7 PPC Strategies for 2019

If your past PPC campaigns have produced less than stellar results, it’s time to tackle it from another angle. There are all kinds of proven strategies for PPC that you could be trying out but aren’t. Here are seven winning PPC strategies to implement in 2019.

1. Focus on Building Target Audiences

If you’re just randomly using PPC on the general online population, it’s like tossing a bunch of seeds out a high-rise window and hoping one of them will fall into a planter on the sidewalk. In 2019, home in and focus on building target audiences. Do organized research on your existing clients and customers. If it makes sense to do so, ask your clients and customers to take a few quick surveys so you can get in insight into their interests and online habits. Research your prospects to find out where they are and who they are. Build out customer profiles that you can share with your marketing team so they can used them to create targeted PPC campaigns based on these demographics.

2. Have Conversions Based on Where They Are in the Funnel

Next, build customized landing pages filled with content that is written specifically to appeal to and covert your target audience based on questions they ask and searches they conduct. Keep your thumb on your analytics as well as search term trends to see if your efforts are paying off. If not, you can quickly adjust to better meet the needs of your prospects. Put everything in place to quickly convert leads so you can market to them in the future. This includes having opt-in forms on your landing pages with valuable information that your leads can’t resist.

3. Find Out Where They Are Most Active 

Take the research out of PPC by researching opportunities outside of the paid ads environment. What hobbies and outside interests do your prospects engage in? What magazines and newspapers do they subscribe to? What charities are they involved with? You can find out things like this by paying digging into social media posts and pages. Once you’ve compiled this big data, you’ll be able to form a multidimensional picture of your prospects. You can then use this to further customize your PPC campaigns as well as your online content.

4. Test Different Channels

You might find that you get better results from a different PPC channel. There are many to choose from, including:

• AdRoll
• Bing Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Instagram Ads
• Twitter Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Amazon Ads
• Gmail
• Revcontent

An advantage to expanding your PPC channels is saving money. Google AdWords isn’t cheap. If you’re PPC budget is running thin, an alternative channel might leave you with more moola to play with. Another advantage to experimenting with alternate channels is the chance to do better A/B testing. You’ll certainly see some different and maybe even surprising results.

Whichever channels you try, make sure you use data to guide your experimentation, tracking, testing, and tweaking as needed. Avoid falling back into the random approach and make your alternative channel PPC campaigns as targeted as you possibly can.

5. Test Content and Calls to Action 

It can be overwhelming to finish up a PPC campaign strategy and then go straight into launching an A/B test. But it’s an essential step that really shouldn’t be overlooked as one of your top seven PPC strategies for 2019. With the addition of one or two alternate PPC channels, it shouldn’t be too hard to implement A/B tests for your campaigns. It will be a little more time consuming to A/B test your landing pages. However, it might be worth it to enlist a third party testing service like User Testing. Usertesting.com lets you set up screening questions so you get a panel of testers that fits with your target audience. You can then have the testers visit the two versions of landing pages and give you their feedback on anything you like. This is a great way to get honest opinions before you’ve even published your landing pages. You can also use the same service or another one like it to conduct A/B tests on your content, calls to action and conversion points.

6. Don't Forget About Voice Search

Voice search is experiencing an exponential rise in popularity. People find voice search to be convenient to use while they’re driving, at the grocery store or anywhere else that they don’t have a keyboard or keypad in front of them. In 2019, it makes sense to integrate voice search research into your campaigns. Here's how you do that:

• Export Google Ads data from the last 30 to 60 days
• Review long tail (5 or more word searches) and local search queries
• Add keywords / searches to campaigns that show opportunity 

Once you’ve conducted all you’re A/B testing and landed on some campaigns that you’re happy with, take the time to build out voice search keywords in the campaigns as well. And remember, people use voice search primarily with mobile devices like phones, tablets and watches so be sure to give preference to those.

7. Tie It All Together with Great, Detailed Reporting 

Finally, don’t hoard all the data yourself! This information is gold and your sales and marketing team can make good use of it. Bring together some really useful, detailed reporting to tie all the information together. Create dashboards for your team with KPI where data can be reviewed, delved into, separated and focused on to the tiniest little detail. Make sure all of your Google Analytics and tracking is setup correctly. Leverage information gleaned about attribution, including first / multi / last touch, device tracking and view through conversions. Give your team the ability to separate the data into segments so they can gain insight into performance by intent. Lastly, tie in with CRM and see if your efforts are resulting in sales and long-term business goals.

Make 2019 your best year for getting the most value out of all your PPC marketing campaigns. Using these seven strategies, you'll be able to bring your marketing returns to their highest levels ever. For more information about maximizing your PPC campaigns or for help implementing any of these ideas, please contact us today.