When it comes to making your PPC (Pay Per Click) search campaigns profitable, there’s nothing wrong with using straight to the point ads, keywords and landing pages.

To give you some ideas to use in your future campaigns, in this post you can read about great examples of PPC.

From large billion dollar companies to smaller local businesses, these PPC examples will give you plenty of ideas to try on your own campaigns.

Rebel Yell Bourbon

Position your brand as a community of rebels.

There are some enormous brands in the bourbon market:

• Makers Mark
• Evan Williams
• Jim Beam

In order to make your brand heard among such a crowded field, you need to give your customers a message that entices them away from your peers, one that positions your brand as a community of rebels…

Samsung Galaxy S8 Campaign

As you can see from the PPC advert above, Samsung was ranking number 1 for “mobile phone”. Obviously, that is a massive keyword with millions of monthly searches and over 686 million page results.

The genius of this campaign is the way it intercepts traffic.

If you’re searching for mobile phones, then the chances are you want to buy one or you are thinking of buying one. The advert grabs your attention straight away with the brand name and model before telling you there are only 2 days to go.

Impact b ball

People love to be different and your customers want to get what they asked for when punching in their search request. However, one of the most powerful tools for conversion that you sell to them is an idea, a dream even.

Impactbball.com has been in operation since 1997 and has been responsible for 130 NBA Draft picks since the end of the last decade.

Impactbball knows the value that aspiring basketball players place on reaching the pinnacle of the sport and their PPC advert plays on this…

Countsy

Accounting and HR service Countsy have reserved their calls-to-action exclusively to the sitelinks in their Google Ads.

As you can see, the ad copy itself is reserved solely for their service features and benefits. They treat their copy as a “micro-sales letter”, saving the call-to-action for the bottom of the ad.

Hungryhouse Campaign

The last PPC example on our list is to do with the keyword “takeaway”. Let’s face it; everyone loves a takeaway, no matter if it’s Italian, Indian or Chinese, there is always a market for takeaways.

In this example, the online takeaway website Hungryhouse has managed to rank number 1 for their primary keyword.

Featuring a huge headline with lots of detail this advert really grabs your attention and lures you in with the amount of choice.

Short conclusion

It’s best if you could try coming up a few innovative ideas to test, alongside your standard campaigns, so you aren’t relying on them to bring in the business.

Spend some time researching other people’s successes, as you may find ideas you can adapt to suit your own business.

Some marketers choose to send prospects who click on their paid search results to their website’s homepage.

While this will certainly get them to a page with relevant information about your company, it is not the most effective option when dealing with search marketing.

Instead of sending people to a generic page, it’s far more effective to design a custom landing page with information and an offer tailored to the verbiage in the paid search ad.

Message matching

Without message matching your PPC ads will not yield any conversions. It’s really as simple as that, and here’s why. Message matching or ad matching is when you align your ad headline and your post-click landing page perfectly.

A good message match assures the visitor they have arrived on the right page. This is important to avoid confusion, which can happen if a user goes from an ad specific to something they want to a homepage they have to attempt to navigate.

Increase Conversion Rate

Even if you have a great website, it’s easy for them to grow frustrated and impatient, looking for the information they wish they had right in front of them in the first place.

That makes them more likely to give up their search and return to the SERPs.

A custom landing page, however, that addresses the messaging from the ad directly, presents the reader with everything they want to know.

This is a lot more likely to generate an immediate positive response from viewers.

Optimized PPC post-click landing page

There are certain elements a good PPC post-click landing page should always have.

Your PPC post-click landing page should contain:

• An impactful headline
• A supportive tagline
• A list of benefits (not just features)
• Trust symbols
• A clear call to action
• A lead capture form
• An image showing context of use or a graphic that appeals to the visitors’ emotional side

It sounds like a lot, but when you see it in action, you’ll find it’s simpler than you might anticipate.

Short conclusion

A solid landing page can help your PPC ads perform better, rank better, and generate more revenue for your business.

By keeping your messaging narrow and targeted, you speak directly to the immediate needs of your prospects.

And by building a simple, visually engaging page, you guarantee that you’ll catch their eye and hold their interest.

When you have a smaller digital marketing budget, every dollar counts, and you often need to get creative to make sure your ads show where you want.

Most small businesses have only have a small chunk of change for their advertising, which means you cannot afford to be wasting your money in ineffective areas.

What to do when you have a small budget:

Retargeting site visitors and purchasers

We all know that it takes more money to acquire a brand-new customer than it does a customer who has already purchased or otherwise engaged with the brand.

