A sustainable PPC strategy is the difference between achieving your business objectives and failure. Paid advertising networks on Google, Bing, Facebook, and other platforms allow even small businesses to successfully drive conversions in a world where major brands generally dominate organic search rankings.

Whether you're a professional marketer or a business owner, simply signing up for a PPC account won't be enough to help you stay competitive. Take the time to get familiar with your platform of choice and use this guide to aid you in developing a sustainable PPC strategy that will push your conversions and profits to new levels.

1. Set a Defined Goal for Your New Campaign

Every paid advertising campaign that you invest in should have a defined goal before you begin. These goals depend on numerous factors including how new you are to digital marketing, whether or not you have an existing audience online, and what your plans are for expansion.

Establishing a well-defined goal for you and your team is the bedrock of any successful strategy. Understanding your objective helps you understand how you will need to engage with your audience and what type of content you should attempt to curate both in your ads and landing pages. Common reasons for running PPC campaigns are:

• Brand discovery and awareness
• Sales and conversions
• App downloads
• Remarketing

You are not necessarily limited to running one type of campaign at once. For example, you might utilize a discovery campaign to bring in first-time customers while using a more sales-focused campaign to capture conversions from those that have already expressed interest in buying. However, you will want to be sure not to mix these segments of your audience and confuse your messaging. If you've never used PPC platforms before, stick with one defined goal and attempt to gain mastery before taking on bigger challenges.

By defining your goal, you can now make smart decisions when moving forward with your PPC strategy. This brings us to our next step -

2. Align Your Goals with Audience Intent

You won’t get far with your PPC strategy if you’re attempting to achieve your goal by marketing to an audience that isn’t aligned with your efforts. Every customer interaction with a business can generally be summarized in several steps often referred to as the Buyer’s Journey:

• Awareness – The individual is just learning about your business and its products or services. They may have a problem that you may be able to solve, which leads to

• Interest – After learning about your brand, the individual may express interest in your products by visiting your landing pages or subscribing to a list to learn more. That interest in your solution to their problems leads to

• Desire – The individual may now be looking closely at your deals and comparing with competitors as you provide a legitimate solution to a real problem they’re facing. The desire for your product leads to

• Action – The individual has decided that they are ready to purchase with the brand that offers the best product/service and the best offer.

As you can see, where your audience is along this journey should dictate how you want to go about marketing to them. If an individual has only just discovered your brand during the awareness stage, you wouldn't want to jump right into the hard sell as you would during the action stage. You would want to provide the user with the opportunity to learn more about your services so that they can educate themselves to make a smart purchasing decision.

If you're a brand that's currently focused more on generating immediate sales and conversions, then you will want to create a PPC strategy that focuses on audiences that express a desire to engage or make a purchase.

After you align your goals with an audience that matches your intention, you need to know how to target those individuals directly. A great place to start is by bidding on the types of keywords that are pre-loaded with the audience intent that matches your campaign strategy.

3. Bid on the Right Types of Keywords

It's natural for a brand to want to rank for the most popular and most commonly searched keywords that relate to your industry. For example, an HVAC company would love to be the number one ranked result on Google for HVAC or HVAC services. However, these types of keywords are guaranteed to be highly competitive and therefore expensive, pricing out many smaller businesses.

However, you can still scoop up valuable keywords for your campaign by understanding the intent behind the search. There are generally three types of keywords entered into a search engine every day:

• Navigational – Expresses an intent to go to a defined location. The user may not remember a direct URL. This can include searching for brand names, products, services, or anything else related to a brand they may have in mind. These keywords are useful if your brand is already popular and well-defined.
• Informational – This type of keyword helps users find content that educates or informs them about a topic. These generally take the form of questions using words such as “where,” “when,” or “how.” The key here is that the intent is to learn, not to spend. Informational keywords are great for ranking educational content on your site that can promote awareness, but they are not the keywords you would pursue necessarily for chasing immediate sales.

• Transactional  – This type of keyword is loaded with the intent to purchase. A user might enter the words “buy” or “sale,” but may also search in terms of a product or service. Examples of this would look like “best local landscaping service” or “professional men’s watch.” These are deemed transactional as the keyword seems to imply that the user is already interested in purchasing that product or service.

Understanding the types of keywords and why users search for them is key in helping you to tailor a sustainable PPC strategy. Your focus should not just be to chase the most common keywords but to research keywords that fall under the type that aligns with both your campaign goals and the audience intent.

A discovery campaign focused on building brand awareness would prioritize informational keywords. Users are not at the action stage of the buyer's journey and simply wish to gain more information. You can then bid on informational keywords that your audience is using and ensure that your website or landing page has quality content that provides them with the resources they need. Users then feel rewarded for discovering valuable content, which then establishes your brand as an authority, and drives success for your PPC campaign.

Likewise, a conversion-driven campaign would highlight transactional keywords that users type when they're already committed to spending cash on a product or service. Your ads and landing pages should match the intent of these keywords and prioritize hard-selling your products or services with great offers that they can't turn away from.

Finally, you might also consider bidding for long-tail keywords for your PPC campaign strategy. Long-tail keywords are phrases that consist of three or more words and have a highly specific focus. Many new marketers will make the mistake of ignoring these keywords due to their low search volume. However, the hyper-focused intent behind using them makes them well-aligned with campaigns driven by conversions.

Because the user is motivated enough to highly-define their search, there is a great chance that they are also motivated to purchase if they discover your ad. Additionally, the low volume equates to a low bidding cost, making it a cheap, but potentially worthwhile investment to consider in your PPC strategy.

4. Utilize Analytics for Continuous Optimization

PPC campaigns are unique in that while they are paid, you only receive a charge whenever you receive clicks from your impressions. Whether you are using Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or another PPC platform, they want your campaign to perform otherwise they do not receive payment.

