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.

If you are running PPC ads, you need to be performing A/B testing on a regular basis to ensure that your ads are performing as well as they should. A/B testing gives you a way to test different elements of an ad to see if changes improve or harm the clickthrough rate. Doing this is a critical step to keeping your ads fresh and improving your performance. In fact, when you hire a PPC management expert to help with your program, A/B testing is one of the first things that they will likely recommend.

A/B testing might seem complicated, but it’s something that anyone can accomplish. We’ve put together some easy steps to help you to do your own A/B testing and improve the performance of your PPC ad campaigns:

1. Determine the highest-performing ad from an ad group that generates a high amount of traffic for you. You’ll want to focus on ads that have already proven to be successful to see where they can be tweaked.

2. Put the original ad on hold and make a pair of duplicate copies of this ad. From there, make a pair of tweaks to perform the test you want to accomplish. This can mean changing the text from “all caps” to all lowercase, using different images or color elements.

3. Halt all of the other ads in your ad group so only the ads that you are running A/B testing on are live. Make sure to label these ads with their date and the changes made in AdWords.

4. Make sure you have “Optimize for Clicks” selected in AdWords to get the most accurate results.

5. Let the ads run for a lengthy period of time before you start to try and collect any conclusions. You’ll want to get several weeks’ worth of data and hundreds of ad impressions before you have a data sample size that is large enough from which to draw conclusions.

When you start a pay per click advertising campaign, what you are really doing is beginning an engagement with customers that you hope lasts for a long time. You aren’t just trying to get them to click on your advertisement on time; you want to convert their click into a purchase or action. But it can go even deeper. A well planned PPC campaign can lead to building long-term relationships with customers.

A pay per click advertising campaign should ideally have a limitless life cycle. Within this life cycle, there are four key stages that will mark the relationship you have with a customer who is initially engaged by the campaign. And within each state, there are several metrics that you can use to determine the effectiveness of the campaign:

Attract: This is about getting initial eyeballs for your advertising and is measured by total impressions. This tells you how effective you were at picking the right PPC outlets. You’ll want to pay special attention in this stage to targeting the right keywords and identifying your target audience.

Capture: This is the “engagement” process when someone takes the action of clicking on your link. You’ll track this by measuring the total number of clicks along with the click-through rate – the clicks divided by the total impressions. This will give you an idea of how effective your ad is at getting people to click on it.

Convert: At this stage, you want to take the potential customer who has clicked on your ad and take them to the next step. If you are an eCommerce site, this would mean closing a sale. If you offer a service or a product that you don’t sell online, this can mean setting up an appointment or getting information for further follow-up.

When you reach this stage of your pay per click advertising campaign, you’ll want to install Conversion Tracking and Analytics software tools on your site. This will allow you to perform a wide range of analysis including conversions, costs, costs and revenue per conversion, return on investment and average Cost Per Click and position.

Retain: Once you have converted a click, you want to turn them into a recurring customer or, if they didn’t convert, find out why. You can track both the number of returning visitors and the revenue they generate to get a sense of how well you are retaining potential customers. You can also analyze the clicks they took on your site to see if there were any stumbling blocks that kept them from converting.

As you move from one PPC campaign to the next, you’ll want to remember the lessons you learned through previous campaigns. The more data you are able to gather and analyze will help you target and build effective advertising campaigns.

Although some people are unfamiliar with A/B testing, it’s actually a very simple concept to grasp. It’s a frequent tool used in landing page optimization to test potential changes to your existing home page. In this version of landing page testing, visitors potentially see one of two pages: the current one or the new, experimental page. This gives you the ability to get real-world data in a short amount of time to determine which page works better and the strengths and weaknesses of various elements of your site.

Even people who understand what A/B testing is all about often don’t do it frequently enough. Often it’s something that is done when a website first launches or a business first undertakes a campaign of optimizing landing pages. However, what they don’t realize is that A/B testing can be a powerful tool throughout the life cycle of your website. In an article at Quick Sprout, Neil Patel recommends running an A/B test at least every one to two months for websites with more than 10,000 monthly visitors. Patel runs A/B testing twice a month for his business and claims that one out of every four test yields results that increase landing page conversion rates by 20 percent.

A/B testing isn’t just for elements on your website. You can also perform basic tests on the ads as part of your PPC advertising campaigns. Even if your Pay Per Click advertising campaigns are having success at the moment, this doesn’t mean that they are as successful as they could be. Trying out new elements in your campaign and comparing them to your existing elements can help you to understand what is working and what can work better. It doesn’t have to be a major overhaul – according to Patel, even some minor tweaks can provide major benefits to your Pay Per Click advertising conversion rates.

Here are three tips from Patel that you’ll want to consider during A/B testing:

People Love Free Things: Simply adding the word “free” to your advertising can have a huge impact on click-through rates. People are attracted to the concept of getting something for nothing and generally want to read more if something is offered to them for free. If you are already using “free” in your PPC ads, consider highlighting the word through colors, font or sizes.

Place a Value on Your Free Things: People also want to know just what a great bargain they are getting. If you can, make sure you place a dollar amount on the value of the free item or service you are “giving away” on your site.

People Also Love Videos: Many people will click on a video to learn the same information available in text form on a website. Simple videos can be cheap to produce with a provider of PPC advertising services but pay huge dividends.