If you are carving out a long-term digital marketing strategy for your business, SEO serves as the base of it. Without investing in SEO, you can’t expect long-term results. But SEO takes time — sometimes three months, sometimes a little more than that, and some industries even require a year-long investment to rank on Google.
For someone looking for instant results, or boost visibility in a competitive niche when top results are dominated by high-authority sites, PPC is the best option. In exchange for a few bucks, you can acquire the top spot on Google.
Sounds easy? It isn’t! Running successful PPC campaigns is science itself, you have to research, experiment, and set new campaigns based on the data gathered from previous campaigns to create optimized PPC ads for your business.
One of the free tools you can use to nail your PPC ads is Google Alerts. In this article, I’m going to show you how!
What is Google Alerts?
Basically, it’s a notification tool that lets you track when people use certain keywords or keyphrases online. This knowledge ultimately helps you to optimize the existing campaigns and fill in the gaps. Let me demonstrate its use with the help of an example. Say you’re selling chocolates online. You run separate PPC campaigns for each of the chocolates in your stock, such as Mars, Snickers, Cadbury, etc. You can set alerts for certain events, for example whenever someone mentions your company’s name, or the chocolates you’re selling, or post similar content, etc. you get a notification. Keep in mind that Google only sends you alerts whenever new content is published; you get no notifications about the content that’s already published. And it’s reported that Google doesn’t send you every page that is indexed on Google. To use Google Alerts, you must be aware of the operators used to set alerts for specific queries.How to Set Up Google Alerts?
Setting up Google Alerts barely takes a minute or two. However, in your very first attempt, it might take a bit of time and thinking to set up your first alert. Here’s the step-by-step process:- Go to google.com/alerts and sign up, or sign in if you already have a Google account.
- Make sure it’s the same account where you want to receive alerts.
- You will see a top bar with a search option, enter the query or phrase for which you want to be notified.
- Once you have entered the query, you will see several options below it regarding the region, language, frequency of query, sources, and the place where you want to be notified about it.
- As far as the frequency of alerts is concerned, you can receive an alert instantly when the research is made, or once in a week or month.
- By choosing a particular company, you can limit the alerts — that means you will only get an alert when a certain phrase is searched in your target region.
How does it Help in PPC?
OK, so now you know what Google Alerts are and how you can set up alerts yourself. It’s time to walk you through how this tool can amplify your PPC efforts and bring the best results.1. Use Google Alerts to Find Trending Topics
When you’re not sure which keywords and topics should you target in your campaigns, Google Alert brings a myriad of ideas. In fact, you can begin your content ideas research from here by setting up alerts against keywords relevant to your industry. Every new alert will give you potential phrases and words to use in your next PPC ad copy. You will also discover the strengths of your competitors, the vacuum in your industry, and ultimately improve the results of your ads.2. Spy on Your Competitors
Manual competitor research demands an abundance of time and focus. You can’t find the loopholes in your competitor’s ad if you don’t analyze every element from ad copy to the visuals used. Besides that, every day you have to Google relevant queries to see the results. Google Alerts makes this quite straightforward. Just set up an alert with your competitor’s website mentioned in the alert against certain keywords and get alerts whenever a change is made to their ad.3. Dig Valuable Data & Use it to Improve
Running successful PPC campaigns is all about experimenting and tracking what’s working and what isn’t. If you’re not getting results, this could be due to a weak ad copy, targeting the wrong audience, or showing your ads at the wrong time. Google Alerts bring insights regarding your audience. And this data helps you to evaluate your performance and see if months of PPC expenditures have done any good to your online reputation. Do people know you in your industry or not? You can receive alerts if someone types your brand’s name or your product on Google. This way, you will get plenty of information related to demographics, the type of audience mentioning you or search you on Google, and the frequency of those mentions.Summary
As one of the leading PPC Services in Dubai, we know the kind of boost well-optimized PPC campaigns can provide to your business. But you only get desired results if you create and manage them the right way. Google Alerts will give you campaign ideas, pinpoint the loopholes in your ads and the strengths of your competitors, and you will eventually be able to create campaigns that generate thousands of dirhams in revenue!
