPC ad campaigns, marketers rely on thorough PPC keyword research to be intentional about whom they want to reach. This is a careful analysis of the words and phrases that internet users type into search engines when looking for specific products and services.
PPC campaigns underpinned by excellent keyword research tend to yield more clicks and more conversions. PPC keyword research has three components:
- Broad keywords: A wider selection of general keywords, appealing to a large audience.
E.g. “Best holiday retreats in Boston” - Long-tail keywords: Specific keyword phrases with a tighter focus.
E.g. “Best pet-friendly holiday retreats in Boston” - Negative keywords: Nullifying keywords that omit irrelevant audiences.
E.g. “Best holiday retreats in Boston for women”
Therefore, you can use keyword research as your foundation and plan an effective PPC campaign by implementing these six key components:
- Campaign strategy and structure: Details your campaign goals, bid management, ideal campaign platforms, testing strategies and plans for conversion tracking.
- Campaign budget: Guides the parameters of your available ad spend.
- Keyword selection: Pinpoints competitive keywords relevant to your campaign.
- Ad copy: Shapes the messaging that the target audience needs to receive.
- Ad visuals: Bolsters ad appeal and attracts new potential customers.
- Landing pages: Direct readers to explore the pages where certain ads live and the website in question.
How Keyword Research Affects Your Campaign Performance
The time, attention, effort and care that goes into keyword research leads to profitable marketing successes when done right. If you want to know how keyword research affects your campaign performance, simply look at the key advantages below to understand why this is a smart move for modern marketers:
- Brand management: Thorough keyword research, effective ad campaigns and consistent marketing efforts help grow a brand that will be trusted by a loyal customer base. There’s power in giving internet searchers exactly what they want. When users go looking for a service or product, PPC ads should help your offerings rank higher on search engines like Google.
- Budget control: Businesses have different budget allocations, but effective keyword research levels out the playing field considerably. With clever ad campaigns and responsive marketing strategies, even smaller marketing teams can get big gains through close performance tracking and creative ad campaigns.
What’s more? Budget control proves very useful during uncertain times, like how marketers were tasked with adaptive keyword research during the pandemic.
- Campaign customization: Since there’s high competition and marketers across your field are banking on pulling traffic on the same keywords, you can still beat out the competition with bespoke campaigns that are customized to make your business offerings stand out.
- Measurable results and ROI: Keyword research comes with clear, actionable metrics that create a direct path to ROI.
- Targeted advertising: By maximizing your Google Analytics and keeping a close eye on Google Search Console performance, you can start implementing improved targeted advertising.
Leverage PPC keyword research as part of advanced marketing campaigns that reshape all future advertising for you and your entire business.
Identifying High-Intent PPC Keywords
To hit the nail on the head for high-intent PPC keywords, the first step is being purposeful with the kind of content you’re crafting and the ad campaigns that accompany it. User search intent falls into these four defining categories, which will govern what kind of keywords work best to appeal to your target audience:
- Informational: Users seek accurate and contextual information bases that will provide more details, proper explanations and relatable examples for their general queries.
- Navigational: Searchers use keywords or phrases to find specific sites or pages that serve a directional purpose, so that they get to their desired destination quicker.
- Commercial: Internet users type in keywords and phrases related to specific products and services, for the sake of comparing and weighing their options before making a purchase.
- Transactional: These types of searches entail confident users who want to make a direct purchase or perform some other intentional transaction online.
These are based on search volume, which signifies the number of times users search for a certain phrase or keyword within a specified time period. Keywords with a high search volume signal keyword popularity, empowering marketers to make fruitful predictions about potential website traffic and search ranking for high-intent PPC keywords.
Best Practices for Conducting PPC Keyword Research: A 5-Step Process
From thorough keyword analysis to using the best PPC tools and platforms to streamline your PPC research process, here are five steps that will help you develop effective PPC ad campaigns.
Step #1: Do Thorough Audience, Search Query and Search Trend Research
Research the unique interests, needs and preferences of your target audience to better understand what drives their search queries.
Step #2: Brainstorm a List of Relevant Keywords
Build a comprehensive list of natural keywords for your product, service or topic offering. Consider broad match and exact match keyword variations.
Step #3: Use a Keyword Research Tool
Extend and refine your keyword research list by utilizing the best keyword research tool available to you. Choose between these popular keyword research tools to perform organic keyword research:
- Ahrefs.
- Moz Keyword Explorer.
- Semrush.
- Google Keyword Planner.
- Surfer SEO.
These platforms consolidate keyword suggestions and also allow writers to measure how well their content would fare on search engines.
Step #4: Perform Competitor Analysis
Analyze the high-performing keywords your competitors use to inform the needs of your own PPC campaigns. With broader competitor insights, you’ll know what works, where the loopholes are and which areas of PPC potential to focus on.
Step #5: Align Your PPC Keywords With Your Target Audience’s Search Intent
Perform strategic and intentional keyword selection (including keyword distribution) to align your content and ad creations with your audience’s exact search intent.
Common Mistakes To Avoid in PPC Campaigns
With every nifty SEO marketing guide, we like to provide tips that’ll save you wasted time and resources. So, here are 10 common SEO mistakes that can hurt your PPC campaigns:
- Bypassing SEO keyword research altogether: Neglecting every SEO Google trend that matters hurts ad performance.
- Overly broad target audience: Casting the audience net too wide affects selection and waters down keyword quality.
- Targeting too many keywords: The key is to strike a balance between broad, long-tail and negative keywords.
- Including the wrong keywords: Avoid including unrelated or random keywords.
- Avoiding relevant negative keywords: You need to include negative keywords, but make sure they’re relevant.
- Weak ad copy: Users expect high value on all fronts, so prioritize quality copy.
- Not running ad campaign tests: Whether experimenting with Bing ads or Facebook ads, ensure you run ad campaign tests to gauge reception and the audience’s temperature.
- Not optimizing landing pages: All the aspects of your website must be optimized, especially your landing pages.
- Short-cutting PPC ad campaign performance monitoring: Track your ad campaign performance and make adjustments to your PPC strategy where you find shortcomings.
- Abandoning your ad campaign goals: Align all ad campaign efforts with your overall marketing goals to stay on a positive performance and growth trajectory.
Do PPC Research the Clever Way: Staying Ahead of the Advertising Curve
Now that you have an understanding of the basics of PPC research and how it bolsters online advertising
With an effective PPC strategy, smart ad spend and strategic competitor keyword analysis, you’re ready to launch successful PPC advertising.
Comprehensive digital marketing campaigns that include clever PPC ads are your ticket to growth, improved performance, more traffic, higher conversions and favorable ROI.