PPC Advertising... Top Tips

In general, PPC (pay per click) costs are rising, and campaigns tend to be complicated to set up. You're not alone if you're worried about the complexity, and about costs going out of control with PPC. However, if you choose your platform wisely, it can in fact, be easy to control and straightforward to set up.

PPC Complexity

Companies drop cookies on your devices and know more about you than ever before. They know where you live, what you’ve shopped for recently, the items you’re interested in, your hobbies… they can almost tell what you ate for breakfast this morning! Targeting is becoming ever more advanced, and therefore setting up campaigns can be very involved. 

If you're new to PPC, but you're keen to try it out, it's best to start with a platform that offers easy set up, via a simple interface, with easy to understand targeting methods, such as LikesXL.

Rising Costs

PPC is becoming a pricey option, with competitive keywords costing a fortune. Wordstream estimate that the Top Ten most expensive keywords are as follows:

• Insurance
• Loans
• Mortgage
• Attorney
• Credit
• Lawyer
• Donate
• Degree
• Hosting
• Claim

Some companies can pay £70 per click for an expensive keyword, which is staggering.

PPC used to be an affordable way for small businesses to gain visibility online, however now with competition from giant companies with equally massive marketing budgets, we find the smaller guys are being pushed out. And the cost continues to rise.

This is where the LikesXL PPC option becomes even more attractive than usual! Because the platform charges a flat rate of €0.06 per click, no matter what the keyword or ad, it makes PPC a very affordable option for smaller advertisers, and potentially an extremely attractive option for larger ones, especially if they operate within a very competitive market place.

Mobile Growth

Mobile traffic is increasing, with mobile devices now taking the lion’s share of all traffic globally. When advertising using the classic PPC platforms, advertisers need to think about targeting mobile users with mobile optimised ads instead of simply pushing desktop ads to mobiles and thinking that’s good enough.

Mobile and desktop traffic behave differently, so in the same way as we must ensure that our sites are optimised for mobile devices, we also have to ensure we optimise our ads for mobile users too.

Success Criteria

We must accept that the customer journey is now extremely complex, across multiple devices, websites, shopping portals etc. We all consume ads and content at an alarming rate whilst researching a product before actually reaching the conversion point. The same applies to PPC, so a paid ad may trigger a decision, but the actual journey thereafter, will often involve cross device, cross channel or even offline activity, then the paid ad won’t be attributed the conversion.

When this happens, the PPC campaign doesn’t get the credit because there’s simply no way to track it. Put another way, our customer journey may have been tracked and influenced when visiting touch points X, Y and Z before starting a new, totally separate and untracked journey at point A. LikesXL represents an example of point A in the above scenario.

Cross channel/device/off and online tracking is a universally understood issue that has been challenging software developers for years. Despite this, the reality is that PPC budgets tend to be increasing year on year, with hot favourites seeming to be text ads on Mobile, AdWords and Facebook. There are other newcomers in the PPC arena growing in popularity too… enter LikesXL!

With customer journeys becoming ever more involved, rapid, complex and involving membership sites where activity behind logins cannot be tracked, advertisers need to open up to the potential that new platforms offer. 

Audiences are becoming more involved in membership and community sites, no doubt because most of us like the feeling of being 'involved', 'connected' and 'a part' of something. As advertisers, we can't control our audiences, and we can't track their every move, but we can make sure we are where they are likely to be, such as on LikesXL!