When you are creating an AdWords campaign, you have a limited amount of space to reach potential customers. And you need to accomplish this with many competitors also running PPC campaigns that are trying to reach the same audience. Making your ad campaigns stand out from the crowd with only a few characters to work with is challenging but creating successful and measurable PPC campaigns can be done.

Here are a few tips for how to get the most out of your PPC campaign:

Highlight Results

Since your PPC ad will appear when someone searches on a keyword, you don’t need to use your headline to remind them about what your company does. Instead, focus on the solutions that you provide and the end result that a customer will get by clicking through to your site. Make it very clear what you are offering in return for a click.

For example, a headline such as “Learn More About Fat Reduction” is weak because it gives you no unique information about the product. Instead, a headline that says “Use Laser Liposuction to Painlessly Lose Fat” tells the reader exactly the type of treatment (laser liposuction) being offered and the unique benefit (pain-free treatment) that they can get.

Motivate Action Through Time Sensitivity

People are motivated by thinking that they are going to miss out on a special deal or offer if they don’t act immediately. One way that you can spur people to act quickly is to add a countdown clock or timer to your PPC ad. Google now has given advertisers a way to insert a countdown timer into their text ads by simply adding a snippet inside the headline or description of the ad. This gives you the ability to let people know that a sale is ending or that a special is only good for a few more days (or even hours).

Use Specific Numbers to Add Credibility to Your Claims

It’s one thing to tell your customers how much money you can save them or how many customers you’ve proved services to over the years. It’s another thing to attach specific numbers to these claims. Using figures instead of broad terms such as “many” or “countless” gives your statements credibility in the eyes of potential customers. It’s also been proven that people respond better to exact numbers (like 1,512) rather than rounded numbers (such as “more than 1,500.”)

Keep Ads in the Present

One way to improve your PPC campaigns is to take specific numbers and apply them to the amount of customers you’ve provided services for or products you’ve sold in the last month or year. Doing this creates timely and relevant ads that will make readers want to learn more.

Personalize and Localize Your Pitches

Customers want to feel like you are talking directly to them and that they aren’t just receiving a generic pitch. You can accomplish this goal by using phrases like “you” and “your” as part of your pitch and headline. Another way to personalize your advertising is to localize it by mentioning the reader’s local area or directing them to call a phone number with a local area code.

The purpose of performing a successful PPC campaign is to get clickthroughs — and a lot of them. In many cases, a person will execute a PPC campaign and immediately see very high clickthrough rates only to see the clickthroughs drop significantly after a few months. Unless they are carefully paying attention to their clickthroughs, a campaign can completely bottom out before they realize that it isn’t working anymore.

In most cases the campaign didn’t stop getting clickthroughs because something went wrong — it stopped getting clickthroughs because all PPC campaigns stop getting clickthroughs after a certain period of time. The longer you run the same PPC campaign on the same sites, the more likely you are to see diminishing returns — sometimes happening very rapidly.

In order to plan for successful PPC campaigns, you have to understand that the effectiveness of campaigns will decay over time. This happens for several reasons:

The Novelty Factor

Readers have never seen a PPC campaign when it first launches, which means that the graphics, text and calls to action are fresh. They might click on it out of novelty or because they are intrigued by the content of the ad. But if they’ve seen the ad and clicked through once, there’s little reason for them to click through again. The longer you keep your same ad campaign on the same site, the faster your clickthroughs decline.

The Copycat Factor

If you have a successful PPC campaign, it’s not just your customers who will notice. Your competitors are tracking your ad successes (just like you should be doing with them) and will see what elements of your PPC campaign are attracting customers to click on your ads. Once this happens, there is nothing to stop them from integrating similar elements into their PPC campaigns to attempt to also get positive results. Unless you keep your PPC content and presentation fresh, it will quickly get lost in a sea of copycats.

The Qualified Customer Factor

In order to have a truly successful PPC campaign, you need to make sure that you are reaching the right customers. If you have a successful campaign, this means that qualified customers are reading your ads and clicking through to find out more information. But this also means that the qualified customers will have quickly already clicked through your ads, leaving just low-level and unqualified customers as the only people who haven’t clicked on your campaign.

The solution to this problem is to consistently monitor your PPC campaigns and be ready to either keep the content fresh or advertise in new avenues after a certain period of time. Doing A/B testing will go a long way in helping to determine if your PPC ads are still working or if you need to change things up.