Because of this, your PPC platform of choice will provide a suite of analytical tools that you can use to track your campaigns in real-time. Both Google Ads and Facebook Ads will monitor countless metrics including click-through rate, clicks, impressions, cost-per-click, and much more. You can elevate your PPC strategy further by using tools such as Google Analytics, which will tell you everything you need to know about how a user spends time on your website or landing pages.

Utilizing these types of reports can tell you what keywords or channels your audience uses to find your brand. After arriving at your site, you can also track how long they spend on a page, how engaging your content is, and even information regarding the audience's demographics and interests. These are all powerful resources as this information is necessary to continuously refine your campaign and further improve your return on investment (ROI).

While certain tools like Google Analytics feature paid subscriptions, all of these platforms offer free versions that effectively provide all of the analytical information a business needs to run a successful PPC campaign. Social platforms with paid ad features will offer built-in analytic tools to help you optimize performance and ad spend automatically.

However, be aware that it can take weeks for your PPC campaign to gather enough information to take appropriate action. Making changes to your advertisement or landing page too soon into a campaign will disrupt the algorithm and cause the learning process to take that much longer. You must give your ads an appropriate amount of time before considering changes. After you've gathered enough data, you can begin A/B testing new variations of ads and begin to eliminate the ads that do not generate worthwhile results.

5. A/B Test Your Ads & Landing Pages

It's great to aim for a home run out of the gate, but results like that are anomalies when it comes to PPC campaigns. Most PPC strategies will account for the time it takes to test and refine the sales copy and appearance of your advertisements and landing pages.

With the help of your PPC and website analytics tools, you can gain an approximated idea of what type of content is performing well with your audience and which isn't. To gain more specific insight as to what your audience truly enjoys, you can begin to A/B test certain aspects of your campaign. A/B Testing allows you to present two variations of the same ad or website page to your audience.

Each page will feature similar content but feature a slightly different URL for easy distinction. Your PPC platform will then direct new traffic to either variation depending on the split that you designate (usually 50/50). As users interact with both page variations, the algorithm will gather analytic data and automatically push traffic to the page variation that performs the best. After you gather enough data to decide, you can eliminate the poor-performing variation from your campaign.

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Common things that you will want to A/B test with a PPC campaign include the ad copy, images, videos, headlines, call-to-actions, or the sales copy itself on the landing page. Your first landing page draft may be filled with excellent, informative copy, but A/B testing may prove that your particular audience is more receptive to a succinct, direct sales approach. Similarly, recording a 1-2 minute video and uploading it can often do more in driving conversions than 2,000 words of content.

A/B testing is not a one-and-done step and should be continuously employed to gather further insights about your audience. The more informed your team is about your target audience, the better you will be able to refine your campaigns and create a sustainable PPC strategy for all campaigns moving forward.

6. Use the Right Network to Reach the Right Audience

There are several types of PPC ads on different networks. Choosing the right type of advertisement to employ is another step to helping you better connect with the right audience.

A. Search Ads

The first type of advertisement is a search ad. Users will bid with competitors for certain keywords that will return their domain as an advertised result on search engine results pages (SERPS). The bidding competition ultimately determines the price you pay any time your ad gets a click.

A search ad is most effective for audiences that are already at the buying stage of their journey. If the user is willing to click on a paid business ad when performing a search, they're likely looking for a high-quality brand that can help them solve a problem. If you're looking to drive conversions with your campaign, search ads are the way to go.

Take advantage of your ad space to demonstrate brand authority, give direct information about what you wish to sell, and provide a high-quality image of the product or service.

B. Display Ads

Display ads are located on a different network than search ads and are great for generating general brand awareness. A display ad can be on any website on the internet that opts into Google's display network. Your ads will only appear on screen whenever the user meets a variety of targeting parameters that you designate.

Because display ads focus more on building awareness, they're not necessarily the best suited for driving immediate conversions. You should expect to spend more and settle in for a longer campaign cycle with the benefit that your brand can be seen by users all over the internet. After building more brand awareness, you can shift your campaign focus to more aggressively pursue actual sales.

C. Shopping Ads

Shopping ads are similar to search ads in that they highly target those who are motivated to purchase a product. This is highly popular among e-commerce brands and is a highly effective way of securing conversions from online shoppers.

Using Google's Merchant Center, you can upload your products including images, pricing, and description. You can set targeting parameters to target only those users that express interest as well as qualifying income. Because users get a direct visual of the product and the necessary information, shopping ads have extremely high clickthrough rates when compared to other ad types.

Choosing the right type of advertisement to run falls in line with everything outlined in this article thus far. Every decision you make regarding your PPC strategy should align your goals with your audience's intent. Because we outlined our goal as our very first step, choosing the right type of ad network to use should be simple whether you're looking to boost your brand awareness or drive immediate sales.

7. Remarket to Those That Engage with Your Content

Remarketing is an additional type of PPC campaign that allows you to re-engage with users that abandoned the sales journey before converting.

The traditional buyer's journey was thought of as a funnel. The top of the funnel is the widest to grab as many potential buyers as possible. As the sale process continued, the funnel would filter out less-qualified buyers until you're left with only the most worthwhile prospects. However, the sales journey seems to be much less direct, especially with modern changes in online shopping.

It's difficult, if not impossible, for us to know the exact motivations of a user when visiting a website or landing page. However, we can gauge an approximation by examining when a user stopped engaging with our advertisement.

As an example, we will say that a new user visited your page, added an item to their cart, but never followed through with the checkout process. We can assume that they must have an interest in the product, but maybe hesitated when it came to the pricing, shipping, or some other part of actually making the purchase. Our next sales pitch should naturally be different than if we were approaching someone that never heard of the brand before. This is why we utilize remarketing.

Utilize your analytics and metrics to determine how your audience interacts with your content and which stage of the sales process is causing you to lose them. This allows you to hyperfocus your new advertisements to better suit their needs and secure the conversion. A great way for you to do this is by setting up micro-conversions to track along the way.