Paid search and paid social can be a very competitive space, so it’s crucial to use audience targeting to the best of your abilities.

One easy way to get the biggest bang for your buck, with lower CPAs (Cost per acquisitions) and higher ROAS (return on advertising spend), is to retarget site visitors and purchasers.

These users have already shown intent and interest in your brand, making it easier for them to engage.

Geotargeting

Geotargeting is one the first settings you need to decide on. Should you target states, cities, ZIP codes, or something else?

The smaller the geographic area, the less traffic you will get so balance relevance with budget. Consider adding negative locations where you do not do business to keep stragglers from seeing ads.

Ad scheduling

If your business is open during specific hours, it might make sense to set ads to run only while you are open.

If you sell online, you are always open, but it may be smart to review reporting to determine if there are any times of the day when there is a negative ROI.

Device targeting

Every good advertiser has a strong call-to-action in their ad. Whether it is to fill out a form, to make a purchase, or to sign up for a newsletter, there should be an action you want a user to make once they have clicked your ad.

We can use bid adjustments at either the campaign or ad group level to prefer either computers, mobile phones, or tablets.

These bid adjustments can also be used to exclude a device type entirely, just like the ad scheduling bid adjustments.

Long-Tail Keywords

Choosing the right keywords can make or break your AdWords account. For Search campaigns, they are the tool of communication with Google to place your ad on the expansive advertising wall.

To use your AdWords budget effectively, it is best to give Google keywords that have high intent and are directly relevant to your business.

Short conclusion

Low budget accounts can be effective if they are managed correctly.

Whatever you are testing within the account, always try to keep all variables within the experiment constant besides the variable you are testing.

Advertising is the big gun of paid efforts brands put in to increase awareness and revenue. Be it small businesses or large enterprises, everyone has a shot at advertising.

Most smart AdWords advertisers are concerned about two things:

• Increasing the conversion rate
• Reducing the cost per conversion

 Leading social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Quora. all are open to advertising on. While social media advertising has its own impact, there is no denying the fact that search engine ads are efficient too.

The benefits of using Google Ads are many

But the point I want to stress is – Are we using it to its full potential? Are we optimizing our Google Ads? Are they driving in conversions or results?

If you thought twice before answering the above questions, you are probably in the right place. Flushing money into advertising without understanding its workflow is not cool.

Hacks for improving CTR and conversion rate:

• Use Title capitalization:

This is something very basic. Use title capitalization in your ad copy so that it looks nice. The headline should look like a headline.

Your audience first sees the ad and if it looks appealing enough, a prospect will read it, and click if it makes sense. If it isn’t formatted, your ad will be ignored and that’s where it hurts your CTR.

It doesn’t cost you a cent to capitalize your headline but the results will make you smile.

• Pay attention to mobile

Your ad’s landing page must be mobile-friendly allowing users to easily access the webpage on their mobile devices. As you have less space to display ads on mobile, make sure you have the most important information in the first line.

• Make your ad copy relevant to the keywords you’re targeting

If you are using dog foods as a keyword, make sure your ad copy is relevant to dog foods. This normally happens when you’re using too many keywords for a single ad or ad group.

Sticking to the rule discussed above will keep your ads relevant to keywords.

• Write compelling ad copy

The majority of Google Ads are just posted for the sake of advertising. We need to understand our customers’ emotions and step in their shoes.

Most of the time, we come across such boring ads that we may want to report them for lack of luster.

• Use exclusions and negative keywords

Exclusions include all those websites and mobile apps where you do not want your ad to appear. This generally includes all business niches which are irrelevant to your business.

We all are aware of the importance of negative keywords for search campaigns. Just like keywords which we decide for our ads to appear on, there are certain keywords which we do not want our ads to appear on. These are called negative keywords.

Short conclusion

When you start seeing decent CTR and conversion rate, the next step is to test and tweak your ads and campaigns for improvements.

Keep an open mind when it comes to Google AdWords because there’s a lot you can learn when choosing your keywords, creating new campaigns and ad groups, as when you place bids.

As a business owner, you’re busy. Your focus is on growing your small business as quickly as possible, for as little as possible, and without a lot of help. Fortunately, it’s easy to run a successful small business with the power of paid search advertising.

Paid search advertising lets you leverage this web traffic to attract new customers and engage existing ones with nothing more than an internet connection, a few dollars and a couple hours of your time.

