A way to analyse all the data we obtain, we use machine learning and automation more often now in digital marketing. Data science does this by turning theories into evidence. Big data is one data science term you might come across. It is large and complex data sets used to identify trends and patterns that can help businesses make better and more personalised decisions for their customers. In PPC, that kind of technology can work wonders for optimising budget spend, improving CTR, and overall performance.

Before technology was as good as it is now, some decisions were made by best guesses and past trends. That didn’t always work good and people and businesses lost a lot of money. Today, data science can help find trends to save people millions and give businesses the chance to improve customer relationships and services.

How can data science help PPC?

Whether you use Google Ads or other PPC alternatives, automation is at the forefront. Other benefits of data science in PPC include:

  • Identifying outliers in impressions and clicks over time to confirm whether significant changes are due to seasonality or something else.
  • Creating better split tests.
  • Creating and optimising remarketing lists.
  • Tailoring PPC campaigns aligned to particular audiences and when they’re online.
  • Identifying unusual traffic.
  • Understanding buyer’s preferences.
  • Deeper analysis of ad copy.

Find data sources and cluster them. The quality of your data sources can affect your insights so use the best tools you can. Software like SEMrush, Google Data Studio, and Tableau can help collate and analyse data quicker and easier.

PPC needs to work together with all marketing channels. PPC professionals strength lies in combining their efforts with everyone within a marketing team. That means collaborating with sales and using CRM data, developers who help create landing pages and websites, SEO, and customer support. Data insights can provide goals and best practices for everyone to follow to ensure a smooth customer journey from impression to goal conversion.

Visualize PPC performance.  With data visualisation you can turn all that into insightful information. Performance reports are important to showing where PPC is succeeding or needs improvement and the ability to visualise that data is important too. Data visualisation can find trends, normalise larger datasets, compare data over time or help further testing. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple bar chart or line graph to show you where things are going right or wrong.

Data in isolation has no meaning and being able to test it in controlled conditions can lead to important insights. That’s the beauty of data science – it provides knowledge you can use to make better judgements. In PPC, those judgements can impact metrics like ROAS (return on ad spend), Quality Score, impression share, and cost per conversion.

The “new normal” that was brought to us during the April COVID-19 peak forced everyone to quickly go to battle mode against the unexpected challenges and adjust our lives accordingly. As May is coming to end, the situation is getting better and businesses are starting to get back to their feet.

Advertisement business also felt the pandemic impact and marketers across all industries were also pushed to their limits to invent new ways to push their ads in this unusual time when a whole new way of how we search and when we search the internet became standard. Many are still adjusting to these rapid changes in our industry, but the data does look promising. As of early May, PPC campaigns appear to be recovering from the shock of COVID-19.

While many advertisers still are not receiving the same results that they had in March, most are beginning to show some improvement. Specifically, starting the late of April, paid search conversions rebounded to about 89% of their pre-COVID levels. Advertisers on Bing saw less of a drop initially but saw similar recovery in late April.

Our internet usage has skyrocketed, as we work, learn, and stay connected at home more. According to the researches, people are consuming 70% more content online. Advertisers are finding a quickly growing audience with Google Display ads and YouTube, even if most of that time is spent off the SERP.

COVID-19 has limited traditional retail and made ecommerce essential for most people. But small businesses online advertising have done particularly good during April, as their largest competitors like Walmart and Amazon have struggled to manage the high number of orders and have pulled most of their ads from Google. Facebook shared its Q1 2020 performance and reported healthy growth made by increased ad sales despite the pandemic. Facebook noted that as a result of COVID-19, the costs of Facebook ads took a decline in the last three weeks of March and have remained low since.

At the same time, people started to use social media a lot more to stay in contact with their families and friends. People began to use WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, helping Facebook grow its active user base to a new record of 2.6 billion monthly active users.

While it may be a long road back to normal, there’s been new hope for advertisers that are finding more customers online than they were in the early days of this crisis.

Both strategies, SEO and PPC cost money to get traffic to your site. The difference is that for SEO you pay people to get your website free organic traffic. But problem is that happens over time. It may take a year for results to show. For PPC, you pay the service provider, you pay for ads and you get immediate results. This might give a certain feeling that PPC is the way to go. But SEO experts think otherwise and that the best way forward is to use the two together.

Good things about PPC

  • You can pick your keywords and build the ad around it
  • PPC generates immediate traffic and gets you instant exposure, possibly on the first page of search results.
  • You can target people who are searching for similar products.
  • You can choose the time, geographic location and position on the page.
  • You can target geographic locations and track data.

Bad things about PPC

  • You pay for every click. People may simply click through without any intention of buying.
  • PPC results show up in search results and it faces stiff competition
  • There is no guarantee that even finely crafted ads can lead to conversions.
  • Your ad, and therefore your company, is visible so long as you have an ongoing PPC campaign. Suspend it, and you go off the radar.
  • PPC does nothing to enhance your reputation

Good things about SEO

  • Search engines rank your website based on your search engine optimization strategies. Some visitors may prefer such listings to PPC and are more likely to click through, especially when they wish to obtain more information.
  • Even if you suspend SEO operations for a while, your presence is there on search engines.
  • Keep pushing it and SEO will result in the increasing volume of organic, convertible traffic. Plus, you establish a robust online presence and reputation and keep improving with the passage of time.

Bad things about SEO

  • It requires a good  website to serve as the base of SEO operations.
  • It is not easy to get to the first page and the first five at the top of it. It is much harder to keep that position.
  • It takes time ranging from 6 months to a year for your site to show up on the first page of search results and if you are not doing it alone, you are paying SEO people to keep working on your website regardless.