8. Set Up Micro-Conversions to Gauge the Effectiveness of Your Strategy

While the end goal for every business is to secure a sale or a conversion, you can benefit yourself by establishing smaller goals to keep track of along the way. Let's look at an example of what a typical buyer's journey might look like after clicking on one of your advertisements:

Read About the Product > Fill Out a Form to Gain Promotional Discount > Add Product to Cart > Enter Billing Information > Complete Purchase

While the primary conversion is the purchase, we can designate several of these steps as a micro-conversion to track our successes. If a user makes it past the form step, we still are better off as we managed to obtain valuable contact information as a result of our advertisement. You can then utilize their contact information and general interest in your product to add them to your list for a remarketing campaign.

Understanding what micro-conversions have higher rates of success can also help you to take a closer look at what parts of your PPC strategy require optimization. If your audience is not completing your form, then you need to improve your on-page content or make the form simpler to fill out. If the user is adding the product to their cart, but not completing the purchase, you may need to sweeten the deal, adjust pricing, or improve the checkout process in some way.

Creating micro-conversions as separate goals is invaluable for helping you to both improve your existing campaigns and to better prepare for future remarketing campaigns. The better you can understand the behaviors and thoughts of your audience, the better chance you have at creating a sustainable PPC strategy that you can lean on for future sales.

9. Build Lookalike Audiences

Finally, be sure to leverage all of the valuable data you've collected about your audience to create lookalike audiences. A lookalike audience is a brand-new audience that demonstrates the same behaviors, interests, and search habits as your existing audience that led to conversions.

Taking advantage of lookalike audiences gives you a leg up on all future PPC campaign efforts as you already have an idea of buyer wants and needs, based upon previous experiences. This saves you valuable time and campaign funds by taking advantage of all the testing and analysis you've done previously. Giving yourself every advantage is exactly how you can develop a sustainable PPC strategy in the competitive marketing world online.

Platforms like Facebook and Google make it extremely easy and convenient to create lookalike audiences. Again, it is in their interest for you to be a successful client as you only pay when audiences engage. By helping you to engage with new customers that previous research proves to be highly qualified, you should find your lookalike audiences to be high-converting users from a much earlier point than when you first began marketing with PPC.

Conclusion: A Sustainable PPC Strategy Aligns with Customer Intention

The key takeaway for developing a sustainable PPC strategy is to employ tactics and tools that align with audience intent indicated by their web browsing behaviors. Every action a user takes including the type of keyword they use to search can inform you whether they simply wish to educate themselves or if they're ready to purchase.

By establishing a clearly defined campaign goal and aligning that with your audience intent, you can begin to choose the campaign type that is best suited for that purpose. You can then use your understanding of your audience to use your budget effectively and bid on the keywords best suited for your business goals.

After building out your initial campaign, leverage all of the powerful analytical tools at your disposal. It is easier than ever to instantly gather all of the traffic data you could ever need to optimize and improve your campaign performance. You can use that analytical data to A/B test your ad copy, landing pages, and more. You can also set up micro-conversion goals to better understand the behaviors of your audience members.

Finally, be sure to leverage all of the hard work and research you've done thus far to give yourself up a leg up in future efforts. Lookalike audiences allow you to utilize your data to begin marketing to high-value prospects. This continuous optimization and improvement are what you need to develop a sustainable PPC strategy moving forward.

When you talk of paid ads, business owners and marketers track metrics such as quality score, cost per click (CPC), and click-through rate (CTR). However, these metrics do not tell you everything.

If you have a high PPC conversion rate but do not have strong overall revenue, the problem may not be with your ad. It could be that your customers have decided to leave your business.

A metric that can help you in this regard is the PPC churn rate. Your PPC churn rate is defined as the total number of people who convert through paid ads but decided to end the relationship after buying or subscribing to your service or product.

Your PPC churn rate looks particularly at the customers who get converted from paid ads from platforms like Google ads.

Why Should You Check PPC Churn Rate?

Most PPC metrics depict how well your ads persuade people to purchase. For instance, conversion rates show how often individuals actually buy from your paid ads.

But, these metrics do not tell you a lot of things, such as:

1. Are customers unhappy with your products or service?
2. Does your ad focus on features your customers care about the most?
3. How well does your onboarding process works?

Some of the things your PPC churn rate can tell you are:

• If your customer service isn’t good
• If you have a confusing documentation
• How well your onboarding process works
• Whether the expectations of customers match your service or product
• Whether your competitors provide a feature that you do not

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All in all, you should care about the PPC churn rate because it can tell you a lot about your business. If you are not paying attention to why customers are leaving and in what numbers, you could simply be wasting away valuable ad spend on customers who won't stay with you.

How to Calculate Your PPC Churn Rate?

To calculate your PPC churn rate, here are the two things you should know:

1. The number of customers who signed up from your PPC ads.
2. The number of customers from paid ads you lost by the month’s end.

The formula to use for calculating churn rate is:

For instance, let the number of customers of your business who converted from PPC ads at the start of the month be 100. Suppose your business lost 32 of those customers. Now, your PPC churn rate will be:

(32/100) x100 = 32%

Strategies To Help You Lower Your PPC Churn Rate

If you calculate your PPC churn rate and get disappointing churn rate results, you must know different ways in which you can improve them.

Let's discuss them one by one:

Identifying Why Your PPC Churn Rate Is Higher

If you get a high PPC churn rate, then the first step that you need to take is to identify the reason for its higher value. This can pose quite a challenge as there is not an easy answer for this.

Begin by looking at things such as:

• Do you give documentation?
• Do you have outdated software?
• Are there any problems with your product’s quality?
• Do you have a customer service strategy?
• Does your competitor offer a better solution or feature?
• How is your onboarding process?

To find the cause, you can also perform UX testing and competitive analysis. Customer reviews can also point out where your customers seem to struggle.

If you can find what is causing a high churn rate, you can definitely take steps to lower it. But, if the cause still is not clear, there are some other strategies you can follow.

