Do you know the biggest problem with your PPC strategy? It is that you think you have a problem.
When a baby is learning to walk and keeps falling, do we say it has a problem? No, we encourage the child to try again, to become better, to become stronger, and to learn how to win.
Here are a few tips that will help you win a little sooner.
1. Ditch Ad Extensions
Possibly the most controversial tip demands the first place in this article. There is no doubt that some businesses have leveraged the ad extensions feature rather well. It is good to see international hotels listing their locations in major cities, and blue-chip insurance companies showing off their great ratings, but for most businesses, extensions are weak and possibly a liability.
Many small-to-medium business ads need to rely on their ad copy alone. Even the addition of a less-than-perfect URL can put a potential customer off. People may not wish to book a luxury cruise with DavesDeals.com, and your out-of-state phone number may convince some people that you are a scam company.
2. Avoid Peak Bidding Times
The best way to save money on affiliate advertising is to stop competing with big brand companies. Peak times are when consumers are clicking ads on mass. It is a time when there are plenty of clickers to go around, but also when bid prices rise as auto-bidders use up the massive daily budgets your branded competitors have.
Save your daily budget and compete during off-peak times when you get more clicks for your money. You can avoid peak times using the scheduling tools on your affiliate network.
3. Get a Professional to Help You
There is nothing worse than a poorly built advertisement, be it poor graphic design, a badly created video, or even uninspired written content. The more sophisticated the ad is, then the more help you are probably going to need.
Even a simple picture ad looks like spam if it is not created by a professional. It is not just about using expensive image software. It is about the placement of each ad element, the leading of the eye, and the design style that is used. Luckily, in our age of online freelancers, you can get some very good-quality professional help for very reasonable prices these days.
4. Alienate and Scare Some People Away
Ever wonder why car advertisements feature the price of the car or the uglier side of the finance terms? It is because they need to scare some people away. They need to scare away the people who cannot afford the car or who cannot afford the finance deal.
Car ads are built to be desirable, but they do not want non-buyers to clicking them, so they scare away people who cannot afford the car. You need to do the same with your ads. You need to target your consumer while scaring away the type of people who will never buy/covert/subscribe/etc.
Scaring away doesn’t have to include being mean or callous, it can be as simple as having professional-looking designs to stop children from clicking, or esoteric wording to stop non-fans from clicking. Like with the car example, sometimes you have to alienate people by making it clear you are not offering a service/product that they can have.
5. Use Negative Keywords and Experiment a Little
It has been proven again and again that negative keywords are guaranteed, money savers. Even the best keyword choices and keyword profiles are going to pick up a few unwanted clickers, and the use of negative keywords can severely limit the number of unwanted clickers.
This is especially true if you are paying for impressions, or if you have an ad that may appeal to a particularly broad set of people. What’s more, if you are genuinely trying to target people, then negative keywords are part of that targeting process.
6. The Right PPC Strategy Requires the Right Affiliate Network
There are plenty of fantastic affiliate networks out there, you do not have to rely on Google and Bing. This is especially true when you consider how limiting their terms and conditions are.
Want to advertise on a website with jokes on it? Then you had better hope the jokes never reach anywhere beyond tween giggles because joke websites are the most commonly banned websites from the Google Ads network.
There are hundreds of examples where Google and Bing limit advertisers to the point where they are only allowed to advertise on the blandest, beige, and stale websites on the Internet.
7. Keep Coming Back to Your PPC Research
Do you know a good way to waste money? You do your PPC research, create your ads, and you consider the matter closed. If you want your PPC campaigns to be successful, your PPC research needs to be an almost perpetual process.
You need to be revisiting your adverts every two weeks to do more keyword research and improve the way keywords are used in your advert. If you wish to learn more about PPC research then read more here.
8. Do Not Change Your Maximum Bid Amounts Within Two Weeks
Whenever you change a budget setting such as your maximum bid, the network has to learn how clickers and users are going to react to your new place in the affiliate market. It takes up to two weeks for it to learn. Until that point, the suggestions you are getting and the budget/bid suggestions you are getting are unreliable.
Leave at least two-week intervals between changes, especially if you are using trial and error testing to improve your PPC performance.
Trial and Error Testing Is the Path to Sustained Success
In reality, none of these tips, or any other tips, will help you succeed if you do not have a trial and error testing mindset. Each advertising campaign you set up should be planned and structured so that you may learn from it. So that you may take what works in your PPC strategy and build on it while removing what doesn’t work.
We have more articles on business and marketing success on the Menaentrepreneur blog and they are just aching to be read. Check them out if you want to learn more from seasoned and industry-tested experts.
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