Master PPC targeting
Master PPC targeting
1. Use demographic targeting if you have a novel product.
Essio Shower and TYME are good examples of using demographic targeting to generate sales for novel products. By zeroing in on gender, age range, and other interests and behaviors, they’ve been able to turn every one-dollar investment into a four-dollar return. Prioritize the following networks for demographic targeting: Facebook for its custom audience, also, its ad targeting is much stronger than any other PPC channel when it comes to demographics, Google Display Network for the sheer publisher size, and LinkedIn for B2B companies.
2. Use LinkedIn if you want to target based on career characteristics.
LinkedIn is great for targeting based on career characteristics because of its array of B2B and work-related demographic options, as you can see in the image below:
The challenge with LinkedIn compared to Facebook is that ad fatigue, one of the reasons why your cost per acquisition can go up, is more severe. This is because audience sizes are often smaller, so you have to keep refreshing your creative to keep cost-per-clicks from spiking.
But if what you’re promoting has enough margin to sustain sometimes higher-than-average costs per click, then LinkedIn can be the perfect PPC platform for you.
3. Use Google Ads if you have strong keyword intent.
With a strong keyword intent and a PPC search campaign, you’re able to bypass the awareness and consideration part of your funnel, and go straight to the preference and purchase part. By bidding on keywords your prospects use to find you, you can calculate how many clicks it takes to get a conversion, and how many conversions you need before you get a sale, if you’re in the SaaS or lead gen space, so you can set currency-specific bids on your keywords.
4. Match your call to action or offer with its conversion intent, to ensure that the keywords you bid on can turn into sales.
For example, if your company buys cars from people, here are three keywords you might bid on; for Awareness, broken transmission, for Consideration, what’s my car worth, and for Action, Sell my car.
5. Track sales after the initial lead, trials, or demo if you’re in the SaaS or lead gen space.
Without keyword-level sales data, you may think that, as in the example below, Keyword 1 is the best performer because it has the lowest cost per conversion:
When, in fact, you should allocate most of your budget toward Keyword 2 because it has the lowest cost per sale:
6. Break down your PPC campaigns with specific geographic targeting.
Ask yourself, Which cities give you the most traffic? and start there. If you’re running PPC campaigns through Google Ads, you can look at the Dimensions tab and prioritize which geographic locations you want to target first, with ad-specific city mentions.
7. Use interest targeting to target your visitors based on browsing behavior and which sites they like to be on.
For example, if customers who love your aromatherapy shower kit, also like massage, yoga, and meditation, then you could use interest targeting to target people who don’t know about your product, for example, people that like yoga, massage, and meditation.
8. Use topic targeting to target groups of websites that cover similar topics.
Google has an extensive library of different topic codes you can target depending on your target audiences. If you sell protein powder, for example, then you’d target the topic category: Beauty & Fitness > Fitness > Bodybuilding.
9. Use retargeting, custom audiences on Facebook, and similar audiences on Google Ads, to target people who either already know you, or share the same characteristics of your best customers.
Retargeting allows you to recover lost conversions from those who weren’t ready to convert the first time. Custom audiences on Facebook allow you to retarget your visitors on Facebook via a pixel or cookie, or by uploading an email list. When that happens, you also create a lookalike audience Similar audiences is a Google Ads feature to find new people who have shared interests and characteristics of the people in your remarketing list.