How To Lower PPC Churn Rate With the Help Of Customer Loyalty?

One of the best ways to decrease the churn rate is to ensure your customers are satisfied and happy. Some ways to improve customer loyalty are:

1. Provide Loyalty Rewards

Try to foster a bond between your business and your customers by rewarding long-time customers. For instance, you can offer high-value customers a dedicated customer support line, early access to new features, and more.

2. Create a Community

Creating a community can provide you with multiple advantages. One of the most significant benefits you get when you build a community is that it serves as a medium to interact with your customers. Creating a community also helps drive user-generated content, which is useful in your marketing efforts.

Create a place on platforms such as Slack, Reddit, and Facebook where your customers are able to create new friendships, get some valuable tips, and get a chance to interact with your team.

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3. Focus on Customer Service

Poor customer service is one of the top reasons customers leave. Ensure that your customers don't have to read laboriously through lengthy, terrible documentation to know how to use your service or tool. Make a video documentation or craft an easy-to-use FAQ. Also, think about using a chatbot to deliver timely customer service.

4. Make it Easy For Your Customers

Always offer a convenient experience to your customers. They should be able to make a purchase easily, get the required information, and conveniently navigate your website. Doing so improves your customer loyalty as they can quickly get what they need.

5. Attach A Cancellation Survey When People Choose To Cancel

Cancellation surveys are the same as employee exit interviews in a company. In an exit interview, you are asked why you are leaving the company and what steps the company can take to improve. This way, the company gets honest feedback about things such as management decisions and work culture.

Cancellation surveys are created with the same purpose. Knowing why customers aren't sticking around gives you a chance to improve and prevents you from losing future customers.

When a person goes to cancel, attach a cancellation survey with just a handful of questions. For instance, when the person chooses cancel, a question box can appear and ask the person the reasons for leaving.

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Tip: Ensure that the cancellation survey is easy to complete and offers multiple-choice questions. Refrain from giving too many choices as the person can feel overwhelmed and click away. Provide choices such as too expensive and no longer require the service. Also, create an other option along with an answer box for customers who wish to write detailed feedback.

6. Create a Smooth Onboarding Process

Paid ads may persuade a customer to convert, but your onboarding process can decide how the customer feels about your business. Make sure your onboarding process is smooth. If individuals are confused regarding how to set up or use your service, you have a problem. If customers can't fathom how to use certain features, your service or product may not provide them any value.

Some ways in which you can improve the process of onboarding are:

• Make the entire process easy for your customers: Make your documents in a way that your customers easily understand. Also, do not forget to label them.
• Ask your customer’s preferred contact method:  Ask their preferred contact method. Some customers prefer the phone while others may prefer email. Also, as your customers may live in different time zones, ensure you know when to contact them.
• Provide tips: Make it a point to let your customers know how to make the most of your product or tool. For this, you can create an automated email campaign that offers tips and tutorials.
• Only ask for information you require: Some information is essential to ask, like a customer’s email address and language preference. But, think before asking for some other information from them such as a physical address, company name, etc. Doing so is important because you don’t want to annoy your customers.
• Don’t Rush It: You may want to explain how amazing your service or tool is right away. But, introducing too many features at the same time can overwhelm your customers. Instead, you can use spaced-out emails and triggered popup boxes to talk about the features over time. Begin by engaging your customers and then tell them about the extra features when they are at a stage where they want to learn more.

Tip: Make it a point to check your process of onboarding once every few months. This way, you can modify the things that aren’t working successfully.

7. Make It Easy For Them to Contact You

Making customer service a priority helps in reducing your PPC churn rate. Customers are more willing to cancel if they struggle to reach your customer support.

Begin by replying quickly to posts and messages on paid ads. For instance, you ran a paid ad on Facebook for one of your products. Now, ensure that you respond to the requests and questions from customers in the comments.

When you respond, customers get the information they require. They also start to trust you more.

Some more tips that you can follow are:

• Ensure that your contact information is clearly shown on your website and important landing pages.
• In your PPC ad, provide the phone number or email address of your customer service.
• Put in place a chatbot to give answers to questions that are frequently asked.

If customers know they can rely on you to help them and they can easily contact you, there is a low chance they will cancel your service or product.

Wrapping It Up

If your churn rate is high, start by figuring out why. Remember, your customers may want to leave for a number of reasons. Next, try to remain focused on customer loyalty. This means you need to create a smooth onboarding process and make it easy for customers to get in touch with you. Finally, ask the leaving customers the reason they don't want to stick around anymore.

Note: If you need help with managing your client's PPC Campaigns, DashClicks' White Label Dashboard can help you. If you are an agency that wants a personal white label dashboard for PPC clients and is looking to manage things using automation, you can check out DashClicks' White Label PPC. Sign up for the platform today. It's completely free!

As we all are already aware, the year 2020 wasn't what you call a normal year. In this year, many things got impacted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic - more people started to shop online rather than go to a retail store, companies began to adopt a remote-first culture, and in-person conversations transformed into video conversations. So, one can easily say that the last year brought along a variety of changes. During this time, something similar happened in the advertising and marketing turf as well.

The recent trends in PPC show that marketers have started to use Artificial Intelligence and Automation for creating data-backed ads. Plus, they are focussing on the buyer's journey now more than ever. Therefore, whether you're an agency or an advertiser, you need to be abreast with the newest trends and features to take your PPC game to a whole different level.

Let's discuss the 10 important PPC trends to watch in 2021 to help you with the same:

1. Understanding your Audience and Buyer Journey is Important

In 2021, the most successful PPC marketers are concentrating on their target audience. At a time when there is less control because of AI and automation, what matters most are the people who are seeing your ads. Doing so helps in driving qualified clicks.

In order to move ahead of the pack this year, advertisers need to think about their customers and how they decide to purchase. Spend time thinking about the following questions:

• What information do they require?
• Where do they interact?
• What are they searching for?
• How to measure success at every step?

