In any form of digital marketing like PPC advertising, social media marketing, etc., giving worth to the user's satisfaction is utterly essential. Providing the target audience with value to their search intent is a great way to boost their engagement on your website and eventually retain their loyalty to your brand. One of the most critical aspects of marketing any product is to provide maximum fulfillment to the users' satisfaction level. If your company is trying to provide or give value to the user experience, then an essential result of online marketing is already achieved. Constantly working to improve customer experience will always benefit your brand to achieve their call-to-action and get their desired or estimated return on investment. A good UX gives a positive impression of your brand to the user. Still, it is necessary to be constant throughout the overall user journey, especially in PPC ads where the main objective is to achieve conversions through persuasion to click the ad.
Every brand recognizes the value of positive user experience in digital advertising and all the other stages of marketing, starting from creating a healthy brand image to finally generating revenue through sales. On digital platforms, using the search engine, your target audience will first type their search terms on the search engines to get the desired solution to their query, and if they intend to buy a product, they will mostly navigate to the ad results. Search engine result pages present two types of search results, one is paid ad results or pay-per-click ads and the second one is the organic result which is related to search engine optimization. PPC advertising has a high percentage of conversion as the ads provide all the necessary information to the users, i.e., price, features, and appearance. Therefore if a user is clicking on the PPC ads, there is a very high probability that they intend to complete a transaction and fulfill a brand’s desired call-to-action.
PPC advertising is one of the essential methods in digital marketing and can be used to achieve quick results, like building brand awareness, lead generation, etc. There are different channels of PPC advertising, but Google is the most preferred one due to the vast amount of active users it has. The process of PPC advertising is simple; an advertiser pays a fixed amount to the search engine when their ad is clicked and the amount is determined by bidding on the target keywords which they are willing to choose for their PPC ads. The sequence in which the ads are shown is directly related to the amount paid; the more you pay, the higher it displays.
It doesn’t matter if your brand is keen to provide the best products to the customers or give them the highest value of the amount they are ready to pay for your product. If the user journey from your brand’s pay-per-click ad to the point of the ad's call-to-action is not smooth, then the sale's end goal and future customer retention will never occur. That is why a smooth and positive user experience holds too much weight and there are dedicated UX researchers teams to ensure every possibility of negatively affecting a good UX is eliminated.
How to give a good user experience in PPC
There is definitely a good chance of conversion using PPC ads and to increase this chance, providing an enhanced user experience throughout the complete user journey is an essential requirement. The user journey doesn’t necessarily start with the target audience clicking the pay-per-click ads and navigating to the landing page; it requires more. There should be complete relevancy regarding the user's search term to the content they encounter and the overall journey in between, which includes navigating to the site, selecting the product to buy, completing the transaction, and finally being satisfied with the product. Certain essential factors need to be considered when providing a good user experience to the consumers.
• Recognizing the most preferable audience - The most important metric for creating PPC ads is to identify the audience. No brands just want to click on their ads and don’t get a conversion. If your brand is bidding on the most relevant keywords to prepare ads for their most suited audience, they want the maximum worth of the amount paid to the search engine after every click on their ad. Therefore, recognizing the preferable audience becomes very necessary to get the utmost return on investment from the advertising cost. Knowledge of the audience helps the brand strategies the most effective PPC advertising and improves customer experience.
To understand the audience, you need to identify their buying pattern and characteristics to closely decipher the type of PPC ads they are attracted to, what is their requirement from a preferred product, at what time they are most active on any digital media platform, their most used online marketing medium, their spending capacity and also the demographics, i.e., where do they live, their age, race, religion, etc.
Your brand or any other brand in the world, if tried to satisfy every target audience of their respective business, would have failed due to several limitations because it is impossible to create a separate PPC marketing strategy for individuals; that is why buyer personas are created. In the buyer persona, you can mark the characteristics of similar audience groups and create different pay-per-click ads for the respective groups.
• Passing the PPC ad through different stages - Even if the desired outcome is to achieve sales, the PPC ads should pass through different marketing stages to accomplish better results. If your brand is starting its advertising cycle by spreading general awareness of the product, then understanding the pro and cons of PPC advertising comes early to the advertiser. Running test ads to evaluate the advertising campaign and then making a better PPC advertising strategy will lead to more promising conversions. The product should be advertised in stages, primarily focused on creating brand awareness, generating leads, and then obtaining sales.
