Using PPC to Increase Conversions

Paid search advertising is a marketing technique where you pay to have your website displayed on the search engine results page. The alternative or counterpart to paid search is organic search, where the search engine ranks your businesses site based on key factors and displays it somewhere on the results page at no cost to your business. This sounds enticing, but if your businesses site isn’t ranking very high on SERPs, then it’s definitely time to invest in paid search. 

What is PPC?

Paid search is commonly referred to as Pay-Per-Click(PPC) advertising. The really cool part about PPC is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad. This means that you aren't paying for people that scroll on past.

There are three key elements of a paid search advertising campaign: keywords, ads, and landing pages. 

Let’s dive deeper into PPC with a case study on how Western Washington University’s(WWU) MBA Program can leverage PPC advertising to increase awareness and applications.

How MBA Programs Can Leverage PPC to Increase Conversions

If you type “MBA programs” into Google right now, Western’s MBA program doesn’t appear in the search results on the first page or the second page. I didn’t bother looking beyond page 2 because let’s be honest, no one does. I narrowed the search down to “MBA programs in Washington State”, and still there’s no mention of WWU on the first page of the search engine results. This isn't good because 75% of people never even go past page one of search results. It's clear that organic search alone is not enough.

Let me outline how WWU can go about implementing a paid search strategy. 

Step 1: Outline your business goals. 

For WWU, the goal is to increase awareness and applications. We want to put the WWU MBA program on prospective students radars and then we want to take it a step further and make sure they actually apply. 

Step 2: Do keyword research and select the right keywords for your business.

Chances are, the WWU MBA program has already done keyword research to help with their SEO and organic search strategies. Keyword research is important because you’re essentially going to provide Google(or Bing, or Facebook) with a list of keywords like “MBA programs”, and other words your research proves to be important. Then, when users search for those phrases or terms your ad will pop up in the SERP to direct users to your website. By using PPC to appear on more users SERPs, and specifically on the SERPs of users looking for MBA programs, there will be higher levels of brand awareness and an increase in application numbers. 

Step 3: Write compelling ad copy!!!

Now that you’ve determined when you want your ad to appear on the SERP, you have to make sure that your ad is enticing enough for users to click on it.

Step 4: Use A/B Testing

There is never any reason to guess when it comes to marketing, and it’s no different for PPC. Use A/B testing to make sure that you’re sending out the absolute best(meaning generates the most conversions) version of the advertisements. Don’t waste your ad dollars or dwindle away the marketing budget on ineffective ads. 

Step 5: Optimize your landing page

You’ve selected the right keywords so your ads appear in relevant search results and your ad copy is enticing enough for people to click on it, but where does it lead users to? Develop landing pages that match the intent of the users search terms. For the WWU MBA program, the primary goal is to increase applications, so the program information and how to apply should be easy to find on the landing page. If users can’t find what they’re looking for they probably won’t stay on your website for very long. Some ways to make the landing page more appealing are to grab the users interest, keep the amount of copy down, and have prominent call to action buttons. You can use more A/B testing here to determine what version of your landing pages function the best. 

Step 6: Track and measure the results

One of the huge benefits of using PPC is how easily you can keep track of your efforts. If you're using Google Ads to run your PPC campaigns you can use the performance tracking tools they offer in combination with Google Analytics to view the stats and analyze the performance of your campaigns.

PPC advertising is fairly simple to implement and you can even start with a fairly small budget and scale up as you begin to see the results. Using paid search allows you to reach a broader audience and increase brand awareness. With such a low barrier to entry and obvious evidence that relying solely on organic search is not working for the WWU MBA program, implementing a PPC advertising campaign is a no brainer.

What's even more exciting here is that the steps outlined above can really apply to any business. Whether this is the first time you've heard of PPC or its something you've been considering for a while, I encourage you to give it a try and see for yourself the effects it can have on reaching your businesses goals.