Working with PPC customer support at Microsoft Advertising, for example, can help your business get the right advice, employ the right tactics, and simply streamline the process, so you aren’t emerging from a PPC rabbit hole feeling frustrated and upset. That’s no fun and can be easily remedied.

Here are five common concerns and how customer support can help small businesses like yours with their PPC campaigns.

“I have no idea how to get started.”

Onboarding specialists are part of customer support and work with small businesses to set up your PPC ad account from scratch, create your first set of ads, research keywords, set a budget, and assist you with competitive bids.

They view the entire process as a team effort and are genuinely interested in understanding your business goals and objectives. Then they help you design a PPC campaign to meet them.

“I can’t figure out why my campaigns aren’t performing.”

If you’ve been using PPC advertising for quite a while, coaches can support your campaign by introducing you to the latest features and tools you may not know about.

Sometimes we get into a routine and performance plateaus but talking to an expert for 15 minutes can totally refresh your PPC perspective and provide you with valuable insight and ideas.

“I’m afraid I’ll look like an idiot if I can’t figure this out on my own.”

Managing PPC campaigns is a learned skill, but it might not be something that comes naturally to you. A coach’s job isn’t to do everything for you, but to educate you on how to improve campaign performances on your own.

Customer support can help business owners get familiar with PPC tools, processes and resources that help you successfully manage your ads without external support.

“I don’t think customer support will understand anything about my business and it’s too much of a hassle. I just have to figure this out on my own.”

The whole point of customer support is to take the time to understand your industry and your business goals, that’s the only way to provide meaningful and targeted guidance.

Coaches treat you like a partner and pro-actively offer strategic direction and the right tools to increase your PPC efficiency.

“I’m not sure I’m managing my campaign correctly and spend too much time worrying about it.”

This is a big one, especially for businesses that aren’t familiar with paid search. Your time is spent worrying that you’re doing it wrong instead of learning how to do it right.

This is where working with a coach can really help because they provide you with peace of mind.

Kenneth Andrew is General Manager SMB Sales at Microsoft Advertising.

If you’re trying to expand your online influence through paid search advertising, and you’re already running Google Ads, then Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads) is the next step.

The ability to import Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft Ads is one of the biggest advantages of the platform.

What is the Google Import Feature?

There are two different ways to import your Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft Ads. The first is using the “Import Campaigns” dropdown in the MSA platform.

The second way you can do this is within the Microsoft Bing Ads Editor.

Why this process when you could do it all within Editor? Because the interface has checkpoints in place to make sure that errors aren’t missed.

How to Import Google Campaigns Properly

Once you choose “Import from Google Ads”, you’ll sign into your Google account and allow Microsoft to “manage your AdWords campaigns.”

Select your account from the list of Google accounts and then choose the campaigns.

Once you have selected all of that information, carefully review the Import Options. There are a lot, but they’re all very important.

Things to check after the transfer is complete

It’s not enough just to import your campaigns and then leave them on autopilot. 

Because Microsoft and Google function differently, you need to take a close look at your campaigns after they are imported to make sure your settings are optimized. Here are some items that you should review:

• Adjust your bidding
• Raise/lower budgets if needed
• Review targeting
• Understand new quality score requirements
• Modify keywords and negatives
• Check custom parameters
• Look at character counts

4 common mistakes when transfering accounts:

·         Screwing Up the Settings

Firstly, when you transfer an entire account you need to pay close attention to all your settings.

Some features like geo targeting, custom shapes, and audiences would be not applicable to Bing’s advertising platform. Your settings could be missed if Bing doesn’t recognize some of the AdWords features.

·         Ignoring Your Bing Search Query Report

Secondly, check your Bing query report to avoid displaying for unrelated terms in Bing search.

Your Bing and Google search queries could be completely different, especially when you target broad, modified broad, or phrase match types.

·         Copying Mobile/Display Campaigns to Bing

Thirdly, I don’t recommend transferring your AdWords mobile and display campaigns to Bing because it can cause multiple mistakes and interruptions. They don’t work the same way on both platforms.

·         Too Little Time Spent Optimizing Bing Ads

Besides working on your settings and queries, I also recommend doing a full evaluation of your Bing account on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Microsoft is working to improve the Bing Ads system and the inside changes could involuntarily affect your account performance.

Short conclusion

If you’ve done all of these things and everything seems to be running smoothly, expect to get more leads, more sales, and more revenue soon!

If you want to import more campaigns, Microsoft recommends waiting at least two hours in between each import.

