Pump up the volume: six ways PPC can boost your promotions

Sometimes, you need a little extra boost for certain products or services – be it a product with excess inventory, a new service or simply something you want to catapult into the spotlight.

PPC tactics can help get the word out, and I’m going to show you how in six steps.

1. Sitelinks strategy

I’ve talked before about using your ad extensions strategically, and sitelinks is one of those extensions that can help get the word out in your ads.

And I’m not just talking about using the appropriate sitelinks for a particular ad group (e.g. a dog sweater ad with a dog sweater sitelink). Consider this: a furniture client of ours had a product line they wanted to start promoting on their own after they ended an affiliate program.

We placed a sitelink that led to that product line’s landing page in every campaign we could.

Because the rest of the ad was strategically constructed to be as relevant as possible, this was simply an added bonus and highlighted one of the product lines they thought people might like to know about.

2. Remarketing campaigns

Remarketing is a powerful advertising tool. So consider using it to boost conversions on the product or service you want to promote.

Going back to our furniture client example, we typically ran remarketing campaigns on AdWords for specific types of furniture (loungers, deep seats, etc.), but for this promo, we wanted to set up a campaign specifically for the collection they were trying to sell more of – so any type of furniture in that collection.

Anyone who landed on any page in that section of the client’s site would now be put into a new remarketing campaign with ads specific to the collection. This gave the line more visibility as shoppers browsed the Web.

p.s. If you want tips on optimizing your remarketing campaign once it’s up and running, check out an earlier post I wrote about optimizing AdWords remarketing campaigns.

3. Bing Ads

The Bing Ads network has been known to have less competition and a lower cost per click across many categories. Plus, Bing has a nice share of the pie when it comes to search engine rankings, as reported by comScore.

I always say, if it can bring in more paid search revenue, why not spend some time and effort there?

Typically, we’d take our best performers on AdWords and import them over to Bing Ads. But, if you’re trying to promote a service or product, go on and create a new campaign just for that on Bing and see how it fares. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.

4. Look into trends

It never hurts to look into the actual queries that are driving conversions within any particular ad group to see if there are more opportunities to build out new ads and target new keywords.

Peep into your AdWords Search Terms report or Google Analytics Search Queries to view the keywords that are converting that you may not have thought of.

This is a small step you can do to grab even more visibility in the search results and boost those promotions further.

5. Video ads

Video ads are gaining ground and provide an engaging, low-cost way for people to learn from and interact with a brand. In fact, Forrester predicts that spend on video ads for desktop will grow 21% annually until 2019.

When we wanted to promote our client’s furniture collection, we refocused their current video budget to create new ads specifically for that.

But, reality check: Video ads are not easy or cheap to make (when done well), so some brands may not have the budget to create and then advertise video. But, you can see clicks as low as $0.09 (what we’ve seen with some retail clients who are experimenting with TrueView ads) – not bad.

If you’re going to go down this road, think about creative ways your video can add value or entertainment versus just highlighting product or service features.

Maybe you take the opportunity to teach your audience something new in a how-to video ad (by the way, how-to video searches are hot) or incite humor in some way.

6. Review differentiators

Your promotion can fall flat if your competition is offering nice little perks above and beyond what you do. Take a critical eye to your value-added services and make sure to build those into your ads so they really stand out.

For example, do you:

• Have a good return policy?
• Offer free shipping?
• Give samples of whatever you’re selling, before a shopper buys?

Little things like this can ensure your ad gets the click, not someone else’s.

PPC is a great channel to help you advertise your promotions, whatever they may be. I hope the ideas in this article inspire you just a little to use all the great features that AdWords and Bing Ads can offer to help spread the word about your promotional products and services.

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