It is not easy to compete against big brands in PPC. After all, they have big in-house marketing teams as well as expensive ad agencies to handle their campaigns. Their PPC budget is huge.

How to avoid being galloped by the bigger fishes while living in the same water body?

Yeah. It’s true that budget and expertise matter in PPC success. But using the right things at the right time in the right way makes a huge difference.

It takes you to assess your PPC strategy from a new angle. Work over your CPC to make them bring meaningful traffic. Test your campaigns to fix the loopholes. Learn the art of using negative keywords.

Based on such factors, this guide will help small businesses like you to outwit big guys in the PPC game.

Empower Your CPC with the Quality Score:

There is no need to tell that CPC or Cost Per Click is the actual price you pay for each click on your advertisement.

CPC plays an important role in the financial success of your paid marketing campaigns.

The entire ROI of your marketing campaign is driven by two factors—your investment in clicks and quality of traffic being generated by them.
Therefore, both cost and value are important factors while setting your CPC.

The point is here to lower the price for each click while improving the value of your visits.                        

Google Quality Score (formerly known as AdWords Quality Score) is a great way to meet both purposes.

This is because Google lowers the CPC by 16-50% if your quality score is 6 or higher.

Conversely, a quality score of 4 or below can increase the cost of per click (CPC) by 25-400%. Besides, the quality score also impacts the position of your ads in search results.

Make sure to improve your quality score to lower the cost per click of your campaign. Here are some ways to do that…

• Prefer paid keyword tools over free ones to generate quality keywords.
• Create relevant ads.
• Create a landing page and ad text to the search intent of your audience.

Take Care of Negative Keywords:

A negative keyword option lets you prevent your ads showing for irrelevant searches. They tell the search engine which phrases your ad should not be shown for.

Let’s assume that you sell new “Dell laptops”. But you don’t want your ad to appear for the search phrases such as “refurbished Dell laptops”, making “refurbished” a negative keyword for your campaign.

This way, they weed out unwanted traffic, helping you attract only the most appropriate searches while lowering your costs. Negative keywords also improve your conversion rate as well as Quality Score.

However, negative keywords are not something you set and forget. Make sure to update the list frequently. Here are two key stages of generating and updating your negative keyword list.

Before Launching Your PPC Campaign: 

It is a proactive way to figure out irrelevant phrases before you actually launch your campaign, saving you money on wasted click.

When Campaign is Launched:

This is reactive negative keyword research as it is in response to futile phrases that your campaign has already matched against. Once your campaign is launched, dig out your search query reports for keywords with good impressions and low clicks. Apart from that, make sure to generate negative keywords research frequently once or twice a week.

Identify Your Key Metrics:

KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are used to find out how effectively a venture is achieving key goals. In short, they are used to evaluate the success of something.

And there are certain KPIs to determine the success of your PPC campaign.

These key PPC metrics help you get a real insight into your campaign. 

• How Many Time the Paid Ad is Clicked?
• The Average Amount Being Paid Per Click
• How Often the Ad is Clicked on After Being Found (CTR)?
• Quality Score
• How Often Ads are Shown for Keywords?
• How Often a Click Result Leads to a Sale?
• What is the Cost per Conversion?
• What is a Total Conversion Value?
• How much you earn or lose per dollar spent on advertising? (Return on Ad Spend or ROAS) 

Keep in mind that all metrics are related to each other, meaning the failure of one can affect other metrics. For example, a poor CTR rate can impact Quality Score which in turn impacts the cost per click. 

Work over these KPIs to find out the key areas of improvement in the campaign.

Test the Variables:

Test your PPC ads now and then to make sure all things are going right for the campaign. I prefer a simple A/B test method to find out what works and then imply it.

While running A/B tests, it is essential to conduct both parts of the test at the same time and assess the performance metrics based simultaneously to prevent the data from being twisted.

Test Your Ad Headlines:

Headlines are the first thing that prompts a user to take the action. Therefore, it is important to generate compelling headlines to attract clicks. Test several headline variations to see how each one works. Or you can construct the headline in the form of a question.

Test Your Landing Page CTAs:

Conversion rate depends upon your landing page. Tweak your landing page CTAs by changing the wording, size and location. This is because the wrong placement of CTA hurts your conversion rate.

Test Your Landing Page Text: 

You can change your products descriptions or other text. If the product descriptions are lengthy, shorten the text to see if conversions can improve. 

Drafts and Experiment feature can be useful in performing these tests.

LAST NOTE:

The above-given strategies will be useful to attract the searches in the PPC landscape dominated by your big competitors. As I have told in the very starting of this blog, you need to keep the things right.

These tips help you improve your quality score and CPC as well as metrics. Besides, you can use Drafts and Experiment or other tests to determine how other versions of your campaign can work in PPC.

But as they say, PPC won’t bring overnight result—so have patience and do the right things to see the expected results.

What do you think? Drop your valuable thoughts to the comment section given below!

About the author

Romit Malhotra is the director of KVR Web Tech. He has more than 12 years experience in handling Paid Media Campaigns for various top listed brands of the world.