5 Best Practices for PPC Marketing in 2023

Pay-per-click marketing (PPC) has long been held as an impactful form of advertising, particularly when strategized, managed, and adapted correctly. Every year brings changes to the nature of PPC advertising. However, with platform rule and guideline changes, audience behavior and other factors sometimes at breakneck pace. With that in mind, here are our top five tips for best practices in the space for 2023.

Automate Your Campaigns

Last year saw an advance in the underlying technology used by many platforms and even agencies. They embraced artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate PPC campaigns management better. 

The ability to react quickly to market dynamics and different metrics is one of the critical benefits of PPC. For example, rather than starting an advertising campaign and then having to see it through before responding to feedback, you can make changes and optimize on the fly.

PPC automation takes this to the next step, as you cede the responsibility for monitoring and changing your campaign to advanced and cutting-edge technologies. 2023 will see further advancements in AI and machine learning and further adoption of automation. If you want your campaigns to remain competitive, you will need to move with the times.

Use Responsive Search Ads

Responsive search allows you to create several different headlines and descriptions for each advert. Then mixed and matched to gauge the best, most fruitful advert construction. This technique is not a new practice, but 2023 is the year you need to start if you are not currently using it. 

The amount of campaign data available to you is decreasing thanks to factors that include data handling regulations and a move to reliance on search engine algorithms. As a result, responsive search becomes increasingly crucial for campaign optimization.

Do you still need convincing? Google’s data indicates that using responsive search ads can improve your PPC advertising campaign by up to 10% in some cases. As a result, a good return on a few extra minutes of work.

Embrace New Technologies

Over the last few years, the growth in video PPC advertising has been steady, and there is no reason to think that 2023 will see any change in that trend. 

In addition, there is typically less competition for video advertising than text ads so that you can expand your audience reach reasonably consistently. But, of course, these ads need more effort and time, with different skill sets than text ads. You will need lighting, camera, scripting, editing, etc., to make your video ad, for example.

As virtual reality seems poised to leap from niche to commonplace, you should start to think of it as the logical next step for pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Of course, this will need another set of skills and resources to achieve, but it could be time and money well spent as the market matures. Check out this article for an interesting read on the momentum building behind virtual reality technology.

Voice search is also trending upwards and presents a different sort of challenge for marketers. You will need to tailor your search terms and keywords to account for this audience, taking something of a readjustment. You will need to move towards writing for language as spoken rather than typed. 

Voice search also tends to lean towards location-based intent. For example, consumers are likely to say ‘pizza place near me’ rather than type ‘pizza place’ because they assume that the search engine will account for location. Constructing your campaigns with voice search will improve your PPC results, so spend some time fully understanding the voice search market for optimum returns. 

Manage Your Audience

We alluded to an overall reduction in the amount of data available to PPC marketers, something that has been occurring for the last couple of years. This data limitation is in part due to the leading platforms (Google, Facebook, Bing, etc.) transitioning advertisers to a more automated environment, as well as global data management policies tightening. As a result, this translates to you being able to do less on the advertising side, but it does mean that you can focus your efforts on the audience.

Ensure your PPC is created for and targeted toward your potential customers at each stage of their buying journey. You can do this by delivering quality adverts tailored to each buying cycle stage. 

Confirm that you know what your clicks mean to you – are they coming from people just entering the sales funnel or towards the end? Do you need to speak to new customers or loyal repeat visitors? Once you know who and where your audience is (in the sales cycle), you can start to fine-tune your PPC to get maximum value.

Expand Your Presence

When you think of PPC, the chances are that you think of Google Ads. They have been, and remain, so dominant in the search space that it can be tempting to put all your eggs in the Google/Alphabet basket – you should resist this temptation. Other platforms may not have the raw power of Google but leveraged skillfully; they can still provide you with an impressive return on ad spend.

In quarter 1 of 2021, Microsoft Ads/Bing accounted for almost a third of mobile and tablet click-throughs (according to this study). Is that an audience that you can ignore? What about social media? Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are not going away any time soon and have massive amounts of daily users. All of whom can be encouraged to visit your landing pages with carefully curated advertising.

Digital Authority Partners

To find out more about PPC in 2023, get help with your advertising strategy, or launch a fully managed campaign, get in touch with our award-winning Las Vegas PPC agency. Whatever your marketing and advertising goals, we can help you reach them by creating, implementing, and managing a campaign that delivers measurable results.