How to use pay-per-click advertising to increase sales
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website and increasing sales. However, it’s important to take a methodical approach to your campaigns to maximize your return on investment.
PPC ads show up on search engine results pages when potential customers enter keywords you have chosen. You pay only when someone clicks on your ad. By monitoring the performance of your ads, you can fine-tune your keywords, ads and website to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.
“There’s a lot of room to experiment with online advertising,” says BDC manager of Demand Generation, Adrian Turner. “It requires more hands-on management and monitoring than traditional advertising, but it allows you to achieve more targeted results.”
Turner offers these helpful steps to creating successful PPC campaigns.
1. Set up your website analytics
The goal of online advertising is to drive people to your website, either to raise awareness of your business or convert traffic into leads or sales. To know if it’s working, you need to use software like Google Analytics to collect data about who is visiting your site. If you don’t already have analytics in place, your tech manager or web agency can set it up for you.
Analytics can tell you if your specific goals, such as increasing page views or number of sales, are being reached. You can also learn where visitors are coming from, which pages they’re visiting, how long they’re staying, and if they are repeat visitors.
Turner says it’s important to maintain control over access to this data.
“Your web partner can do the set-up, but make sure you own the login credentials. If you change web agencies at some point down the road, you don’t want to be locked out of your analytics or lose your historical data.”
2. Target your audience
It’s not enough to get a high-volume of traffic to your website—you want to attract the right people, i.e. your ideal customer. You can target your ads to potential customers in specific geographic locations. Geo-targeted PPC can be especially useful for local services or seasonal businesses, as it helps focus ad spend where it’s most likely to yield results.
If you sell a product online, you’ll want to select countries you're equipped to ship to. Consider using demographic and interest-based targeting to refine your audience further. Platforms like Google Ads allow you to specify details such as age, gender, income level and even lifestyle interests. This can be especially valuable for niche products or services that appeal to specific customer profiles. By honing in on the most relevant audience, you’ll make your PPC spend more efficient and improve the likelihood of turning clicks into conversions.
There’s a lot of room to experiment with online advertising. It requires more hands-on management and monitoring than traditional advertising, but it allows you to achieve more targeted results.
Adrian Turner
Manager, Demand Generation, BDC
3. Create an online advertising account
Creating an online advertising account is your first step toward launching a PPC campaign. Start by setting up a Google Ads account, as Google commands the majority of online searches in Canada and globally. When setting up your account, you'll enter basic information about your business, including location, industry and advertising goals, which helps Google recommend initial settings tailored to your needs.
Once you have a functioning Google Ads campaign, you can easily set up an account with Bing, the second-most used search engine.
4. Choose your keywords
Search ads are based on keywords: Words or phrases people use when looking for products, services or other information on the web.
There are a number of ways to pinpoint the best ones for your business.
- Look at what competitors are using.
- Think like your customer and come up with words and phrases they would use to search for your product or service.
- Use Google’s Keyword Planner, a free tool that provides keyword suggestions based on your industry, website and existing keywords.
- Consider long-tail keywords, which are longer more specific keyword phrases that may have lower search volume but often result in higher conversion rates, (e.g. “running shoes” vs. “comfortable running shoes for beginners”).
5. Use negative keywords
Google Ads allows you to add negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing up for irrelevant searches. For example, if you sell high-end products, you might want to exclude keywords like "cheap" or "free" to avoid attracting unqualified leads. This strategy helps optimize budget by focusing only on relevant traffic.
“As you learn more, you’ll be able to be more strategic in the keywords you select,” Turner says. “You can start saving money and differentiating your business by bidding on less common keywords but still have your ad seen by a lot of people.”
How the Google Keyword auction works
The cost of keywords is determined by an auction process. Turner suggests bidding on lots of keywords at first. You’ll quickly see which ones get your ads into top positions on a page—if they rank at all—for what you’re willing to pay. Then you can narrow your list. (There are four ad slots on a search result page. The higher you are, the more clicks you’re likely to attract.)
If you want your business associated with a particular keyword or phrase, you submit a bid to Google—how much you’re willing to pay to have your ad displayed when someone searches for that word or phrase. Then, when someone searches, Google compares your bid to all other bids to determine how high ads will be displayed on a page, if at all. But it doesn’t just promote the highest bidder to the top of the list.
Instead, Google also looks at your ad—how relevant it is likely to be for the person who is searching. It’s the combination of relevance and price that determines how your ad ranks.
This process happens every time someone submits a search using your keyword, so you could “lose” one auction but win another. That’s why you need to monitor your ad performance over time to get a sense of a trend. You can do this by using the preview function in your Google Ads account.
Turner recommends determining a maximum monthly budget for click-throughs to your website. Once that amount is reached, your ad will stop appearing. For example, if you pay $0.50 per word and select a budget of $500, your ad will run for 1,000 click-throughs.
People sometimes expect to see results right away. If your goal is to drive more traffic to your site, you may see volumes go up pretty quickly, but if you’re looking to increase sales, it can still take time. Be patient and monitor.
Adrian Turner
Manager, Demand Generation, BDC
6. Optimize your landing pages
Make sure the landing page where visitors arrive after clicking your ad is relevant to the keywords and ad copy. Consider adding strong calls to action (CTA), testimonials or special offers to increase engagement. Use whitespace strategically, keep forms short and place your CTA in a prominent location. Focus on making the page easy to navigate and visually appealing without overwhelming visitors.
You’ll also want to ensure that your landing page closely matches the message in your ad. If your ad promises a discount, special offer or specific information, make sure that’s front and center on the landing page. A seamless user experience from ad to landing page can significantly improve conversions.
7. A/B test your ads
Experiment with different versions of your ad copy to see which performs best. You can test different headlines, calls to action or even keyword strategies. By regularly testing and refining your ads, you can improve click-through rates (CTR) and return on investment (ROI).
Consider experimenting with visual elements like images, colors and layouts, especially if you’re running display ads. Small changes in visuals can sometimes make a big difference in engagement.
8. Monitor continuously
Once you’re familiar with the basics of PPC advertising, you can use the control settings in your account to adjust the time period during which you want your ad to appear and how much you are willing to spend.
The web is a dynamic environment. By monitoring your ad performance, you can make sure your PPC investment keeps producing strong returns.
Beyond search-based ads, Turner says there are other forms of PPC available you can also explore, like re-marketing display ads.
“Re-marketing ads follow people who have been to your site and pop up on other sites they visit. They remind people who you are and that they’ve looked at your business. You can develop an awesome synergy with both search and display advertising working together.”
Next step
Learn how to turn website visitors into customers by downloading BDC’s free guide, Attracting and Selling Online.