Supercharge your PPC campaigns with these tactics

The online advertising universe is constantly evolving. With innovations in digital advertising happening all the time, it can be challenging to maintain high performance and stay competitive without a constant pulse on the Google platform. There’s a ton of strategy, trial and error, and creativity required to drive successful PPC campaigns. Here are some next-level tactics that can help supercharge underperforming ad campaigns.

Mobile Ad Campaigns

Mobile ads are a power tool in the digital marketer’s toolbox. By 2019, mobile will account for more than 33% of total media ad spend in the US. With that kind of growth and Google’s mobile-first policy, optimized mobile ads should be a key channel of your online advertising mix.

Google has released many new mobile ad elements, including price extensions and call-only campaigns. Price extensions allow advertisers to display a menu of services with pricing. You can launch call-only campaigns to focus on compelling buyers to click-to-call a business directly from the ad.

Google launched “responsive ads for display” to help marketers streamline ad images and copy and “bid adjustments per device type” to silo budget based on mobile versus desktop or tablet. Additionally, location extensions are showing a 10% boost in CTR for local advertisers.

Best Fit for Mobile Ad Campaigns

Unless you are marketing to infants or the elderly with limited access to smartphones, you should be experimenting with mobile ads.

Creative Ways to Use Mobile Ad Campaigns

Rule number one: Mobile ads must link to mobile-friendly landing pages. This is especially true now that Google has launched its mobile-first policy.

Mobile users make quick decisions, and ads are prime real estate. Put your most compelling content on top and your call to action in the first description line. Leverage extensions to increase CTR — location extensions, sitelink extensions, phone call extensions, and price extensions. Here is an example from one of our clients.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs)

Dynamic Search Ads can be an amazing tool for sellers to extract data about products that are generating the most conversions and sales. The information can help you boost SEO efforts by telling you how to prioritize search terms and can drive conversion optimization. Since Google is determining which pages and products to create ads for based on quality and relevance, you know how the search engine prioritizes your content. This is incredibly valuable data.

Best Fit for Dynamic Search Ads

DSAs work best for businesses with large online inventories and product selections. The use of dynamic ad text allows a PPC campaign to service hundreds (or thousands) of pages without you having to write ad copy for each one. They also work well for sellers with detailed inventory information like SKU numbers that buyers search for using long-tail keywords.

Creative Ways to Use DSAs

DSA results provide insight into which products are in demand and highly relevant, allowing you to prioritize your PPC campaigns based on that data. Take caution when implementing DSAs, as things can go wrong if not properly enabled. For example, displaying misspelled keywords, nonsensical ad titles, and spammy-looking content.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads and Customer Match

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) do for search what remarketing lists do for display advertising. RLSA serve ads to your site visitors based on certain criteria that put them in a list. For example, a user abandons a shopping cart, which adds them to a list and serves ads for the items they left behind with the hope that they come back and purchase. Say someone visits a specific services page of your business website. This action adds them to your RLSA and you can serve highly relevant and timely ads or offers for that specific service.

Customer match is similar to RLSA and allows you to serve ads on the search network, YouTube, and Gmail to those users on your opt-in list who have a Google email address.

Best Fit For RLSA

RLSA are good for small budgets and highly competitive keywords as you are only marketing to your customers and prospective buyers who have shown immediate interest. You must have a certain audience size to qualify. Customer match works well for companies with a large Gmail subscriber base.

Creative Ways to Use RLSA

RLSA campaigns allow you to increase bids on expensive keywords for buyers who have visited your site but left to keep researching. You can bid on a broader range of keywords because the searcher has an interest in you and is more likely to return and convert. This opens up new strategies for search campaigns in competitive markets.

Current Events PPC

This is home-grown terminology we use to talk about using current events to supercharge PPC campaigns. Advertising can do wonders when it reacts to real world events. Jumping on the opportunity to help people and provide relevant products at just the right time is what smart advertising is all about.

Current Events PPC Best Fit

One of the greatest strengths of online advertising is the speed and agility of the medium. Consider a generator retailer advertising a discount before an impending hurricane. Think about a cowboy boot manufacturer using geo-targeted campaigns in cities where the rodeo is headed.

Creative Ways to Use Current Events PPC

Consider annual national events, current fads (Pokemon Go anyone?), and extreme weather forecasts. Many of our clients at Forthea Interactive run interesting campaigns during Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and, of course, Christmas.

You could also piggyback on national elections and important events going on in your city, for example, the Super Bowl. In Houston, we have popular events like the Chevron Houston Marathon, PRIDE parade, iFest international festival, rodeo and WWE SmackDown. We know these events are getting a ton of searches and our clients love being part of the energy around them.