PPC campaigns in digital marketing is an online way to promote content for a website. It is an advertising model that helps generate clicks for a website. It is a paid way of directing traffic to a website. It uses relevant keywords to the products and/or services. In this, the publisher gets paid by the advertiser each time the ads get clicked on a website.

The website owner may be offering various products and/or services. Usually, organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques may take months to pick up speed.

Hence, business owners prefer to cast their budgets for PPC campaigns as the results are immediate in a shorter period. Well crafted PPC campaigns provide traffic, leads, and customers once the advertisements start running. PPC campaigns can be complex and require careful planning.

To enable a search engine, especially Google, to rate the relevance of advertisements, a good strategy is needed. Some of the important steps to

Goal setting. The objective of the PPC campaigns in digital marketing must be clearly defined before beginning the campaigns. The advertisement objective once defined can help plan the campaign’s strategy accordingly. Various ends may be served by an ad objective such as traffic creation, brand awareness, sales promotion, etc. A proper goal setting is therefore necessary.

Choosing a platform. Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc are various platforms. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are also available. The platform must be chosen wisely and an advertisement campaign strategy must be planned according to the chosen platform.

Of all the platforms, Google is the most effective and famous platform for PPC campaigns in digital marketing. Google provides Google Adwords as an advertising interface that could be used to plan and publish Google ads. Other platforms also provide their interfaces to plan and publish ads.

Plan Targeting. The advertisement targeting should be planned for the most relevant audience. This can be of two types.

Geo-Targeting. In this, the audience is targeted for a specific geographic location. This location could be a country, city, specific areas, specific location or the area surrounding a specific location.

This helps in targeting areas where one is likely to find customers and restrict it in locations where such chances are feeble. The right targeted geographic region can optimize campaigns for better results.

Device Targeting. As more users nowadays utilize mobile devices to surf the internet, it becomes imperative that advertisements be customized according to these devices. Also, the advertisements need to be customized according to the device’s operating systems.

Keyword Research. It is an intense, continuous and laborious endeavor. A list of core keywords needs to be created at the inception of the campaigns. Then these keywords need to be constantly refined, modified, added or removed to make the content and ads relevant and up to date.

An expansion of the keyword list is also needed for long-tail, low cost, and high relevance keywords. In addition, Conversion tracking code could be used to identify profitable keywords that are leading to clicks and conversion. Irrelevant and under-performing keywords need to be removed from the keyword list.

An effective Advertisement text. The importance of a persuasive, unique, trendy, catchy and informative advertisement text cannot be emphasized enough. An effective ad text must contain core keywords, discounts and promotions, and an exhortation. The quality score of an advertisement depends on various factors, and ad text is one of them.

Ad extension. These enhance an advertisement by showing additional information with an ad. This includes address, ratings, website links, email, contact number, etc. Rich and informative Ad extensions help in gaining more clicks, especially in the cases of similar matches or competing ads by increasing the ad relevance and improving its quality score.

Ad scheduling. This basically deals with our control on when a user is able to see our advertisement. We can optimize our advertising strategy through this. Ads may perform differently at different times of a day or a week.

Therefore, one needs to decide which time is the best to display the ads and schedule them accordingly to increase the exposure. Also, one may schedule ads when one is comfortable to handle customer or their inquiries.

Optimization of landing pages. A landing page also contributes to the quality score by Google. A landing page is where a user is redirected once he clicks on your ad. Therefore, landing pages must have good and relevant content, specific, and should prompt the user into some action such as “Buy Now” or “Subscribe” etc.

A poor landing page with irrelevant content may lose customers or may result in poor quality scores by Google. Also, each landing page must be optimized according to the specific advertisement.

Monitoring of Competitors. Since there is too much competition, a constant watch on competitors must be maintained. One should observe the keywords they use, how their ads appear, what audience they target etc. and then plan the ads campaigns strategy accordingly. Then one should try to create a different and better advertisement than one’s competitor. This would give us an advantage over them.

Use Google Analytics. Continuous monitoring and tracking of PPC campaigns are needed to gain better insights into its running. Google Analytics is one of the great tools in digital marketing that helps in knowing searcher’s behavior by knowing the bounce rate, conversion rate, tracking the conversion rate of the PPC campaigns. These insights would help in optimizing the PPC campaigns as well as the landing page.

Therefore, one sees that effective PPC campaigns require continuous research and fine-tuning. Static PPC campaigns that are set and forgotten would never be effective.

To be effective, the searcher’s needs and behavior must be well understood. Keeping all the above factors in mind, one could, therefore, build effective PPC campaigns.