Back in January, Google announced that they would be making some big changes from July 9, 2019, onwards to the way their Chrome browser operates, with sites that repeatedly flout the Better Ads standards having all ads stopped (including compliant ads).

What are the better ads standards?

The Coalition for Better Ads was formed in 2016 by a group of leading advertising agencies, publishers, advertisers and trade associations.

The initial standards launched in March 2017 after extensive research into the impact that different ads had on user experience.

These standards covered North America and Europe.

It currently consists of 4 types of desktop and 8 types of mobile ads that rated as falling beneath the required levels of acceptability by consumers.

Types of ads that fall below the standards are:

• Pop up ads (desktop and mobile)
• Video ads that auto-play sound (desktop and mobile)
• Prestitial ads (desktop and mobile)
• Large sticky ads (desktop and mobile)
• Density above 30% (mobile)
• Flashing animations (mobile)
• Poststitial ads with a countdown
• Full-screen scroll over ads

So what’s changing?

The big change is that Google is stepping up its efforts to stamp out these ads. Previously, it filtered ads on sites in North America and Europe that were repeat offenders in terms of contravention of the Better Ads standards.

Google hasn’t laid out the specific timing for when the new rules, collectively called Manifest V3, will take effect. The company says it is still revising the new mechanisms and is “actively exploring other ways to expand this API.”

Ad blockers emphasize that they’ll adapt to whatever requirements Google lays out; their survival depends on it.

But it’s still unclear the degree to which the changes will benefit users in the end—at least when it comes to keeping ads out of their tabs.

What should I do?

Most importantly, you should review the ads on your website to make sure that none of them violate the standards listed above.

Google has a helpful Ad Experience report that analyzes your site and tells you if there are any issues with your site’s ad units, but you can also check the site manually.

Short conclusion

Keep in mind that even if your site is compliant with the standards, it could still be losing revenue due to inefficient design that leads to low engagement.

Think about user experience whenever you design a new page to ensure users continue to return, recommend and share your content.

Time. It’s arguably the most valuable resource we have. It’s especially valuable to marketers, who usually have limited budgets, limited resources, and increasing demands for performance.

Marketers, almost universally, have way more than enough to do. If you’re in the marketing trenches, the one thing you could probably use more of is time.

Automation can provide that extra time.

Automated Bid Management

Managing your bids manually is hugely time-consuming, and not only may it prove impossible to oversee across larger accounts, it may be more profitable (and accurate) for a machine to manage the bids on your behalf.

You can use AdWords scripts to automate common procedures (such as modifying bids) or interact with external data, and by far the biggest time saver I’ve experienced from using scripts has been the automation of bids for product groups on Google Shopping.

What to do with extra time?

Study your competitors’ PPC campaigns.

Your competitors’ ads can be a rich source of ideas for new ad copy, images, and videos. If you don’t have a library of which ads your key competitors have been running, you may be missing out on some fantastic ideas for your own ads.

Keep your PPC skills sharp.

PPC marketing is constantly evolving. That means your skill set needs to be evolving, too. So try to read even a few more PPC articles every week, or listen in on a few PPC webinars.

Create more landing pages.

The more targeted your landing pages are, typically the higher your campaigns’ conversion rates will be. If you’ve got less than 10 landing pages for even a medium-sized PPC account, there’s room for opportunity.

Redo your negative keyword list.

Keywords are still important. And while you may have worked really hard to develop a regular keyword list, most marketers spend barely 20% of that amount of time on negative keywords.

Set up a few experimental campaigns.

Google, Facebook and the other ad platforms are always coming out with cool new types of advertising campaigns.

If there’s a particular campaign type you’ve been wanting to test, that might be a great use of the free time PPC automation can give you.

Short conclusion

What’s the outcome of implementing these PPC automation techniques? Better performance and less time spent doing the work.

And the more time you save on your PPC wins now, the more time you have to spend on bigger wins—PPC or otherwise—in the future.

It’s pretty common for companies to use PPC ads solely as a means of attracting new customers and then move on to other means (e.g., landing pages, supplemental content) to keep these individuals engaged and moving through the sales funnel.

To get the most out of your PPC initiatives, you’ll want to begin developing multiple campaigns that focus on catering to the needs and expectations of individuals that exist within each stage of the sales funnel.

Though this will require you to increase your investment into your PPC initiatives, doing so will ultimately increase the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaigns.

This increased effectiveness will make the increased investment completely worth your while.

