By Shawn Hanak
With the coming of summer, baseball season is back in full swing. So now I’ll do my best to relate America’s pastime to your pay per click (PPC) campaigns. It’s time to step up to the plate in our campaigns and hit them out of the park!
Single – Campaign Creation
You set up and launched your PPC account. This may be the shortest distance you can get from a hit but you still got there, you made contact, and just that shows you’ve put effort into your account. You went and found your keywords through your website and the Google Keyword Planner, sorted them into ad groups, and created ads that reflect these keywords. You did well just to get here but you have a lot farther to go if you want to score with your campaigns.
Double – Ad Extensions
The easiest way to make it to the next base is to add ad extensions to your account. These are useful for taking up more space on a search page and adding more information about your product or service. Ad extensions are essential in any good paid search account and don’t cost any extra money to use. To pass up on these would be to pass up on those grocery store items that say “30% more free” for the normal sized product. Extensions also can show a wide variety of useful information including your business address, phone number, and links to other useful pages on your website. To learn more you can visit one of my other blog posts here.
Triple – Bid Modifiers
Bid Modifiers help give you more control over how much a click is worth to you in regards to more than just the keyword. The most common bid modifiers in search campaigns are on location, ad schedule (time of day, day of week), and device. These can be set at the campaign or ad group level, giving you a lot more control over your bids. The modifiers also stack off each other so Google will read all your bid adjustments before coming up with your final cost.
Home Run – Conversion Tracking
All the work that you did before here was good but you don’t truly score in your account until you are tracking conversions. Conversions are crucial to helping you calculate the ROI on your campaigns to see what is working and what is not. You can track a variety of useful information to your business like purchases on your website, app installs, calls to your business, and more. These also help you see which keywords are profitable and help you know where to set your bid modifiers.
Bonus: Grand Slam – Testing
You made it around the bases but you can definitely score more than once with PPC. One way to do this is by setting up monthly tests. If you don’t test in your accounts and just leave them running they will grow stale and be less profitable over time. So be sure to test various items including keywords, new ads, locations, ad extensions, and landing pages.
By taking advantage of all the different features PPC has to offer you’ll be making sure your account is a winner. There is always more that can be done to increase your ROI through PPC so always be trying new markets and seeing what works best for you.
About the Author
Shawn Hanak is a PPC specialist for ChoiceLocal who specializes in Adwords, Bing Ads, and Facebook advertising. Shawn helps clients by reaching out to new customers and new employees alike. When he’s away from the marketing world he enjoys hiking,
