The world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has grown dramatically in the last several years and so has PPC bid management. More companies are starting to shift serious dollar investments into paid advertising online to increase their digital ad placement spend in the coming years.
A 2020 report showed that 33% of marketers use PPC advertising to increase their brand awareness. That number won’t be going down anytime soon.
Yet as more people use digital advertising in their sales and marketing strategies, the cost per click in online advertising will inevitably go up.
It’s a simple application of basic economy–the higher the demand, the higher the price will go. And so enters PPC bid management.
How PPC Bid Management Works
As online ad prices go up, businesses turn to PPC bid management to effectively track, analyze, and redirect ad spend to the best channels.
The process of managing PPC bids is relatively straightforward: you get a tool that can effectively track what keywords you’re paying for, how much they cost, and what returns they bring.
This tracking and comparing activity allows advertisers and marketing teams to pivot and adjust spending on keywords based on what’s working or not.
Create a Solid PPC Bidding Strategy
Using a PPC bidding strategy to effectively run PPC ads is crucial for any company, whether big or small. While you won’t always have full control over our marketing efforts, gaining some form of agency over where our ad dollars spent go can be the critical difference between losing money on ads and turning your marketing dollars into more sales.
Using a bid management solution to run your bidding strategy can help you save time and energy, and gives you a more targeted and informed approach to ad bidding, ensuring that more of your dollar spent actually turns into sales.
So with that in mind, choose a bid management solution that will help you get more control over your ads and help you make more informed advertising decisions.
PPC bid management isn’t rocket science. But it’s also far from being just a walk in the park.
Here are seven practical tips and strategies for managing PPC online ads to maximize your profits.
1. Be Clear on Your Target Persona
Marketers today have merged a PPC strategy with their content marketing efforts. And just like any marketing activity, a PPC strategy must have an exact audience. This practice has to be one of the first things that should happen when running paid ads.
Through the power of data mining, platforms with ad opportunities like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and virtually every social media platform there is allows an advertiser to direct ads to an ideal target persona.
Knowing one’s target persona allows advertisers to craft messages and content that can directly speak to an audience’s immediate felt needs and pain points.
For instance, you’re a company selling a supplement that improves heart health. Determining that your product will resonate more with older people looking for ways to remain healthy, you can target a PPC ad towards users who might type up search keywords like “how to keep my heart healthy” or “common medications for heart disease.”
The more specific your target persona, the clearer you will be on the keywords that you should be targeting for PPC bids.
2. Keyword Bid Management
A best practice that every advertiser or company must maintain is a keyword management system. When running keywords, it’s not enough to put dollars on individual bids. It’s also vital to track the performance and measure the returns of investment against ads spent.
There are several tools and software available online that can help advertisers effectively measure, track, and analyze whether a set of keyword bids are effective or not.
Knowing which keywords work and which ones don’t give companies a better idea of which PPC bids will bring in the most profits per dollar spent.
This approach not only increases profit maximization. It also helps lower ad costs. Why spend additionally for a long list of keywords when you can focus on a smaller set of more effective ones? Being able to manage keywords by seeing their corresponding results allows us to do that.
3. Test Your PPC Ads
Another best practice scenario in PPC bid management is using a bid management system to split test ads. The best way to decide is to run two or more variants of an ad and measure which variant provided better results. The ad could have different copies, colors, topics, or any factor that will split a message down the middle.
Split testing an ad based on the audience is another way marketers can figure out which works best. Some might even try using various content types.
With video ads now accounting for more than 35% of all ad spending online, marketers are also currently trying to split test different video ad versions on certain occasions.
4. Bid on Unique Long-Tail Keywords
Another of the more effective PPC bidding strategies available to marketers today is applying a unique long-tail keyword approach to PPC advertising.
A long-tail keyword is a long string of words that form a memorable phrase that might have lesser searches. Unique long-tail keywords have lower search incidences, but they are also more unique, making them cheaper to bid on. Moreover, long-tail keywords often hit more targeted audiences who might find your query more useful.
Going back to the rationale that PPC ads are a game of demand economics, more unique keywords will generally have lower costs per click. And since they’re cheaper and more targeted, they’re better keywords to bid on since they will provide better results at a lower price.
Long-tail keyword research can often be a tedious task, but the returns can be quite rewarding when done right.
5. Use a PPC Bid Management Tool
Bid management tools are online services that allow advertisers and marketers to do more by automating ad management and bid management processes. It helps marketers stay productive and focused by taking care of the measuring and redirecting so that teams can simply stay on top of strategy and creativity. Additionally, it gives marketing teams greater control.
As keyword lists propagate, it becomes hard to stay in-line with overall goals. A bid management tool can help avoid that loss of focus.
Adspert is an excellent example of a bid management tool. Its plug-and-play capability makes it easy to use, and it’s full automation, which runs bid management in the background without eating up a store owner or team’s time. It also provides control and monitoring for other ad platforms, such as Amazon Ads, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and eBay Ads.
6. Integrate Your Ads With an eCommerce Platform
Bid management solutions that deeply integrate with eCommerce platforms provide companies with more insight and automation when running ads.
There is a wide selection of eCommerce software options that can integrate seamlessly and adequately with various bid management solutions and give companies smarter ways to manage, run, and measure ad spend.
PPC advertising and eCommerce that come hand in hand make a great strategy that will put any company ahead of the curve as digital marketing and advertising go.
7. Implement a Retargeting Strategy
Every lead and prospect an advertisement reaches will be at varying stages in the customer journey. Some might just be getting acquainted with a brand, while others might be further up and closer to making a buying decision.
Effective marketing and advertising campaigns cover all parts of the journey, including awareness, liking, preference, purchase, and repeat patronage.
When targeting leads closer to the end of a buyer journey, you must deploy retargeting strategies. About 69.8% of all online shopping carts get abandoned. Most of these abandoned carts belong to a person who is one step away from becoming a customer.
This scenario makes for high-converting ads when run correctly.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, implementing effective PPC bid management strategies is essential for maximizing profits in online advertising.
By following these seven tips, including targeting the right audience, managing keywords, and utilizing bid management tools, you can optimize your ad campaigns, increase conversions, and make informed advertising decisions for maximum profitability.
