When it comes to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, you're likely thinking about what keywords and phrases will work best in driving traffic to your website. However, the wide world of PPC goes a little bit deeper than that in today's marketplace.

With so many competitors looking to tap into the lucrative world of social advertising and build their revenue streams in better, more effective ways, it's vital that businesses turn their attention towards looking more into the type of traffic that they aim to lure into conversions.

The world of PPC marketing is a congested place today, and it calls on new innovations to help businesses battle their way towards winning conversions and building fresh customer bases. With this in mind, let's take a look at some of the most effective methods of outpacing competitors when advertising online: 

Prioritise keyword quality

Here, it's worth remembering that Google's whole business model is based on bringing the appropriate results for search queries. This mantra applies to organic results as well as AdWords.

To action this approach, Google assigns target keywords a Quality Score which ultimately plays a significant role in determining your 'Ad Rank.'

Fundamentally, your Quality Score is based around you ad relevance, its expected Click-Through Rate (CTR), and the assumed landing page experience for visitors.

Due to the importance of ad relevance, it's vital that your PPC ads hit the nail on the head when it comes to being discoverable for visitors. With this in mind, it's worth questioning whether your campaign's ad copy corresponds to the search intent of the keywords you're using.

An approach to help action this is to create different ad groups alongside each of your chosen keywords - also known as 'single keyword ad groups' - and there you'll be able to cater to the intent of different searchers as opposed to aiming at appealing to larger groups.

Remarket effectively

The sad truth of Google AdWords is that high bounce rates are a common occurrence. Visitors to your landing pages arrive at different stages of the customer journey. For example, an unmissable Call-to-Action (CTA) may work wonders for somebody who has arrived on your page with the intent of making an immediate purchase, but it would be pretty useless to somebody who's aiming to learn more about their product options.

To make sure that you don't miss any opportunities among visitors who aren't yet ready to make a purchase, it's important to use your remarketing options effectively. Be sure to cross-sell and down-sell to bounced visitors. This means that it may not be enough to offer free samples or demos to visitors who are still busy educating themselves on your offerings but creating content that could answer the questions that they're searching for answers for could be perfect in winning their confidence.

E-books are excellent ways of offering bounced visitors an opportunity to learn more about your business and discover solutions for the questions and issues that they're facing.

Track your ads

Ad segmentation has a strong role to play in tracking conversions. Through this approach, it's also possible to make valuable comparisons across different segments.

Firstly, segmentation allows you to monitor the variations on ad performance depending on different hours of the day, or days of the week, or weeks of the month - as well as the cost-per-conversion rate associated with these metrics. With this information, it's possible to time your ads to appear at peak times so that your budget can stretch further.

It's also possible to explore the type of conversions you're getting from headline clicks or from embedded site links. This level of insight helps if you're driving conversions but your CTR is low. To action low CTRs you could try improving the quality of your copy or restructure your advertisements as a whole.

Top Verses Other is another very helpful segment which shows how your ads are performing at the top of the Google rankings. This helps you to learn where your ads are being positioned and how much you'll need to spend in order to hit the very top ranking positions. If you're spending 20% more in order to reach Google's top three positions, but your conversions are up 80%, it could be worth the extra investment, for example.

Monitor traffic sources

Furthermore, it could be entirely worth your while taking the time to use a platform that's able to provide rich insights into how your website is gaining its traffic. Finteza is good for this - which can not only detail where your traffic's arriving from, but the type of visitors that you're gathering.

If you're running multiple campaigns, the monitoring of your arrivals is significant in helping to learn which PPC avenue is the most lucrative for drawing conversions. Traffic sources can also help users to understand the value of the backlinks they're building elsewhere, too.

Fundamentally, if you're aiming to reach audiences via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, the levels of insights that analytics platforms can bring to your web management could ultimately save your campaign a small fortune through more effective optimisation tactics.

List negative keywords 

One of the most important tactics you can adopt when optimising your PPC campaigns is based on building out and keeping track of your negative keyword lists. Taking this measure will reduce costs as well as improve the quality of your results. Many marketers fall into the trap of losing scores of money on irrelevant searches.

One of the most effective ways of investigating negative keywords is through exploring the search terms that people are actually putting into Google in order to make your adverts appear.

Tools like WordStream Advisor and QueryStream help to action this approach by serving up relevant query data that can be utilised to identify both single and multiple word negatives - these platforms are also capable of adding words that could be worth bidding on. Some more advanced tools can help users to build entirely new ad groups from the types of queries being observed.

Act quickly on poor performing keywords

If you've been running PPC campaigns for long enough to monitor your ad performance, it could be possible that you've acquired enough data to ascertain whether you're keywords are under performing.

If you're not seeing enough of a return on your investment for certain keywords, it could be worth your while pausing it to focus on obtaining better returns elsewhere.

Poor performing keywords can occur when the specific word has a low search volume. If it's not building much traffic even if you're bidding enough, it could be that the keyword may be too long-railed or not something that's commonly searched for. In this case it's worth pausing these keywords in order to free your account from clutter.

When it comes to PPC are, effective optimisation is essential, especially if your business is still establishing itself in a competitive market. Be sure to focus your budget on keywords that bring you the most sustained success in terms of conversions and avoid going toe-to-toe with competitors over popular search terms. As always, with a little bit of introspection and keyword optimisation, your campaign could yield great results without breaking your budget.