06
Paid search and PPC
When you set it up correctly, with highly optimized landing pages, paid search – and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) – is one of the primary drivers of channel ROI for any strategy.
We’d recommend staying away from content CTAs for paid search, as there are other channels with much more efficient lead generation. Instead, focus on offering:
Demo requests
Pricing requests
Contact sales
Free trials
Paid search usually demands a high cost per lead, but you’ll see strong performance in the pipeline – if your follow-up process can keep up.
Have your salespeople poised to deliver rapid, friction-free follow-ups to demo and contact requests for a smooth pipeline from qualified lead to opportunity generation. Otherwise, you risk missing out on hot leads that are ready to buy but turn to your competitors.
When you’re setting up your campaign, you’ll need to make some decisions based on your strategy and the budget. Are you looking for awareness, clicks, or conversion from your paid search – and how much are you willing to pay?
Like with organic search, you can prioritize high-converting keywords to make the most of your budget. Long-tail keywords are a great choice, as they tend to be cheaper and more closely linked to high intent. If someone’s searching a multi-word phrase relating to their pain point, they’re far more likely to convert on a landing page that feels tailored to that specific need. Branded terms also work great here as they're high-intent.
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, review your ad copy and landing pages to ensure they match closely. When your prospect sees your ad – and, hopefully, clicks on it – you need to be confident that you’re answering their query or they'll just click off. Enter high bounce rates.
Paid ads run on an auction basis, too. When you target certain keywords, Google considers your bid, quality score, relevance, expected CTR, landing page, and other factors to determine where you appear in the search.
You can’t influence all the different scoring metrics, but here’s a quick win to help boost your ranking: pay attention to your CTA.
Make the value of clicking through clear in your link – and make sure your landing page matches it.
Google won’t score you favorably if you pull a bait and switch on your visitors by promising an ROI calculator and offering a PDF instead, for example…
If your landing page loads slowly, it’s all too easy for visitors to leave before it finishes, increasing your bounce rate while you pay for that incomplete click. (Check your page speed here.)
Compressing your images (without losing the quality)
Using Minify on your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files
Minimizing HTTP requests and reduce the components on your page
Using a content delivery network (CDN)
Optimizing your site for mobile
Reducing redirects
You can target your keywords by broad match, exact match, or phrase match. Generally, you should use a mix to balance your reach and relevance. They each have their pros and cons.
Pro: The most flexible and expansive, showing your ads for any related search query to reach a wider audience by increasing impressions and volume.
Con: Your ads will likely show for irrelevant or low-quality queries that don’t match your offer or intent. Your CTR, ad quality score, and conversion rate will decrease, in turn increasing your cost per click.
Pro: Targets the most relevant and high-intent leads with the exact keyword.
Con: Your ads show for fewer queries, and you can miss out on potential customers who use different words or phrases to search for your offering. This can reduce your reach, impressions, and clicks and limit your growth potential.
This is seen as the best of both worlds, and you can use it to fine-tune your targeting and control your costs. Google defines it as “A keyword match type that allows you to show your ads on searches that include the meaning of your keyword.”
It sits in the middle of both strategies in terms of search volumes.
Use broad match keywords sparingly to reach a wider audience and test new ideas (if budget permits), while using exact and phrase match keywords to drive higher-intent conversions and sales.
Just like the rest of your channels, you’ll want to regularly assess your keywords’ performance to see if they’re delivering the right number of clicks and conversions. This isn’t a set-and-forget channel; from seasonal changes to new trends, many factors will affect your performance, so don’t assume it’ll scale steadily without your help.
The good news is, it’s pretty easy to see what’s working – and what isn’t – by the volume of clicks and traffic. From the start, have your conversion tracking in GA4 and Google Tag Manager set up to tell you which of your ad campaigns, ad groups, or ad sets delivered the best results, whether that’s awareness, leads, or sales.
When you’re making changes, be wary of the learning period for the campaigns; it can take up to 14 days to see results, and this waiting period restarts each time you adjust your strategy.
Search your keywords using your browser’s incognito mode to inspect what other marketers are up to
Set up A/B testing to compare different ads, groups, regions, etc.
Consistently monitor and remove negative keywords to avoid unwanted traffic and wasted budget
Utilize your branded keywords – unless you have a lot of competitors bidding on these, they’ll likely be cheaper with a higher CTR
Use Google's retargeting capabilities to stay at the top of your audience’s minds and push them to convert