• Don’t be too pushy to achieve sales - To improve customer experience, your brand’s digital advertising should only focus on delivering the product message in a creative way that attracts the target audience to click on the call to action without seeming to be pushy automatically. Being too pushy in your PPC ads to accomplish sales will negatively impact the user experience. The target audience expects that the brand will put effort into building a positive relationship with them and not create an atmosphere of obligation to perform a quick buy; therefore, the PPC ads should not be too much intrusive.
• Creative pay-per-click ads - To make the PPC advertising more appealing to the target audience, it should have a creative element. Creativity boosts the attention to any kind of information to be presented to the users. To give a good UX and extract more time from the users to go through your product ads thoroughly requires being innovative in selling them the idea about why to buy a particular product. If your brand needs professionals to add creativity to the digital advertising of its products, it can always outsource PPC company to insert the essential creative element in the ads to increase conversions and improve customer experience.
• Provide some value through the product and highlight it in your ads - A product or its ad becomes highly worthy if it’s providing some value to the consumer. If the target audience, persuaded by the PPC ads, decides to make a transaction to buy the product and use it, then it should provide greater worth and satisfaction to the consumer than the amount they spend on the product. When the value derived from consuming a product is more than the cost applied, then the retention of the consumer gets simplified. So, preparing PPC ads and intentionally highlighting the product value in them prepares the base for achieving revenue generation through sales and long-term customer retention.
• Redirecting to the relevant landing page - The ad clicks will change into conversion when the users are redirected to the relevant landing pages. When the visitors search on the search engine and find your product ads, they most often expect to land on the specific page to their query, which primarily makes them interested in clicking on the PPC ads. If they are guided to the relatable page, then the satisfaction with their search intent will always be there and the bounce rate will be extremely low. So, on the part of the visitors, it will lead to a good UX and for the product advertisers maximum conversion chance.
• The loading speed of the website - Website loading speed is one of the critical factors in determining the success of PPC ads. The speed at which the website loads plays a vital role in making a PPC advertising campaign a success or a failure. With the passage of time, using high-speed internet has become a habit and every user desires quick navigation. With quick surfing of the website and a smooth navigating experience, the chances of achieving the required call-to-action increase as the visitors can perform all the necessary steps required to achieve the advertiser's intended action briefly.
The digital medium has emerged as one of the most influential platforms for advertising the product and accomplishing other important marketing goals. Considering all the essential factors of creating a good UX for the users through the PPC ads benefits the brand and its future aspirations in the digital marketing field. Many companies outsource PPC services to achieve their goals related to advertising as the digital marketing services companies have specialized knowledge in this field and can benefit your overall online advertising campaign with their expertise. Some of the companies also work as white-label PPC providers.
In white label PPC, a company pays another company for the advertising services and sells it to the customer as its own. It primarily works as a B2B model and then converts into a B2C model. It doesn’t really matter if the ad service is given directly or through a white label PPC company until and unless it is benefiting the company with:
i. Regular sales and retention - If the PPC ads are up to the mark and take care of all the critical factors that are important in generating a satisfying user experience, then the sales intensify with time because it is visible that one of the brand's priorities is to improve customer experience. This boosts the product's sales and helps in retention as the customer now participates in regular and reoccurring buying.
ii. Generates trust and builds brand loyalty - With enhanced user experience and reoccurring sales, the users' loyalty to the brand strengthens and creates an atmosphere of elevated trust.
iii. Increases authenticity - PPC ads, when properly matched with the search terms of the user, leave a positive impact and pass relevant information to the user, which with time increases the authenticity of the brand.
Final thoughts
User experience is one of the most important metrics which is considered highly valuable in any successful digital advertising campaign, especially in PPC advertising, where the users already have their primary focus on searching on the search engine to initiate and complete a sale transaction. To let the transaction complete smoothly without any hindrance, the emphasis should always be on giving an enhanced user journey from the beginning to the end, i.e., from the start when the user clicks on the PPC ads to the point of sale where the transaction completes and the desired call-to-action of the digital advertising is realized.
Both a good UX and a highly rated PPC advertising campaign are inter-related; if users receive a sense of satisfaction after visiting the ad, then it depicts that the PPC advertising has been done well and if the PPC advertising is up to the standards, then it will automatically generate an improved UX. For specialized and result-oriented PPC services, a well-performing digital marketing company can always be hired; these companies have many services in their bucket like outsource PPC services, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, SEO services, market research, etc., which can be outsourced according to needs and wants of online marketing services seekers.
References
• The ultimate guide on common UX mistakes to avoid
• PPC for beginners: The ultimate guide to PPC advertising