What Are the Best Ways To Manage Your Local PPC Campaigns?

One of the ways local businesses find customers online is through paid ads. Pay-per-click (PPC) is a marketing strategy that delivers product ads, offers, and information to people actively looking for them.

Local companies can benefit significantly from PPC by hiring a local PPC management agency. It takes the following techniques to manage campaigns:

• Perform competitor research
• Create a bidding strategy and budget
• Integrate local keywords
• Optimize the ad landing page
• Include retargeting strategies
• Monitor critical key performance indicators (KPIs)

We have a lot to cover about local PPC. Let’s go!

If you want to learn how Digital Authority Partners can increase your PPC effectiveness, watch this video!

Perform Competitor Research

Competitor research helps local businesses understand the market and learn what they are up against. Research reveals their business’ competitors and how they run their PPC campaigns. It also shows what platforms they use and the trends they follow.

A keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Planner can reveal competitors' keywords for their PPC campaigns. It can show the search terms they are targeting, their budgets, and the traffic for every keyword. Another way to learn about local competitors is to check their online presence.

Look at their ads, landing pages, website, and social media. Marketers use Google Ads to check competitor metrics, including their ad copies, calls-to-action (CTAs), ad copies, and much more. They gather these insights and compare their competitor's performance with their business performance. These can help marketers inform their PPC strategies for effective campaigns.

Create a Bidding Strategy and Budget

After marketers find relevant keywords for their PPC campaigns, they form their bidding strategies and budgets. In PPC, marketers decide how much they pay for every click or the budget for their campaign. A flexible, well-developed budget can help rank ads higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), boosting a business' flexibility.

With a well-planned bidding strategy, marketers can ensure efficient use of the campaign budget. Businesses can guarantee higher revenue on their PPC investments. The key is understanding the different auction systems on various PPC platforms. 

Here are examples of bidding options on Google Ads.

• Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Bidding Option: Pay every time someone clicks on their ad
• Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) Bidding Option: Pay only for conversions
• Cost-Per-View (CPV) Bidding Option:  Pay every time someone clicks their video ad
• Cost-Per-Thousand Viewable Impressions (vCPM) Bidding Option: Pay for every thousand times their ad is shown to their target audience

Understanding these bidding options helps businesses formulate a practical budget for their PPC campaigns.

Integrate Local Keywords

Local businesses, such as local manufacturers, rely on PPC to meet the right customers. They need relevant, localized keywords to boost their visibility. Local keywords emphasize the target market and help the ad reach the right people. Marketers integrate local keywords in the ad title, copy, and landing page. They consider the following when selecting local keywords for PPC:

• Identify the actual location of the customers. It can be the city, county, community, or region where the target market resides.
• Determine the area that the company serves. This can be the county, city, region, country, or surrounding areas.
• Focus on the terms preferred by the target market. Find relevant terms using a keyword research tool. Do local customers search for "makeup" or "cosmetics," "sneakers," or "running shoes"?
• Consider conversational search terms. With the rise of voice-activated devices such as smart speakers, local customers use conversation-like words to find what they need. For example, “Where is the nearest fitness gym?”
• Include “near me” keywords. Local customers search for nearby businesses using local keywords such as “Pilates classes near me” or “nearby yoga studio.”

With local keywords ready, businesses can optimize their landing pages to help their ads rank higher.

Optimize the Ad Landing Page

The landing page is where users "land" to accept the offer stated in the ad. Optimizing the landing page keeps customers interested in the offer and guides them until they are ready to purchase.

The most important strategy to remember when optimizing landing pages is to ensure they are relevant to the ad copy. It needs to contain the offer or the information promised in the ad to increase the value of the customers' experience. Here are the best practices to optimize the ad landing page:

• Use a relevant title that matches the title of the search ad
• Adopt a clean page layout and design
• Highlight the offer by placing the product or service name in bold
• Create responsive landing pages to work with different screen sizes 
• Use responsive CTAs so customers can see them whether they are on mobile or desktop
• Include high-quality, relevant images
• Support the offer with success stories, testimonials, ratings, or reviews

Include Retargeting

Retargeting is about reaching customers who have previously visited the website or landing page without converting. These customers might have clicked on an ad and visited the landing page but did not make a purchase. They might have completed an inquiry form but did not accept the ad's offer.

With retargeting, marketers can create more personalized ads because they already know what customers want. Marketers use two types of retargeting ads:

• Pixel-Based: The retargeting ad appears after customers leave the website without buying anything. Ads use cookies to gather information about customer behavior and thus retarget them with the products they viewed.
• List-Based: The retargeting ads use email addresses users provide as they fill out sign-up forms. These ads offer retargeting by using already-available information.

With the right retargeting strategy, businesses can attract visitors previously interested in their products or brands with irresistible offers sure to bring them back.

Monitor Critical KPIs

Part of considering PPC as a marketing strategy is monitoring and analyzing critical metrics. Monitoring key KPIs can give businesses insights into their performance over time. They can produce data-driven decisions that can help improve their paid advertising strategies. Marketers should watch out for these six KPIs:

• Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Calculate by dividing the overall cost of the campaign by the total clicks
• Clickthrough Rate (CTR): The total ad clicks divided by the times the ad displays
• Conversion Rate: The total conversions divided by the total visitors for a period
• Impressions: The number of times the ad is shown to users
• Ad Spend: The money spent on advertising
• Quality Score: A rating from one to ten, with ten being the highest, showing how it performs compared to other ads from local competitors.

Tracking these KPIs can help businesses improve their PPC campaigns and reach their marketing goals.

Summing Up

Manage a local PPC campaign efficiently by performing competitor research, developing a bidding strategy and budget, and using local keywords. Remember to optimize ad landing pages, use retargeting strategies, and monitor KPIs to ensure PPC success.

Partner with a local PPC management agency and create a formidable paid ad strategy to win your customers online. Contact Digital Authority Partners for the latest in local PPC and more.