When undertaking an SEO campaign, most people look at their content first. While this is valuable, you also need to consider the first thing that a person will see before going to one of your web pages: the link. It’s important to analyze your SEO page titles in order to make sure that you are maximizing their effectiveness and power to boost your SEO rankings. Here are a few things you need to look at with your URLs:

Work to Create Shorter and Easier to Read URLs: Making the URL of your pages or blog posts easy to understand means that readers seeing the link will have a better sense of what to expect when they click. This also makes the links more attractive to search engines. Including keywords that you want to rank for as part of your URL is still an effective way to increase your rankings. You still want to avoid overstuffing your URLs with keywords — which, like other content, can make it look “spammy” in the eyes of search engines.

Along with easier to read URLs, you also want to keep your URLs as short as possible. This issue isn’t with search engines but with your readers. It’s been proven that people don’t like to read, copy or share longer URLs (over 100 characters).

Single Domains and Subdomains Are the Best: We’ve repeatedly seen the results — when someone fixes their website architecture so all of their content is in a subfolder instead of a subdomain, their SEO results improve. You should also avoid URLs that have multiple folders, since this can create lengthy URLs that appear to have many levels.

Canonicalize Similar URLs: Another way to improve your search engine rankings is to review if you have instances of multiple URLs with similar content. If you do, use a rel=canonical tag to canonicalize the similar URLs.

Avoid Tracking Parameters: Having tracking IDs at the end of the URLs is not as common — or necessary — as it used to be. You may need them in some cases to help track clicks for specific campaigns, however, so use your judgement to determine if the benefits outweigh having lengthy URLs.

Match Your Titles and URLs As Closely As Possible: People want to know the content of their stories before they read them. Keeping your URLs as closely related to the title of your page or blog post as possible will make sure readers know exactly what it’s about just from the link. However, you typically don’t need to worry about using connecting words from your title such as “and,” “or” or “but.”

Watch Out for Awkward Punctuation Characters in URLs: Many characters that are used in titles can create link breaks in URLs or have trouble being recognized by browsers. This can include empty spaces or characters such as “&” or “#.” Try to avoid using special characters in URLs and stick to basic letters and numerals. As noted, avoid spaces in URLs if possible and use dashes or underscores instead.

Keep Redirections to a Minimum: Most users won’t have a problem if a link they click on redirects to a different site. Things start to get dicey when a URL redirects two or more times before getting to its final page. Search spiders might get confused and readers might see this as being “spammy.”

Don’t Use Hashtags to Create Separate Content: There are exceptions to this rule, but generally it’s cleaner to have a fresh URL than to use a hashtag so that someone can jump to a specific point within a page.

Be Careful of Inconsistent Case Sensitivity: This is especially true for Linux/UNIX servers, which can interpret separate cases as separate URLs. Take steps to redirect or canonicalize URLs that use an incorrect case to the right one.

In February, the Federal Communications Commission voted to create new guidelines to limit the ability of Internet Service Providers to manage Internet traffic speeds. In doing so, the FCC sided with Internet advocates and politicians — including President Barack Obama — pushing for “Net Neutrality” and against major ISPs looking to have more over how their Internet speeds are given to customers.

Net Neutrality is the concept that all people should have equal access to traffic on their Internet network. This means that their speeds should be the same as anyone else’s on the same network, regardless of how much high-speed bandwidth they use or which sites they are using. Net Neutrality would ban ISPs from slowing user’s Internet speeds — this includes blocking or slowing access to certain sites to favor their services versus their competitors.

ISPs argued that media sites such as Netflix and YouTube — along with BitTorrent sites — were clogging Internet bandwidth on their networks. They believe that these media sites should have to pay extra in order to provide their customers with unlimited Internet speeds in order to cover the costs of maintaining and growing high-speed broadband connections on the networks.

A U.S. appeals court ruling in 2014 struck down rules prohibiting ISPs from blocking Internet traffic. The FCC responded by creating new regulations that initially would have created a path for ISPs to create “commercially reasonable” pay-for-priority deals with media companies. However, this move was widely criticized by Internet advocates. Even President Obama intervened and called on the FCC to reverse the planned law to be more restrictive of Internet service blocking.

The FCC relented in February and changed course. They used the earlier appeals court ruling to expand their control over deals between content companies and ISPs along with reclassifying broadband to prevent ISPs from blocking their services. ISPs contend that these new rules will stifle innovation and investment in the existing network infrastructure by limited potential revenue streams.