Paid Search Strategy: 6 Best Practices for 2020

Were you expecting to launch your PPC campaign and start making sales immediately? Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy.

The good news is that it’s worth losing money at first to learn how to get good at paid search. After all, reports show that good campaigns can create a 200% return on your money.

You won’t do well with your ad campaigns if you don’t have an excellent paid search strategy. Keep reading to learn six tips that will help you increase the profitability of your campaigns.

1. Segment Your Audience

How well do you think you can sell a men’s shaver to women? The chances are your conversion rate is going to be very low.

If you want to increase the chance of your ad making sales, you need to target the correct people. Start by creating a persona of the people who are most likely to buy from you. You want to get as specific as you can with your demographics.

Once you figure out this information, start setting filters in your ad campaign so only these people will see your advertisement. Once you create your filters, you can see how accurate your customer persona is.

Even if your audience persona is still off, you can generate a more accurate persona from your ad campaign’s data. You’ll be able to see the type of person that is responding to your advertisement.

Once you have this data, create a duplicate of your campaign that only targets these people. Of course, you don’t have to give up on the people in other demographics. Separate them into their own group and try changing your ad copy to appeal more to these people.

2. Reduce Your Keyword List

You can’t know for sure which keywords will give you the best results when starting your ad campaign. You can only figure this out by spending some money.

However, things change when you start seeing your conversion data. The chances are that there are specific keywords that produce no results.

You can increase your click-through rate and conversions by removing these keywords from your list. Focus on only the search terms that provide the best results.

You can take things a step further by using negative keywords. Negative keywords are terms that are visible in larger search phrases. You can set your negative keyword list to remove any keyword phrase that includes these words.

3. Create a New Landing Page for Each Audience

Just like your ad headline and description will resonate differently for different audiences, your landing page will as well. You can appeal more to varying demographics by providing them a different message when they click on your ad.

Test this by looking at your conversion data to see which demographics are converting at a lower rate. Take these demographics and create an identical ad campaign, but with a different landing page.

You can start your testing by making small changes to your messaging on your landing page. Keep experimenting until you find a layout and a message that works for the demographics you’re working with.

Of course, creating mobile pages isn’t the same as desktop websites. Talk to your pay per click services company about getting custom pages for mobile users.

4. Optimize for Mobile Users

You aren’t primarily advertising to desktop users anymore. You can expect at least half of searchers to be browsing the internet on their mobile devices.

You can take advantage of this by creating advertisements and landing pages that are optimized for mobile devices. You can separate your campaigns to target only desktop users or only mobile users. Create landing pages specifically for these two groups of people.

Mobile users can also use more search engine features than desktop users. Paid search gives you the ability to add things like your phone number in your advertisement. The only thing a mobile searcher will need to do to contact you is to click on your phone number.

5. Create a Retargeting Pixel

You aren’t always going to be able to make a sale the first time someone visits your website. It can take several visits for someone to decide to buy.

Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to get someone to come back to your website after they visit for the first time. The internet is a big place, and attention is sparse.

You can get back in front of these people by setting up a retargeting pixel on your website. This pixel will keep track of everyone that has visited your website. When you’re ready to start your retargeting ad campaign, all you need to do is upload this list to your ad platform.

These campaigns are typically cheaper than regular ad campaigns and convert better. You’ll be able to recoup more of the money that was spent on your original ad campaigns.

6. Rotate Your Ads

It’s easy to get carried away once you find a winning ad. You can pump up your daily budget and watch the sales come rolling in. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that this momentum will last forever.

Advertisements can go stale after a while and start losing effectiveness. If a searcher sees the same thing over and over again, they will eventually begin to ignore it. Your once excellent ad campaign can start losing money if you allow this to happen.

You can prevent this by having a set of winning ads available to use. Instead of only having one ad running all the time, you rotate your ads throughout the week. Doing this will keep your ads fresh and reduce the chance of them being ignored.

Don’t Start Advertising Without a Paid Search Strategy

You can end up blowing your whole ad budget if you start without a paid search strategy. Make sure you use the tips above to optimize your campaign. Even small changes can work wonders in increasing your conversion rates.

Once you start making sales with paid search, you can start focusing on taking care of your new customers. Keep reading our blog to learn how to keep your new customers happy.