How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign to Improve Conversions

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign to Improve Conversions

Health-related queries are the most searched topics on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. Therefore a strong and consistent online presence has become mandatory for medical practices and companies. Healthcare businesses need to target potential customer at every stage, build brand recognition and encourage conversions to survive in this industry and a good PPC campaign could help achieve these objectives. This is because with increasing competition, businesses are finding it difficult to reach out to their target audience through organic methods. Many of them are opting for search engine marketing (SEM) to promote their growth. Competition is an issue here also and brands have to find ways to make their PPC campaigns effective and ensure successful healthcare digital marketing. PPC or pay per click is an internet advertising tool to direct traffic to websites in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked. It requires constant monitoring, optimization, creativity and analysis. The following are some approaches to PPC that can help increase conversions and also improve results:

PPC Campaign
  • Keyword optimization: For any business to increase web traffic, it is important to monitor the performance of relevant keywords. This is applicable for organic results as well as PPC. Google assigns the target keywords a Quality Score (QS) and this along with cost per click determines the “Ad Rank”. The QS is determined by the following factors.
    • Ad relevance
    • Expected click through rate
    • Landing page experience

    Out of the three factors, CTR is the most important factor in determining QS. So to optimize your QS, begin with CTR. It is good to create separate Ad Groups for each of your keywords, which is known as Single Keyword Ad Groups, this helps you to reach specific searchers and not a large group. Optimizing CTR and thereby improving quality score helps to generate more qualified traffic and better conversion rates. Once your CTR is optimized, move on to landing pages. Dynamic text replacement (DTR) is a method that can improve your landing page. DTR lets you tailor the text on your landing pages to match keyword parameters. This helps to improve quality score and also contributes to better conversion rate (CVR).

  • Use of machine learning: Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) assures speedy and high performing marketing. From an AdWords point of view, this signifies automated bid and budget management of your AdWords campaign. A recent study by Marketing Land examined 50,000 campaigns to determine Google AdWords Industry Benchmark and the conversion rate with and without machine learning. The study showed that machine learning helps PPC marketers scale and optimize marketing tasks more efficiently.
  • New ad extensions: Ad extensions come in ad format that shows additional information about your product. It increases an ad’s click-through-rate by several percentage points, increases visibility, CTR and ROI. Ad extensions are available in various formats and choosing the right one will be beneficial for your website.
    • Call out extension: To call with just one click and get additional information about all offers such as limited service, discounted service etc.
    • Location extension: To display your medical business address, contact number and directions to reach you.
    • Site link extension: Provides additional links to other relevant pages
    • App extension: Links that direct users to app store or provide a link to download link of the app.
    • Review extension: Comes from online reviews which online customers tend to trust
    • Structured snippets: Highlights specific elements of your service or products.
      Test various extensions on a small scale to know which one works for you. Keep an eye on the users to know what terms they use for several possible results.
  • Efficient re-marketing: High bounce rates are a reality with AdWords. People who come to your landing page are at different stages of the customer journey. Some of them may be new visitors. Your call to action may not work on them and they may bounce. For instance, you cannot expect a person who has just started educating herself on software solutions to accept a call to action for a demo. To regain any missed opportunities of acquiring a customer, use remarketing to cross sell and down sell bounced visitors. In the above example an eBook that instructs prospective customers how to overcome particular challenges would be an apt down-sell. They will receive directions as regards the options available to them while providing information about how your product facilitates the process. Retargeting helps to capture lead information, and boost the CVR and overall ROI of your campaigns. Following are some tips for remarketing ads to attract lost leads:
    • Different personas and types of customers respond to different forms of media. Split test your re-marketing ads to provide an eBook and webinar and see which one generates more conversions.
    • Dynamic targeting serves specific ads to different audience segments
    • Include well known influencers in your space, this association helps to improve trust.
  • Conduct A/B testing: It is present on any level of PPC campaigns. A/B testing is crucial for PPC campaigns as it makes ads more relevant. To test your PPC campaign, test the headlines, description, link, keywords, and ad extensions. Testing your landing page elements like design, images, CTA, benefits and features is also important. You should regularly use A/B testing to test your bids, keywords and ad groups to increase your conversion rate. Remember to test only one element at a time to get proper results; multi elements testing can be convoluted and indeterminate.
  • Segmentation with in-market users: Using in-market audiences within your display ads you can target users on the basis of consumer behaviour and the content for which they have expressed an interest. According to Google, data such as sites browsed, proximity of visits, relevant ads clicked and conversion rate are used to categorize users by intent.

PPC is an effective strategy to promote your medical website. PPC helps to direct potential patients to your website and increases the profitability of your healthcare business. You can get faster results from PPC but it requires strategic efforts to get optimum results. A professional provider of medical SEO services can provide the right PPC campaign to increase your website visibility, traffic and conversions.

How to Choose Target Keywords for Your Pay-per-Click or AdWords Campaign

How to Choose Target Keywords for Your Pay-per-Click or AdWords Campaign

Healthcare digital marketing has become more complex with medical advertising continuing to evolve. Today, the vast majority of people are using the Internet to get information about healthcare and this is the reason why medical practices, hospitals, medical businesses etc have embraced digital marketing as a means to reach and communicate with their target audience. Businesses must clearly understand their business requirements, marketing objectives and their target audience. Once all these factors are clear, it is easier to attract potential patients or healthcare consumers to your website. To improve ranking and traffic, websites should be search engine optimized and optimizing keywords is one of the most important aspects of organic SEO as well as PPC campaigns. Keyword optimization is a crucial step in digital marketing from content marketing to link building, to PPC (pay per click) campaign.