Using the Funnel to Guide Google Ads Campaign & Content Strategy

During the awareness stage, potential customers are conducting heavy research on a question they have or a problem they need solved. Regardless of the scenario, this stage is heavily focused on educating your audience.

Without capitalizing on this stage in the funnel, user acquisition can run low, and it can become difficult to continue growing past your existing customer base.

Efforts such as Google Display prospecting and non-branded, research-related search campaigns are strong methods to acquire additional customers.

Awareness via Google Display

Display campaigns take content, either image or text, and push it in front of internet users. Without proper constraints in place, these ads can technically reach anyone in the world, making proper audience targeting especially important.

For example, by layering Google Display Network audiences, topics, contextual keywords, and other features, you can ensure you only serve ads to people who would be interested in a product that you offer.

Create Ad Groups Focused on a Single Keyword

There are a few reasons for this:

For one thing, Google determines the Quality Score of your campaigns based on, among a few other factors, the relevance of your ad copy and attached keywords to the actual product being showcased.

So, if your product title and ad copy includes the phrase “men’s running sneakers,” using keywords including the word “shoes” instead of “sneakers” might cause your Quality Score to drop.

On the human side of things, using the one-keyword-per-ad-group approach simply provides a sense of consistency and continuity for those who view your ads.

For example, those who search for “men’s running sneakers” will be presented with an ad using that specific phrase; similarly, those who search for “men’s running shoes” will be presented with an ad using that specific phrase.

Assign Negative Keywords to Campaigns for Each Stage

Along with being more specific with your keyword focus, you also want to take care to ensure that your ads aren’t showing up for irrelevant or ineffective keywords, as well.

Ineffective keywords are phrases used by individuals who have little to no intention of making a purchase. One of the most common negative keywords of the ineffective variety are searches with the word “free” in them (e.g., “free men’s running sneakers).

Obviously, anyone using this term will have no interest in opening their wallet for you.

Short conclusion

PPC ads can absolutely be used to engage further with with customers existing at all stages of the sales funnel – not just at the top.

While you certainly want to ensure that you have other content and initiatives in place to cater to the needs and expectations of those at each funnel stage, you don’t want to overlook the impact a well-placed and well-timed PPC ad can have on those further along in their own personal buyer’s journey.

Custom Affinity Audiences quickly became a favorite for businesses small and large for prospecting, reaching qualified customers, and supporting top-funnel objectives.

What Are Affinity Audiences?

Firstly, let’s quickly define what “Affinity Audiences” are, before we dive into the world of custom. You can think of affinity audiences as similar to TV audiences – wildly generalized types of people that watch your varying TV channels.

So BBC One would represent (kind of) older demographics, people interested in politics and news, whereas E4 would represent your younger demographics (I guess), perhaps those chilling around in their university dorms… you get the idea. Although there is some truth in this system of categorization, it is very broad and presumptuous.

What is Custom Affinity Audience Targeting?

Google defines custom affinity audiences as letting advertisers define whom they want to reach across the web, on any screen. By factoring in consumers’ most recent passions and ongoing interests, your message always reaches the right users.

Custom affinity audience targeting can be set-up by following this path.

display > targeting > Interests & remarketing > Custom affinity audiences

The Advantages of Custom Affinity Audience Targeting

Compared to other audience targeting methods, Custom Affinity targeting offers advertisers several unique advantages.

These include the ability to target:

• An audience based on specific URLs
• Users that visit your competitors’ websites
• Consumers that use specific keywords and search terms
• Consumers who use specific apps

How to Create a Custom Affinity Audience

Creating your own custom affinity audiences is quite easy. Here’s how:

• Create a new Display Campaign(or edit an existing one)
• Go to Audiences
• Select Affinity and Custom Affinity

At the bottom, select Custom Affinity Audience.

You are now given the option to name your new audience and input specificinterests, URLs, places, and apps.

After you’ve finished inputting your variables, you can preview the estimated size of your custom affinity audience

When to Use Custom Affinity Audiences

Do any of the initiatives below describe your advertising goals?

• Branding
• More controlled targeting on GDN
• Advertising tailored content to specific people
• Increasing market reach while driving valuable actions on your site

Considering the very nature of the way we set CAAs up, they are practical for so many different businesses and situations.

There are literally millions of different ways we can reach relevant audiences, simply by playing around with different items (interests, URLs, places, apps).

Short conclusion

Custom Affinity Audiences allow for more control on the GDN. They perform best as a creative way to reach new users in a cost-effective way, and help to drive incremental conversions.