Your business would love to generate a positive ROI, as it is the goal of any business whether build online or offline. Perhaps, PPC is a great platform to showcase your business and products/services to your interested customers in the digital market.

Many times business owners struggle to find the right and effective advertising strategies that work to deliver profitable online marketing ROI.

Small businesses who are trying to establish an effective online presence should better have a look at PPC. As PPC is one of the quickest and fastest ways to target potential customers and improve the return on online marketing investments.

PPC is not a “set and forget” thing, as it needs constant monitoring and adjustment to keep the ROI at the optimal level. However, sometimes for small businesses, PPC can be really tiresome and may also require large time commitment.

The dynamic and flexible nature of PPC might be frustrating for some marketers who aren’t really getting the ROI that they expected from the PPC campaigns.

To make your work easier with PPC, here are 10 PPC growth hacks that would improve your PPC campaigns and would let you gain greater ROI.

1. Use Negative Keywords

Negative keywords help your campaign’s ads to show up to people who are more likely to click on them. They allow you to choose those words that would not trigger your ad and will prevent your ad from showing to people that are searching for things that you don’t offer.

They not only reduce your costs by excluding unwanted and irrelevant keywords but also help the campaign in getting a positive return.

For example, if you sell new laptops and do not offer services related to used and second-hand laptops.

Place used and second-hand on your negative keywords list to target customers who are looking to purchase new laptops.

Negative keywords when used correctly and efficiently with constantly getting updated, can filter down the clicks into potential leads and sales and save up your PPC budget.

2. Pick the right location

You may lose a lot of your budget if you don’t target your ads properly. Indeed, most of the marketers waste their PPC budget because they do not focus much on location targeting while setting up PPC campaigns.

As a small business, select all your target locations wisely, as it would not make any sense to clicks from locations where you are not providing your product/service.

With the geo-location segmentation of campaigns, you can take your optimized campaigns to the next level. Targeting campaigns according to locations gives you much more control over keywords, ads, landing pages, audience and much more.

Smart geo-targeting of keywords further cuts down the competition resulting in higher CTR and conversion rate that automatically enhances your ROI.

3. Use Long Tail Keywords

Short term keywords are broader and have huge search volume. Hence, many marketers make this mistake of only targeting these keywords.

It is obvious that with short term keywords they are going to witness lots of impressions and clicks while the conversion rate will be quite low owing to the traffic being very broad.

On the other hand long tail keywords are three to four word phrases that are super specific to your product/service.

Targeting long tail keywords have relatively low search volume but they only drive traffic that is targeted and conversion oriented. So, it is best to create ad groups with long tail keywords.

You should also create ad titles and copy that includes your keywords. Also, remember to direct your visitors to landing page that matches the content of your ads.With less people bidding on your keywords, your Cost per Click decreases.

Long tail keywords produce a higher conversion rate since your ads are more targeted. They also result in higher quality score, better ad position and lower Cost per Click.

On the whole, you will receive improved ROI than before.

4. Show Ads at The Right Time

Targeting the right audience is important but it will make no sense if the ads are shown at the wrong time. For example showing your ads when your target audience is asleep is not a good idea.

There may be a trend that the ads perform better at a certain time of the day. That’s why you should test ad display.

After doing initial testing by showing the ads throughout the day, adjust your bidding schedule to get your ads more attention when they are at their highest conversion rates.

If your ads are getting substantial clicks at a certain time of the day but are not making any conversions, you should restrict ad impressions during that course of the day. Why? Because your main objective here is to get more conversions rather than clicks.

5. Test The Campaign Elements

There are a lot of ways by which you can generate traffic for your website. And for this, PPC ads are more effective in generating highly targeted traffic that leads to better conversion rate and improved ROI.

As PPC is dynamic and always changing, there should be proper tracking and testing of elements for better performance. Hence, A/B testing can be conducted as optimization parameter to improve the performance of the PPC campaigns.

To become a smart PPC marketer, you should test the elements to improve the CTR and conversion rate. Remember, there are a lot of ways to add variations to your ad that affects the results. PPC metrics gives you an insight of your PPC campaigns and so you should set up A/B tests to track what enhances your campaign performance.

