Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) can help you earn valuable impressions and hits in search results for keywords that mean the most to your business. As soon as you win an ad for a specific keyword, you’ll see a spike in your site traffic and boost lead generation.

However, if you want to outrank competitors and make searchers want to click your ads, you need to optimize your PPC ads.

Pay-per-click optimization, or PPC optimization, is the practice of analyzing and improving your PPC campaigns at the campaign and ad group level, like by updating landing pages, changing ad copy, or modifying keyword bids by improving different elements of your ads so that they earn more clicks.

When you want to optimize your PPC ads, there are a few different areas to consider:

• The ads – the text, photos, design, colors, etc.
• Ad landing pages
• Keyword targeting

PPC optimization checklist for successful ads:

1. Perform keyword research: Before launching a PPC campaign, research the most beneficial keywords for your business. Select keywords that’ll bring the most clicks to your ads. Start with keywords related to your basic products and services. These keywords on their own likely won’t be the best to target since their competition is so high.

For instance, “anti-dandruff hair oil,” a general term, gets a much higher search volume than “hair oil from removing dandruff ” an extremely specific search term.

Identifying general keywords is important, but it’s crucial to come up with long-tail keywords as well.

Try combining your general terms with adjectives relating to your product offerings. This will help you create your list of keywords to target.

The next step involves plugging your keywords into a tool like Google Trends to gain insight into search volume and competition.

The best keywords will have a high search volume and low competition.

This step will help you choose keywords that are the most valuable to your campaign.

2. Create a list of negative keywords: Just like it’s essential to target the right keywords, it’s also a critical part of PPC optimization that you decide what not to target.

When you use negative keywords, you essentially exclude specific keywords from your campaign that might seem like they fit your product offerings, but they don’t.

For example, if you’re a wellness store that sells hair oil, soap, scrubs, one of your negative keywords might be “cooking oil” or “detergent soap” This ensures that people searching for those terms don’t land on your site. This step saves a lot of money by reaching only to people looking for the product and not similar product of a complete different end use.

3. Use demographic targeting to reach the right audience: One of the things that makes PPC so successful is the fact that you can decide exactly who your ads are served to, based on demographics.

A few of the ways you can target your most qualified audience:

• Age: Select this if you sell products that are for a certain age group
• Gender: This targeting option works for companies that sell a product that is made for a specific gender
• Income level: If your company prides itself on the low cost of your products, you could target a lower income level. On the other hand, if you offer high-class products, you have the option to target a higher income level.
• Geographic location: One of the most popular and effective ways to target your audience is by geographic location. You can serve them ads based on their country, state, city, or specific boundaries that you create.
• Relationship status: Social media platforms give you the option to target singles, married couples, or people in relationships.
• Education level: Whether you want to target customers with a high school diploma, those in college, or those going for their master’s degrees, social media platforms have options for you!

Choosing who you want to target with your keywords is a vital decision and can determine the level of campaign success, so review your targeting as part of your PPC campaign optimization.

4. Test your ad copy: Your ad copy can make or break a click, so it’s vital to your PPC optimization process that you test and analyze your copy.

In order to test your ad copy, you’ll want to set up an A/B test. This kind of test allows you to assess two ads with varying copy to determine which one receives the most clicks.

You can test the colors, the landing pages, and the calls-to-action.

When you set up an A/B test for your PPC ads, digital platforms will serve your two ads at random to different users. At the end of the testing period, you’ll have a good idea of what ad got more clicks, and therefore, which ad you should use moving forward.

5. Create eye capturing landing pages: A landing page is where users end up when they click on your ad, and it is essentially the deciding factor in whether or not a user makes a purchase. That’s why it’s one of the most important PPC optimization strategies.

A picture of the product in your ad: Nothing is more of a turnoff than a landing page that isn’t at all related to the ad that a user clicked. When a user clicks an ad, they’re interested in that product, which means your landing page should be all about, you guessed it, that very product!

The price of the product: Associating cost with a product is a big deciding factor when a user is on the fence. You’ll want to be sure that the price is loud and proud on your landing page so that a user can decide if the product fits their budget.

Information about the product: You should think of your landing page as the final step in a buyer’s journey — the last chance you have to wow them with your product. To do so, you should include a detailed description that features product dimensions, materials used, care instructions, available colors, and available sizes.

Including this information gives users everything they need to make an educated decision on whether or not they want to go through with a purchase. Shortage of this information could cause them to second guess your product because they don’t know if you carry the color they want or the size they need.

A powerful call to action: Perhaps the most critical part of a landing page is the call-to-action. This could be a button that says, “add to cart,” “buy now,” “learn more,” or “call now.” It depends on the product or service that you’re selling and what the next step is in the buyer’s journey.

For example, if you’re selling a service, the call-to-action might be “call today for a free quote!”, and if you’re selling a product, it might be “buy now.”

While doing this on your own may be a task, and monitoring this on a continuous  basis could be even more difficult, engage a digital service provider who understands your product, market and objective and works within your budget for an effective PPC campaign.