Tip: It is important to know who has the likelihood to convert versus who is worth prospecting. This knowledge will help you segregate and independently manage both of them.

2. Remarketing

In 2021, we definitely expect to see remarketing getting the recognition it truly deserves.

Hence, remarketing is a marketing tool that demands all your attention. It is an excellent means of engaging with potential customers that, in your knowledge, are already warm to what you offer. It is also more affordable as compared to other marketing methods.

Let's know a remarketing fact after which you may end up rethinking PPC:

Remarketing conversion rates rise over time

It is found that conversion rates tend to rise as more users look at an ad within remarketing campaigns. The click-through rates may decline with time, but those who click on your ad after seeing it a few times in the past are the ones who become likely to convert.

It is important to remember that people can be busy or involved in one or the other stuff going on in their lives. Keeping this in mind, remarketing acts as a gentle reminder to end what they began on your website, all while reinforcing your messaging and branding to the user when they see you.

3. Video Ads and PPC

Let's begin to understand the impact of a video with some stats - People remember 95% of a message from a video.

Now, let's check how the video will impact PPC this year:

• An increasing number of marketers will begin linking to products in video ads.
• Marketers will start including virtual reality (VR) to offer real experiences to viewers.
• Instagram Stories in video marketing will not cease to dominate.

Google has added one of the most fascinating video ad features called Bumper Machine. It makes use of machine learning to make 6-second bumper ads from videos (90 seconds or less) in order to display across Youtube.

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The full-funnel video strategy helps marketers in managing 6-second bumper ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, and skippable in-stream ads.

If you want to foster positive interactions with your potential customers, take note of the following online video advertising trends for this year and beyond:

• DIY videos: With the help of DIY videos on video-sharing platforms such as Tiktok and YouTube, you can easily promote your business. You don't need a ten thousand dollar camera and a professional film crew to create an engaging video ad on these platforms. The thing that matters the most in online video advertising is that you should be able to grab your audience's attention with your concept. For this, focus primarily on your video's content when you decide to create DIY video ads for these platforms.
• Storytelling: With so many videos and ads on the internet, your content should be able to grab eyeballs. A story helps create a connection with your audience and appeals to their emotions. To use this trend, think of how your services or products can impact people's lives. Ask yourself these questions - how were their lives before you came into it? How did they overcome their challenges with the help of the tools you offered? How is their life after using these tools?
• Silent films: A lot of times people see a video ad without the audio. So, you can create your video ad in a way that captures the viewers' attention even when the audio is turned off. For this, you can ensure the visuals in your video ad are gripping. Also, you can use captions in these ads to tell your story.

4. Voice search for PPC campaigns

50% of consumers could be voice shopping by 2022. Therefore, it is more important than ever to create PPC campaigns for voice search and get featured in voice search results.

The three significant ways in which voice search impacts PPC are:

• Natural language: People tend to use a more conversational and natural style when they use voice search. Thus, the use of short-tail keywords may not provide you an advantage.

• Question-oriented: A lot of voice searches begin with question-oriented keywords.

• Mobile-first: Even though plenty of devices have voice search, it is used more on mobile devices.

Here's how you can optimize your PPC campaigns for voice search:

• Analyze current search terms: Check the specific search terms which people have used to see your ad to better optimize for voice search. Visit Google Ads and head over to the Search Terms tab to click on Keywords. Now, see the searches that start with:

a. Hey Sirib. Ok, Googlec. Where do Id. Alexa

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• Concentrate on long-tail keywords and question phrases: Compared to text searches, voice searches are longer and more conversational. A majority of voice searches begin with questions such as how, where, what, etc. Tools like Answer the Public aid you in discovering long-tail keywords and question phrases.

• Know the searcher's position in the buying cycle: Usually, people who use the terms what or who are at the awareness stage. On the other hand, people who search for where or when are closer to the conversion stage. For PPC, bidding on where and when keywords may provide an advantage.

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As you have researched long-tail keywords, question phrases, and current search terms, you can create a keywords list to optimize your current campaign or incorporate them in a fresh campaign.

Note: When it comes to platforms, concentrate on Bing and Google. This is because Bing is the default search engine for Alexa. On the other hand, Google is the default search engine for both Apple and Google products.

5. Diversification is Key

Loss of control in Google may result in more companies shifting PPC dollars to Microsoft Ads and other search engines.

PPC marketers should diversify their skillset beyond Google Ads. Advertisers must become fully aware of the advertising platforms which provide them more control over their reach, messaging, and spending. One cannot depend heavily on Google Ads like earlier.

Remember, diversification is vital for an effective PPC strategy. It is time to diversify advertising beyond Microsoft Advertising and Google Ads Search and Display. This means testing Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Verizon Media's native ads.

There are many alternative PPC platforms you can use to diversify your ad spend. Here's a list:

• LinkedIn: This is an ideal advertising platform if you are a B2B company. You can reach millions of users using targeting options such as company, job title, education, industry, company connections, and interests.
• Quora: Quora has about 300 million monthly unique visitors. To influence people when they are at the consideration phase of the buyer's journey, advertisers can target the content or users as per their activity on the platform.
• AdRoll: AdRoll helps businesses in running ads on different channels from one place.
• Bing: For every search on Bing, 34 searches are made on Google (Ahrefs, 2021). So, you can definitely use this platform.

6. Perfecting The Ad Message

How you articulate your ad message is of paramount importance in 2021. You must, therefore, focus on gaining deep insights into buyer personas. A wrong message is an opportunity missed.

How to craft a successful text ad?

