Looking to boost your pay-per-click (PPC) returns in 2022?
The good news is that with the feature enhancements and updates introduced through 2021, the stage looks set for PPC success for brands that want to optimize returns via paid ad platforms in 2022.
Whether the success you want is for an existing PPC campaign or even if you want to start fresh – the following four strategies can deliver optimized PPC returns.
4 PPC Best Practices to Follow in 2022
The turn of events in the last two years, predominantly shaped by the Pandemic, has forced businesses to revisit their digital marketing strategies – including PPC marketing. But not all change is bad and some of the trends that picked up steam in the world of PPC marketing will continue forward even in 2022.
To help you get prepared with your PPC marketing in the coming year, here are four key strategies to focus on for your cleaning service company or your disaster restoration business.
1. Track and Measure your Conversion Goals
If you want to know how effective your PPC strategy is, then the way to do this is via continued tracking and measuring all your current PPC conversion goals and core actions. For better or worse (the data keeps piling up), tracking and measuring analytics actions over ad platforms are increasing. So today you can track and measure a wider range of data and actions compared to even a year back. It is getting sophisticated and probably for good reason.
If you can track more areas of your PPC campaign, you will be in a better position to make changes and tweaks when needed.
The simple rule to follow in 2022 is this – if there is something that you can track and measure, then do it!
While tracking and measuring your online PPC conversion goals is necessary, if you want the complete picture of your PPC conversion goals, then you need to focus on offline conversion tracking too.
Use Google Offline Conversion Tracking for not only your offline sales generated from Google Ads but also to track other equally vital mid-funnel offline conversions which include conversion from clicks, conversions from store/office visits, and conversions from calls.
2. Automation can and will Drive PPC Optimization
What is a business without data?
The only problem is that businesses today collect a ton of data that at some point will just get too big to manage. But it doesn’t end there – you need to organize and analyze all that data before you can put it to good use. You then have to plan and execute your data-based campaigns over multiple platforms and via multiple channels. Unless you have the necessary automation processes and tools in place, this can be a humungous task.
If you want to gain a competitive edge in the market and make razor-sharp decisions at opportune moments, then automation is the way. It will give your decision-making the agility it needs to stay relevant and competitive within your market space.
Having said that, you will still need human intervention to effectively direct and guide automation – let’s not forget that when it comes to strategy and certain aspects of PPC marketing where insight and empathy are necessary, human intervention is irreplaceable.
3. Focus more on Audience Targeting and Segmentation
Audience targeting and segmentation form the backbone of a PPC strategy – and for this, you need reliable customer data. With privacy rules becoming more stringent, we are firmly on the path to a cookieless space.
For advertisers and marketers across industries, this means that first-party data will continue to gain greater prominence. And in this context, the integration of first-party data integration with ad platforms is something that will become a critical advertising and marketing goal in 2022.
This will open up the space for greater contextual targeting options. In other words, brands will rely less on keywords and focus more on audience characteristics when targeting and segmenting their ideal customer base.
4. Use of Responsive Display Ads
Google has been pushing advertisers towards responsive display ads for a while now. Advertisers who have already started using responsive display ads will have a stronger foundation to create and manage the ads – they already have the core metrics and data on the performance of the ads to rely on.
At the end of the day, you want to display the right kind of messaging in front of the right kind of customer for conversion to happen and to boost your PPC campaign performance. Compared to standard text ads, responsive display ads when included in ad groups can deliver a higher percentage of clicks and conversions.
The flexibility that responsive display ads offer is something that you should focus on if you want to boost PPC returns in 2022. Unlike static image display ads which work only within a specified ad space, responsive display ads use images, headlines, and descriptions that can be customized for any ad space where your target audience is present. You can also use Google Ads performance feedback to further enhance and build upon the impact of your responsive display ads.
This brings up two important questions – what about expanded text ads? Are they still supported?
As of now, expanded text ads are still supported. However, you should know that in Google Ads paid search campaigns, expanded text ads are no longer the default ad format. Having said that, if you want to improve your campaign performance, you can still run expanded text ads in your ad groups along with responsive search ads.
In Conclusion
Tends and strategies aside, being prepared and agile with their PPC strategy will be important for businesses in 2022. Changes to search marketing are fluid and given the current times, falling within a predictable pattern of digital marketing will be difficult.
So the best way forward is to track and measure all your data and be prepared to introduce changes within your PPC strategy. In addition, automation really should be a key area of focus going ahead. That is if you don’t want things to come to a sudden grinding halt – as they did for many businesses in 2020 and during the early months of 2021.