Mixing SEO and PPC

SEO is excellent and so is PPC. The smart thing that expert marketers do is to mix the two together. PPC gives you analytics on keyword performance and keywords used in searches. So use that data for improving your SEO keyword content. Or vice versa, SEO experts are likely to conduct research and then decide keywords for the SEO campaign. Use those keywords in your PPC campaigns because these keywords have been clicked and converted. Lets say you start a PPC campaign. Visitors search using keywords and your ad shows up and they click through. You get data on their behavior on your website and that helps you to modify websites to lead to longer, better engagement.

Analytics show results of pages that generate most revenue. You can focus on these pages as well as others that need improvement. Keyword research tools can maybe help you make an educated guess about which keywords to use in your SEO, but PPC reports are data driven. You can create SEO plan using keywords that have actually delivered traffic. Which is actually showing us that it might be best to use PPC first to get raw data and quick results and then use that data to build your website for a long run results of SEO building.

With PPC campaigns there are a lot of different tyspes of landing pages you can choose from and lets take a look at some of the ways how to optimize a Click Through landing page for PPC.

Lead capture page is another type of landing page that is frequently used in PPC. Ususally that type of landing page has some type of form in it, text box or some other way to get information from the user. The main purpose of this page is to gain information from the user and use that information for other purposes like email marketing, or to send a user to other specific landing page. By doing that there is a much bigger chance of conversion.

Have a Call to Action for the Lead Capture

Depending on what information you want to obtain from the user, a lead capture page can look a little confusing. The best thing you can do when this is the case, is nudge the user into doing what you want them to do.

Limit the Number of Lines to Fill In

As we mentioned above, the more data you request from the user the landing page becomes little confusing since you are making user fill out on the lead capture page and with too many forms showing they are less likely to fill out all the information. This is simply because of the amount of effort it would take the user to do versus what do they get in return. So you can approach that little differently.

  • Offer an incentive for the user if you want lots of information in return. This can range from a financial incentive, such as a discount, to free giveaways, competitions, prizes or access to extra information.
  • Simply solution is to reduce the amount of information you are requesting from the user.

Reason why the Web User Should Fill in the Form

If you have confirmed the incentive, before the user fills out the form, tell them why it is something they should do because in a lot of cases just having and incentive is not enough and landing pages that have an incentive for users to fill out the information, but don’t make clear just what it is and users just skip it and decide to not bother. Use images that portray the benefits of if the user fills in information and once you have gained it, you will then have a ton of information to process and analyse, to learn a lot more about your audience as well.

This type of advertising has a huge impact on the success of an online business. PPC ads makes your brand awareness better, but they also boost sales too. Even Google confirms that search ads can raise brand awareness by 80%. If you run succesful PPC campaigns but not getting enough out of this advertising platform, check out these 9 ways to maybe improve your game.

1. Have a well-defined goal

  • Getting traffic to your website
  • Improving sales
  • Getting subscribers or downloads

First things first, you need to determine what you want to achieve from your paid search ads.

Until you set a clear and measurable goal, you can’t optimize your PPC campaign to match what you are aiming for. Your goal is the first step of your optimization process. If you don’t have a proper map to follow, you won’t get anywhere.

2. Use the high-performance keyword

In any PPC campaign, it is extremly important to choose the right keywords. Even though there is lots of tools, including the Google one for creating keyword lists, to be sure your campaign is good you need to choose the keywords that have high CTR. Before including specific keywords in your ad copy, check the for their performance and pick only those with excellent one. If your audience resides in a different countries, it is good thing to use a VPN service and find which keywords are ranking in their location.

3. Optimize the quality of keyword score

  • The relevancy of your keywords to your ad copy
  • Click-through rate (CTR)
  • Landing page experience

One of the basic reasons many PPC campaigns don’t get the results that they wanted is that they have too many keywords. An average PPC campaign makes all of its sales from only around 12% of its keywords. So, avoid keyword overloading and instead improve the keyword quality score.

Focus on creating headlines that are relevant and can hit the right points of your target audience. Keywords with high CTR will help you generate traffic, which can improve your conversion rates. You can use Dynamic text replacement (DTR) feature to match your ad’s keyword with the content of your landing page.

4. Create a list of negative keywords

Negative keywords can save your campaign budget as it prevents your ads from being triggered by wrong searches. These keywords help you avoid traffic you don’t want hitting your ads.

5. Write engaging ad copy

Put all your efforts into making engaging ads as ad copy plays a big role in making your campaign a success.

  • Your ad copy should clearly state about your USP and why people should choose you over your competitors
  • Try to be as relevant as possible.
  • Create attention-grabbing headlines
  • Add a compelling call-to-action
  • Consider using power words such as Instant, Hurry, Exclusive, Free, Today Only, etc.

6. Utilize remarketing

A high bounce rate is a common thing in PPC marketing but remarketing is an great way to capture those missed opportunities. It enables you to show targeted ads to users who have already viewed your products or services.

7. Use ad extensions

There are two types of ad extensions, Manual Ad extension and Automatic Ad extension. Add extensions are an good way to reveal extra information about your product or service.

A manual ad extension is a customizable extension that has many more extension types such as site link, call out, location, review, etc. Automatic ad extension works automatically but has few types such as customer rating, the previous visit, dynamic site link, etc.

8. Optimize your campaigns for mobile users

Today, when almost half of the global population uses a smartphone, you can’t neglect mobile users when creating your PPC campaign. Be sure that your landing pages are mobile-friendly and give attention to short-tail keywords as mobile users do not prefer to type in long search queries.

9. Keep track of your PPC campaign

You need to monitor your PPC campaign regularly if you wish to have a success with it. If you’re using Google Ads, Google analytics should be a good tool for you or you can invest in an automation solution that can offer closed-loop reporting. No matter what kind is your business, PPC advertising can help you gain better visibility on search engines and boost conversion.