To reach your potential customers, your ads should be alluring, hold relevance, must empower, and be specific. Let's discuss the best practices for writing excellent text ads and the mistakes you need to avoid:

• Highlight what makes you different: Tell people about the services, products, or offers that make you competitive. For instance, if you provide free shipping, then mention it in your text ad!
• Include promotions, prices, and exclusives: People often conduct a Google search to decide about something. Hence, mention if you have an exclusive product or are offering a limited-time discount.
• Prompt the person to take action: If you are selling something, inform the potential customers what they can buy. If you are providing a service, share your contact information. Calls to action such as call today, browse, purchase, get a quote, etc. provide clarity about further steps.
• Include at least one keyword: Keywords in your ad will depict your ad's relevance to what people need. For instance, if you want to include a keyword called basketball hoops, your ad headline can be buy basketball hoops.

• Ensure your ad is matched to your landing page: Take a look at the landing page (the page you link to from your ad). It should feature the products or promotions in your ad. Your potential customers can leave your site if they don't see what they came expecting.

• Ensure that your ads are high-quality: Your ads should not have extra spaces, unclear URLs, and strange capitalization.

Image Source

7. A Great Mobile Experience is Crucial

Are you amazed to see this in a list of PPC trends? You certainly shouldn't be. If brands want to win this year, they must have an easy-to-operate and accessible mobile site. It may surprise you, but many people have not even checked out their website on a mobile, let alone other devices.

Now, more than ever, it is crucial to have an up and running mobile site. It will only help you get traffic that you can use to your benefit. The importance of a mobile experience that delights visitors and continues to bring them back cannot be emphasized enough.

Tip: There is a high chance that people who see your ads on mobile devices want to call you or know your location. You can show your phone number and location with call extensions and location extensions. Also, think about crafting ads that are specifically aimed at potential customers on mobile devices. For this, use your site's mobile version as a landing page.

8. PPC Automation

One of the significant trends in PPC advertising to look out for in this year is automation the use of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for automating labor-intensive tasks linked with Google and Bing ads.

Automation in PPC is not something new, but it is important to note that it will start to play a significant role this year.

Automation will be used for the optimization of PPC campaigns and PPC experts will willingly adapt it to:

• Put an end to low-performing ads and give priority to the ones producing the best results
• Recognize performance issues within an account
• Dynamically produce ads based on website content and user behavior
• Automatically create ad performance reports

Tip: DashClicks' White Label Dashboard helps you to manage your client's PPC Campaigns. If you are an agency and want a personal white label dashboard for PPC clients and manage things with the help of automation, you can check out DashClicks' White Label PPC. Sign up for the platform today. It's free!

9. Artificial Intelligence

As we are all already aware, AI continues to transform the world. When it comes to PPC, it will help marketers to create outstanding ad campaigns and will be specifically useful in:

• Calculating how ads impact quality scores (a quality score is a value that considers your relevance, landing page quality, and click-through rate)
• Predicting the CTR of future ads.
• Knowing the likelihood of conversion from a particular customer.
• Examining the bids which have the likelihood of getting maximum traffic.
• Optimizing keywords, campaigns, or ads when a particular event takes place (for example, when your CPC falls below a particular amount).

As AI becomes more aware of your audience's behavior, it can create targeted ads more accurately. This, in turn, increases the performance of your PPC campaigns as well as Bing, Google, and Amazon ads.

AI can power up Amazon Ads campaigns in the following ways:

• Make bid changes according to the predicted revenue per click of keywords.
• Automate bids for both long-tail and short-tail keywords.
• Provide comprehensive diagnostic information for active keywords.

The benefits of AI don't end here!

AI is incredibly useful in creating great reports. Adzooma, a Google partner, can make PPC reports in just a few steps. Here's is what you need to do:

• Link your Google Ads account
• Go to the reporting tab in the top corner and click on Create Report.
• Add the elements you need in the report along with images, your logo, and text.
• Choose the metrics you want, such as ACoS, keywords, etc. in the format you require (line graph, table, etc.).

And you are done! Your report will get created.

10. Virtual Reality Ads

Virtual Reality's growing popularity has given rise to new opportunities for advertisers. The goal of virtual reality ads is simple - to help viewers try out the product before they purchase it.

The significant ways in which VR can change PPC ads are:

• VR gives information about parts of the screen that the viewers are interacting with and the parts that they are looking at.
• It makes use of eye-tracking technology for ad activation. When the user looks at it for a few moments, the ad begins.
• The Gen Zers and the Millennials are using VR the most, and hence, it is easier to target them in the upcoming years.
• 360-degree videos are one of the best videos to make consumers know about and interact with your products.

Bottomline

To make the most out of your PPC advertising campaigns, you need to know and leverage these latest PPC trends. This year, there will be an increase in video ads (which also includes 360-degree videos). AI and automation will transform the way businesses make and run ads. Also, marketers who will optimize their ads for voice search are going to see improved results.

Consumer buying behavior has undergone rapid changes in recent years. With so much marketing noise these days, users rarely make a purchase decision immediately after seeing an ad. They evaluate their purchase options several times before deciding.

When they are busy searching online, the various options available to them can be overwhelming. It is why Google terms this stage of a buyer's journey the "Messy Middle."

It's crucial to reconnect with your prospects, especially when they are evaluating their options. Remarketing is the only way to target such customers. Businesses generally use remarketing ads for brand awareness, but you can also use them to send the right marketing messages at the right time. Remarketing ad campaigns can boost your revenue by increasing conversions and ROAS (return on ad spend).

In this blog, we discuss in detail remarketing ads and how to use them effectively to get the most from your paid campaigns.

What is Remarketing?

Businesses are increasing the number of interactions with website visitors to boost sales. Since a user enters the sales funnel the first time they visit the website, it is your responsibility as a marketer to send them the right marketing messages to propel them further into the sales funnel. It increases their awareness of your brand, so the next time they make a purchase, they will consider your brand too.

Remarketing helps businesses achieve various objectives such as promoting awareness, increasing registrations, and driving sales. Initially, you can try both Google and Microsoft platforms for remarketing as both have distinct features. As a market leader, Google is known for its mind-blowing search volume. Meanwhile, Microsoft is known for less competition and affordable prices compared to Google.