What Is a PPC Campaign?

PPC campaigns provide an opportunity for businesses to buy instant and relevant traffic. It helps businesses target specific users who interact with Google’s search interface. Google AdWords is an online advertising service that allows you to bid on certain keywords in order for your clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. You have to pay for these clicks, and therefore before you move forward with Google AdWords, make sure to spend some time to understand how it works. Proper planning, timing and execution are very important.

Google AdWords

Choosing the Right PPC Keywords

Keywords are important because these are the terms you target in search campaigns; displaying ads for keywords can generate clicks that will ultimately generate new customers. Since there are numerous new searches on search engines, advertisers must target keyword variations as well. The keywords and key phrases you choose should be highly specific and relevant to your business. Google appreciates relevance and rewards you. Your keywords should connect directly with your ad copy and website copy. When a user types your keywords into Google, they should be looking for a business just like yours. Consequently, people who click on your ad will already be inclined to buy from you.

Using PPC keyword tool is a great way to prepare a list of PPC keywords for ad campaigns. It helps to quickly find hundreds of keywords that real people are using with additional important data such as search volumes, competition level, and estimated PPC cost for each keyword. Word Stream’s Free Keyword Tool helps to get a list of PPC keywords; and to get more actionable and personalized results you can specify your industry and country. Another option is to connect with your AdWords account to get personalized cost and competition data based on real PPC metrics.

PPC Keywords

A proper PPC campaign includes different types of keywords with various levels of intent such as the following:

  • Commercial keywords: These are the most valuable keywords in PPC and are high intent terms that are generally used by prospects that are likely to buy a product.
  • Brand Keywords: These include the brand name and tend to have very low cost and very high quality and yield excellent results in terms of conversion rate and click-through rate (CTR).
  • Broader, low intent keywords: To expand your reach, it is important to invest in broader PPC keywords that have low intent. This helps to increase brand awareness. You can increase your conversion rate on broad keywords through remarketing strategies.
  • Competitive keywords: Competitive keywords allow to get your brand and offerings in front of people who are searching for your competitors’ products and services.
  • Long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are longer, highly specific terms that are low cost and have less keyword competition.

Tips for Planning Your Campaign

  • Keyword research: The first step is to start brainstorming and prepare a list of keywords you think are relevant. Choose keywords that describe what you do and how you do. Run your keyword list into the AdWords Keyword Planner and you will get an expanded list of keywords along with data about how often people search and how many competitors are also targeting those keywords. Carefully review the expanded list and eliminate irrelevant keywords.
  • Keyword pruning: Using the keyword tool, you should be able to prune back certain keywords phrases that are irrelevant or are generating clicks, but not conversions. This report gives you the exact keyword phrase that was searched when your ad was displayed. You can sort by clicks to view the list of keyword phrases that have a history of clicks but no conversions.
  • Develop ad text specific to keywords within an ad group: Each ad group must have at least one ad text that specifies the topic of that ad group. This helps to improve Ad Quality Score – a metrics measured by Google. It will allow the searchers to connect the ad to their search phrase easily. If the ads and landing pages are more relevant to the user, then you are more likely to achieve higher quality scores. High quality score can give you better ad positions at lower costs.

    Ad Text Specific to Keywords

  • Link ads to landing pages that cover the same topic as the keyword in ad group : Sending the people who click on your ads to pages that cover a similar topic as the keywords within each group will help the Quality Score. As ads become more specific, it will be tempting to link ads to the pages you already have. The less related your ads are to your landing pages, the less likely visitors are to convert.
  • Use Exact match targeting: Exact match targeting means your ads will appear only when someone searches for the exact same keyword that you have targeted. This strategy is very helpful for small businesses that are new to AdWords. This is because it gives them better control over their ads and prevents them from wasting money on unnecessary phrases. Once you have all data about how the keywords perform, there might be instances where using a broader match setting will be useful.
  • Use location targeting: If you provide services within a confined geographic area, ensure that your campaigns are set to display ads only to searchers within that area, or else you will end up paying for clicks that are from people in locations where you cannot provide services.

Healthcare SEO Services Could Prove Helpful

AdWords is a highly nuanced marketing platform and it helps to manage your campaign and achieve business success.

  • When choosing keywords, try to think like your targeted customer and this will help decide on the right terms to target.
  • Remember that your keywords and phrases should be closely connected to the wording in your pay-per-click advertisement which in turn should match the keywords and phrases you use on your landing page and website.
  • Try not to use keywords that are too general.
  • Use keyword variations that your targeted audience are likely to use for your services/products. Colloquial usages, synonyms, product names, alternative spellings, singular and plural versions may all be part of these variations.

Mediocre digital marketers fail to structure their online campaigns effectively. It is a known fact that only a streamlined and well-thought out strategy can provide a good result. Keywords are the backbone of PPC, so selecting the right keywords is important. A provider of medical content writing such as a Long Island SEO company can offer the required support to choose target keywords for your PPC or AdWords campaign after analyzing your medical business as well as your competition. They provide strategic PPC campaigns that could ensure great standing for your website in search indexes on Google, Bing and other leading search engines. Finding the right outsourcing partner plays an important role in determining your digital marketing success.