You can find the most effective ad type and target audience by testing different variations of PPC metrics and then tracking their results. Test multiple ads simultaneously, but be sure to test only one variable at a time and run your test for quite some time to acquire proper data.

6. Make an irresistible offer

As PPC, is one the most effective formf of online advertising. There is also a lot of competition in this space. So, to make sure that your ad stands out in the competition, make an irresistible offer for your customers.

The very first thing about creating an offer is that make it very clear and easy to understand. Obviously, you would not like to confuse your audience, right? The clearer the offer, the easier it will be for the visitor to convert. You can also create an offer that is pain alleviating and satisfies a desire.

As social beings, generally people rely on the experience of others before taking any decision. Moreover, you can incorporate social proofs and testimonials to help and induce the visitor to take an action.

Strong offer delivers a significant value to a wide audience. Offer value and then emphasize it with a strong Call-to-action.

7. Create Mobile Specific Ads

One of the easiest PPC growth hacks is to create mobile specific ads as it always results in better CTR and conversion rate.

Mobile advertising is becoming a key component of digital marketing strategy. It has become so dominant that the number of searches performed on mobile devices has exceeded the number of search performed on desktop devices.

The mobile trend is simply increasing with assuredly no signs of slowing down. Since, mobile searches are too convenient, you should optimize your mobile ads o that your PPC campaigns perform profitably.

Many marketers use the same ads to target both desktop and mobile devices – which is not a good idea though. The ads display differently on mobile devices, create separate ads that are only mobile oriented.

As with a normal PPC campaign, the value of your mobile ads should be focussed on your desired goals.

For example, if you want more leads or sales, then make your mobile ads completion or conversion-oriented.

Or if you want more visitors, optimize your ads for higher impressions or CTR.

8. Home Page is Not The Landing Page

Considering the homepage as the landing page is not a mistake, it is a BLUNDER!

Rule of thumb: A homepage is not a landing page. Understanding the difference between the home page and the landing page is essentially very important.

Home pages have different goals than your landing pages. So, do not waste all your efforts by sending potential customers to an irrelevant homepage.

There are a number of conversion options for a visitor like buying your product, subscribing to your email list, registering, downloading an eBook, case study etc. And as there are different conversion options, so you need different and focused landing pages for each of the conversion options.

A home page is an overview of your business, products/services, where a lot of options are available for the visitor. Whereas, landing page focus the attention of the visitor on converting them to the action you want them to take.

Create a simple landing page that is totally relevant to your ad. Do not lose your targeted visitor or sale by leading them to inappropriate landing page.

9. Set Up Highly Targeted Campaigns

It is a well known fact that the audience is not same but dynamic and flexible in nature. So, to target wide audience, you need to make sure that you create multiple campaigns to target different audiences. By creating multiple campaigns, targeting the audience according to their perspective will be easier.

Whereas, using just one ad copy to reach all the groups will certainly lower the productivity and profitability of your campaigns. Another PPC growth hack is that make multiple campaigns and then target the segmented audience specifically.

10. Improve Your Quality Score

Quality Score is a metric that determines the eligibility of an advertisement. It ascertains the ad position and the cost that the advertiser will be charged for that ad position.

Higher the Quality Score, the less the advertiser will have to pay for each click in relation to others bidding on the same keywords, resulting in better performance of your ads.

Quality score also plays a significant role in determining the Cost per Conversion. The Quality Score is represented as a number between 1 and 10.

Google determines quality score by evaluating three factors: expected click through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.

Quality Score has an immense impact on every aspect of your PPC campaign, so make sure you keep your quality score high by continuously by following these tips:

• Structure better targeted ad groups.
• Make specific landing pages for each ad groups.
• Optimizing ad copy keywords
• Take care of quality score for keyword, ads and account level.

Final Thoughts

While these are just few tips to help you to improve your ROI, these are endless probabilities, but then it requires experience and time for profitable implementation.

These tips are building blocks of a successful PPC strategy and will help you on a path to achieve higher ROI.

We hope that these PPC growth hacks will help you to improve your campaign performance and experience more conversions, leads and sales with an overall increase in the ROI.