Why Are Remarketing Ads so Important?

You can use remarketing ads on both Google and Microsoft to increase the impact of your regular PPC campaigns. Google gives you access to reach more than two million websites and apps through GDN (Google Display Network). Meanwhile, the Microsoft Audience Network allows you to reach users on reputed websites such as Forbes, Yahoo, AOL, and Amazon. You can produce engaging ads, leverage automated bidding, and extract performance reports using remarketing campaigns.

Types of PPC Remarketing Ads

Most remarketing ads target past visitors as they browse different websites on Google Display Network. Since the retargeting feature of PPC ads has a tremendous impact on your conversion rate, you can try several types of ads in this category. Some of them are:

A. Dynamic Remarketing Ads

It is highly customized and, therefore, highly effective. During dynamic remarketing, marketers try to bring users back to complete the buying cycle. They systematically show potential customers ads of specific products that they visited on their website. Highly targeted, these ads get the best results if shown at the right time.

B. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

Remarketing lists target the customers that perform follow-up searches after they see a product on a website. RLSA allows you to customize your search ads campaign for your website visitors. It also allows you to customize your bids and ads when these visitors search on Google and partner sites.

C. Video Marketing Ads

YouTube also allows you to remarket to the people who have viewed your videos or visited your YouTube channel. It is also an excellent way to generate leads and increase subscribers.

D. Customer Match Lists

Customer match lists allow advertisers to create paid ads to target prospects on different channels such as Search Network, Gmail, Display Network, and YouTube. They use a visitor's contact informationāphone number, email address, or physical address.

A customer match list is highly result-oriented. With it, you can match around 50.40% of your email list to real users who you can target through your ads. It allows Google Ads and Microsoft advertising to show ads online.

How to Implement Remarketing?

Although remarketing ads are a proven way to drive results, your strategy may vary according to your client's business goals. You can use the following to narrow down your campaign's focus and achieve your client's objectives.

A. As far as access to visitor information is concerned, Google advertisers are on top, and they can target most website visitors and app users. Therefore, you can use the "Google ads optimize list" to reach your website visitors, app users, and your audience at other places.

B. You can also use MSFT (Microsoft Corporation) ad targeting options on Microsoft platforms. It will help you experiment with innovative bidding techniques to optimize conversions.

Here are a few intelligent bidding strategies you can use to drive conversions:

A. Enhanced CPC (cost-per-click): It can help you tweak manual bids so you can target interested potential customers.B. Target CPA (cost per action): In such remarketing ads, you need to optimize your bidding to get maximum conversions at the predefined cost per action.C. Target ROAS: It allows you to generate more revenue at a predefined ROAS.

Tip: You need to raise your bid if you want to reach more customers and improve ROI. Consider making a bidding strategy to stay competitive and achieve a high-quality score and improved ad rank. With a better quality score, you have a higher chance of being seen on the Google Display Network.

How to Set Up PPC Remarketing Ad Campaigns?

A. You need to target lookalike audiences or customers with similar characteristics to those on your existing remarketing list.

B. Reconnect with the website visitors who abandoned their shopping carts.

C. If you have a list of customers, use it to upsell or cross-sell your secondary or complementary products. They are more likely to buy. You can also customize your ads for them and create remarketing lists for specific products.

D. To prevent inundating customers with an overwhelming number of ads, limit the number of times your visitors can see your ads.

E. Schedule the ads when your target audience is most likely to see them. You can use Google Analytics for this purpose.

Tips for Creating Effective Remarketing Ads

A. Use custom ads and keep the content relevant to your audience. Maintain visual uniformity, and use strong calls to action (CTAs). You should also test your ad copies frequently through split testing.

B. Use responsive display ads. They adjust to fit any space neatly. It will save you time and improve the user experience across different devices.

C. If you have a remarketing list that is more likely to convert, you can increase bids on it.

Conclusion

Since remarketing ads are created to help you reconnect with users who have already shown interest in your products, you should continue experimenting and tweaking your bidding strategy to improve your ROAS. In trying to connect with your ideal customers, focus on the objectives you want to attain.

If you need expert help with remarketing ads, DashClicks should be your one-stop destination. As a white label PPC agency, we will run your campaigns as per the latest market trends to achieve the best results. To learn more about our remarketing services, click here.

When creating your marketing blueprint and deciding how to allocate your time and resources to it, you should consider a few crucial distinctions. SEO and PPC (Pay Per Click) ads are two major digital marketing strategies, but you need to understand the difference between them to adopt the right approach for your business.

This article will explain whether you should invest in SEO or PPC to achieve better traffic and conversion results. It becomes even more critical when you are on a shoestring budget. SEO helps boost your search engine ranking and makes your website more relevant to users' queries.

You can't pay to rank high in organic rankings, this can be either a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. Furthermore, Google is committed to keeping organic search content extremely relevant and trustworthy for the users.

On the flip side, PPC ads are paid advertisements that we see next to the organic search results if you are looking at SERPs and also at other places online. It's important to note that running paid ads will not improve your SEO rankings and Google refutes such false claims.

SEO vs. PPC: Which One is Better?

Google started with organic search results, and still, it is its biggest USP (Unique Sales Proposition). When you perform a search on Google, organic listings come just after paid ads or sponsored results.Ā

Organic Rankings: What is SEO?

It's crucial to optimize your website properly to increase the visibility of your website. With increased visibility, your site will show up quite often when relevant search phrases are used. When improving your site's SEO, there are several things you can tweak.

What is PPC, and When Do We Need It?

Google Pay Per Click advertising offers many solutions, and Google Ads is one of them. It allows marketers to bid on the chance to appear as an ad next to the organic searches when a user makes a query to look for what you have to offer. However, in this case, you pay when someone clicks on your ad.

These ads provide you the opportunity to be in front of a wider audience online. You also have the freedom to tweak your ads at any point in time to target a specific customer segment by demographics or interest.

