7 Insider Tips You Can Use to Generate More PPC Landing Page Traffic

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click advertising, is one of the most effective ways to get qualified leads to your landing page.

The problem is, because it’s so good at getting the traffic businesses want, it’s also super-competitive—and frequently expensive.

If you’re willing to put in some extra effort, though, there are a few things you can do to get great results from PPC without destroying your budget.

1. Mobile Optimization

There are now more searches on mobile platforms every day than on desktop, and that means the mobile arena is more important to your advertising efforts than ever.

The sooner you develop a mobile PPC strategy that works, the more clicks you’ll get before the competition gets serious.

Mobile advertising has different rules than desktop advertising—for example, the specific position of your ads on the page can make a difference on desktop, but on mobile it’s crucial. To find out how well your ads do on the different platforms, segment your analytics by device.

It’s not enough to create landing pages with responsive design, they need to actually be designed with mobile users in mind. Otherwise Google will penalize you and make it hard to get your ads where they need to be.

If your mobile experience is lagging behind, it’s time to bring it up to date.

2. Retargeting

There are tons of reasons people might leave your landing page without converting, but regardless of their reason most people who do so never come back.

Retargeting is the solution—it lets you put a tracking cookie into browsers that come to your site.

Once that cookie’s in place, you can use it to make sure the visitor continues to see your ads, reminding them of why they came to your page in the first place.

When they do come back, they’ll be warmer leads than the first time, and much more likely to convert.

Even better, retargeting is usually extremely cheap, so almost every PPC campaign works better with retargeting added into the mix.

3. Warm Up With Social Promotion

Paid search options like PPC don’t have to be restricted to the search engines. Social media is also a viable medium.

In general, paid search targets people who are actively seeking a solution to a problem they have.

Social media, on the other hand, can allow you to build brand awareness so that people know what you have to offer before they decide their problem requires action.

Plus, if you bring visitors to your site through social promotion, you can use retargeting to make sure your products and services stay visible to them until they’re ready to buy.

You’ll need a solid social media strategy to really make this work, but if you put in the time and effort to do it right, it will pay off.

4. Bid for Traffic on Your Competitor’s Branded Search Terms

When buying ads, it makes sense to grab some of the traffic that would otherwise only go to your competitors. After all, if you sell similar solutions, people who look for them will probably be interested in what you have to offer as well.

If you can get your brand in front of a competitor’s potential customers, that gives you a great opportunity to get visitors who are already interested in your product or service, and interested in comparing what’s available.

Set up your landing page properly, and you’ll probably be able to capture not only your competitor’s traffic, but their conversions as well.

If you’re not sure how to get the copy on your landing page where it needs to be, many of the best sites for writing help can provide review or copywriting services to help you out.

5. Use Google’s in-market audiences

Banner ads are almost laughably bad performers, but when they’re so poorly targeted it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Almost no one in their audience is interested, so of course they don’t get a lot of clicks.

One way to make sure your ad shows up for a relevant audience is to make use of Google’s In-Market Audiences.

This tool helps you target your ads at the people who want them. Or at least, who want what you’re advertising.

Leveraging Google’s data about an individual’s search patterns, if the data suggest a person is considering a particular type of purchase—like a motorcycle, for instance—companies using in-market audiences can target that individual with ads for the very things they’re looking to buy.

That means those ads are more likely to get clicked.

6. GSP - Gmail Sponsored Promotions

Gmail Sponsored Promotions are essentially just what they sound like—a way for you to get your ads in front of Gmail users based on what’s in their emails.

Google checks the emails a person reads and sends for keywords, and if you’ve done an ad buy for those keywords, puts an ad right in the person’s inbox.

This is a relatively new option in AdWords, so it may be a good time to get in on it ahead of the competition.

7. Don’t Pay For Ads That Don’t Get Results

No matter what specific PPC strategy you use, if you fail to monitor and analyze ad performance you’ll end up wasting money.

It’s critical that you pay attention and modify or kill the parts of your strategy that don’t result in conversions.

If nothing else, you need to track conversions to know if your strategy is working as a whole. But if you want to be able to optimize, you’ll need to be able to track how much you’re spending on marketing at every step of the way.

Even if your ads get a lot of clicks, or your landing page gets a lot of people to convert, if your marketing strategy isn’t making more than it costs, it’s a waste of money.

Put in the effort to find the parts of your PPC strategy that aren’t working and cut them out. That’ll clear up space in your budget to find better ways to bring visitors to your landing page and make the sale.

Conclusion

It’s easy to take a look at a marketing campaign that mostly works and decide that’s good enough.

But if you want to get the most out of your PPC campaigns—whether they’re currently doing okay or not—you have to get creative, test new ideas, and eliminate whatever doesn’t work.

Give the seven tips above a try and see how they give you an edge in boosting your success with using PPC to drive traffic to your landing page.