If you specialize in B2B products or services, pay per click (PPC) platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising can be a great way to encourage other businesses to visit your website and make inquiries.

In fact, PPC can generate twice the number of web visitors that SEO does!

If you are looking for ways to boost your PPC efforts in 2021, here are four of our favorite strategies to try.

Give them a go and let us know what you think of them!

1. Try using SKAGs

As a word it doesn't sound very nice, but as a strategy, it can't be beaten!

SKAGs is short for "Single Keyword Ad Groups" and can be a great way to target your keywords, ad copy and landing page to a specific audience. It's when you only have one keyword variant per ad group.

For example, if you are selling red shoes you could have "red shoes", [red shoes] and red shoes in the same group.

Studies have shown implementing SKAGs in your campaign can boost your clickthrough rate by up to 14%!

2. Review the times you serve adverts

Other businesses are usually in the office Monday to Friday between 9 am and 5 pm, so you want to make sure that your ads are showing during these times.

You can do this by creating an ad schedule that will determine what days and times your adverts will be served to your target audience. This means your adverts won't show at times when your key customers are out of the office, like weekends.

Alternatively, you can use bid adjustments to serve your ads off-peak, but at a reduced value. For example, you can set a bid adjustment of -80% at weekends, so your ads will only be shown if the price is right.

3. Bid on brand keywords

Bidding on your own brand name is an excellent way to get customers who are very nearly ready to buy your product or service onto your website. Think of it as that last final push to encourage them to convert!

The bonus of brand keywords is that your quality score will be high for them, meaning that they will be inexpensive to bid on and you will pretty much be guaranteed top spot on the first page of the search engine results.

Don't forget to bid on misspelled versions of your brand name. You'd be surprised how much traffic you can get!

As well as bidding on your own brand keywords you can…

4. Bid on your competitors brand keywords

Bidding on your rival's brand terms is something that is hotly debated in the PPC community.

If people are searching for competitor brand keywords, it means that they are at the end of the sales funnel and are considering buying. These words can be expensive to bid on, but it can be a powerful way of directing traffic to your website if done well.