Apart from that, it also allows you to promote a specific deal. It's an excellent opportunity for small businesses and startups who cannot invest in their SEO. Still, at the same time, they need enhanced visibility to keep themselves in business by promoting sales.

Google Display Network

Beyond Google search, Google Ads also allow you to be in front of your audience through your ads on relevant websites in the Google Display Network or GDN.

GDN comprises thousands of websites on the Internet, where you can access many potential customers.

You can also have the freedom to pick specific sites from the network and select the type of audience you would like to target. You can also let Google create a customer list to meet your objectives.

It's important to note that Google Ads don't provide the same results as SEO, and it will also not help you improve your natural search rankings. However, they give so much flexibility that you can grab your potential audiences' attention right when it's crucial for you. It also helps you even if you are a startup and don't have enough resources and money to invest.

Why Won't PPC Help Improve My SEO?

The ultimate objective of Google is to provide relevant and high-quality search results to users. If businesses are allowed to pay for higher rankings, the user experience will suffer and users will not get the required information through Google search. It will defeat the very purpose Google was created for.

Google Ads (SEO) Tools

Google Ads can't boost your SEO, but when you create a Google Ads account, it provides you several tools that you can use to optimize your site. For example, you can use its Keyword Tool to create a list of phrases and keywords relevant to your business. These keywords are frequently used and have the potential to generate a lot of searches. You can include these keywords in your site's content to boost your search rankings.

Google also offers some ad tracking tools through its ads account to measure the impact of tweaks made to your website and ad campaigns, leading to more visitors and conversions. Such insights are beneficial in optimizing your website and campaigns in a much better way, which is not possible without using these tools.

Google offers these tools to its ad users for free. The search analytics report comes built-in with Google Analytics, and it can track the queries and keywords that are attracting more visitors to your site even when you aren't using Google Ads. These insights are incredibly valuable from an SEO perspective.

The Pros of SEO

Before you figure out where to invest your marketing budget, you need to understand SEO's main advantages.

Here are some essential facts about organic SEO:

1. It’s the most cost-effective way to improve your website’s visibility.
2. Natural rankings are entirely free.
3. With improved rankings, you can see sustained results for a long time.
4. The results you get are similar to placing your ad on the web for your potential customers 24/7 without paying a dime.
5. It does not depend on the bidding by your competitors, so results are mostly stable.
6. It’s the most cost-effective option in the long run when you expand your operations and number of keywords; this is not the case with PPC as you would have to pay for every click even when you grow.
7. According to a study by Sparktoro, organic rankings can attract more than ten times the amount of visitors than with paid results.

The Cons of SEO

Even with the tremendous advantages SEO offers, it is not the right fit for every business. It has the following cons.

1. SEO takes time, especially for startups and small businesses.
2. There is no way you can start receiving traffic through SEO from day one, which is possible with PPC.
3. Since SEO is vast and involves many things such as content creation, technical SEO, link building, and data analysis; you need an entire team of marketers with a solid strategy to work together on your SEO project. It requires a considerable and continued investment.
4. SEO is an ongoing process that is never complete, so you need to consistently work on it.
5. SEO is not only time-consuming, but it’s also overwhelming and you need to optimize your site for the algorithm updates every year using advanced SEO tools.
6. SEO offers no guarantees for higher rankings but you’ll attain significant results with perseverance and patience if you have a strategy in place.

The Pros of PPC

1. The instant results you get through PPC offer various advantages such as instant traffic and conversions.
2. It is extremely useful for e-commerce websites with multiple products.
3. It is the first thing that the user sees, so it is even more visible than the organic results.
4. It offers more opportunities to attract search users’ attention to your ad as it uses eye-catching pictures and rich text with phone numbers etc.
5. To run PPC ads campaigns, you need a small team of a paid search professional, a copywriter, and a graphic designer compared to a vast team you may require for SEO.
6. It allows you to target your customers using shopping ads, search ads, video ads, Gmail ads, etc. Organic rankings do not offer you such a variety of options to tap your customers.
7. PPC gives you a wealth of data on keywords and ad types that the customers click before making a purchase, providing better insights to tweak your campaigns and improve your return on ad spend (ROAS).
8. It allows you to take a laser-targeted approach to serve ads to your segmented audiences based on different factors such as the time of the day, their location, and the device they are using.

The Cons of PPC

1. Attracting traffic using PPC advertising isn’t free, and you have to pay for every click. Sometimes these clicks are so expensive that you cannot afford them for specific product types where the cost margin is relatively low.
2. You need to spend for every click, so your conversion rate is quite important. If your customers are not converting, it means you are wasting a lot of money on your campaigns.
3. The cost of clicks may rise with every competitor entering into the fray bidding for the same keywords. It makes it difficult and unpredictable.  
4. You may need a high initial investment to get started.

Organic Search vs. Paid Search: Which One Should I Choose?

Ultimately, it’s your call. It’s worth considering that both SEO and PPC have their pros and cons and help your business in different ways. These days, people search online before making a buying decision, which applies to all products and services. People use Google to check business reviews and answers to their queries. They also check recommendations from influencers and verified customers and both SEO and Google Ads help get in front of these potential customers.

While SEO is a traditional approach that gives your business the required visibility and the chance of being found by internet users worldwide, it takes time and organized efforts to achieve rankings on the first page of Google.

If you want to reach out to the people looking for the products you are offering, you can leverage Google Ads. It works immediately without having to wait for your site to move up in natural searches. PPC is helpful regardless of your business's size, and it allows you to customize your campaign while on the go.

The Conclusion

Since we have discussed the pros and cons of SEO and PPC, it's time to address the big issue -- which strategy is right for your business? Even though it varies based on your situation and what you want to achieve, a hybrid model will work best. You can integrate both strategies intelligently and get each oneā€™s benefits as per your situation and requirements. Dividing your budget and using both the techniques as a hybrid will help you bring traffic to your site in the short term and boost your online presence for long-term success.