Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a tool that many use to increase traffic to their sites, and in effect, increase revenues for their business. Using these ads to entice people to proceed to a website or a landing page that has either a message or a sales pitch is a common practice among website owners. While it may seem that PPC is just what it is, an ad on SERPs that help websites with their business, every year, trends for making these more effective and more useful come out.
This year, there are many new ideas that are emerging to show users how they can increase not only traffic, but also conversions with the use of their pay-per-click ads. Whether you should use these trends or not on your own ads is dependent on whether or not you think these will actually be beneficial to your site and business. Either way, here are some of ideas that may be worth looking into:
Use your PPC ads to inform and not to simply sell off-the-bat – not all websites can easily sell to their visitors, particularly if what they are selling is a bit more complex than a simple product. When you use your ads to inform people, you get them to understand what you are actually trying to sell to them. This can make individuals buy after they get the lowdown on what is being sold, or come back at a later time to purchase after they have done some more research on what you are selling. Giving people information about what you are selling by way of a landing page that tells more about what you have, or by leading them to a page on your site that educates them about what it is you are trying to get them to buy, is seen as an emerging trend this year.
Utilizing ad extensions to highlight what you are offering – with the stiff competition you are constantly getting from your counterparts in the industry, it is essential that you have a pitch that really captures the attention of your target market. While ads have a limited number of characters on them for you to do this, you can utilize what is called an ad extension to further elaborate on your offerings. These extensions do not appear on ads that are not high in rank however, so you may need to ensure first that your PPC ads are well thought out and well made in order for you to take advantage of such a feature.
Mobile PPC is also going to be bigger this year, since more and more people do their browsing on their smartphones and tablets. If you want to get a huge corner of that market, you will need to use this to your advantage by adding mobile PPC specific tweaks to your ads. For example, with the ad extensions that we mentioned earlier, if you want people to be able to call your company for orders the moment they see your PPC ad, adding a clickable phone number via ad extensions will help you do just that. You can find out how these ad extensions can be added to your ads by visiting Google’s Adwords help page.