Entity-Based Strategies: Key to PPC Success and Audience Expansion

Entities in SEO are unique people, places, things, or concepts that provide context and relationships for keywords. Although the concept of entities has been around since 2012, it hasn't been widely adopted in PPC (Pay-Per-Click). In PPC, entities can be leveraged to enhance keyword expansion, improve quality scores, and enable strategic audience targeting. They help in understanding the context and relationships that keywords have, which can be particularly beneficial for creating more relevant and effective PPC campaigns.

To use entities for PPC keyword expansion, consider the relationships and context behind searches. This can help uncover new keyword ideas that resonate with different groups based on their intent. Here are some aspects to consider:

• Activities: Think about what people are doing in relation to your product or service.
• Entity identification: Identify specific activities or interests associated with your business.
• Entity relevance: Determine how your product or service relates to these activities.
• Entity pain points: Understand challenges people face related to these activities.
• Entity solutions: Explore how your product or service can solve these challenges.
• Location: Consider where your potential customers are.
• Entity scope: Look at relevant geographical locations.
• Entity presence: Analyze where most of your customers are located.
• Entity associations: Associate your business with local landmarks or events.
• Entity impact: Understand how geographical entities influence consumer behavior.
• Season or event: Identify when people might need your product or service.
• Entity timing: Consider relevant seasonal trends or events.
• Entity integration: Integrate seasonal or event-based entities into your marketing materials.
• Entity promotions: Create promotions or offers based on these entities.

Entities can improve PPC quality scores by ensuring that PPC campaigns are aligned with the interests, intents, and preferences of the target audience. Quality Score is calculated by Google based on three factors:

• Expected click-through rate (CTR): Entities help align campaigns with user interests, potentially increasing CTR.
• Ad relevance: By optimizing ad copy to relevant entities, ads become more relevant to user intent, boosting ad relevance.
• Landing page experience: Relevant content on landing pages that aligns with the entities in ads can lead to a positive user experience. A higher quality score can result in lower costs-per-click and higher click-through rates, as it indicates that the content provided matches the user's intent well.

The advantage of entity-based strategic PPC audience targeting is that it goes beyond traditional audience segmentation (like age, device, location) by incorporating the contextual relevance of entities. This helps to more accurately identify who your audience is and could be. For example, a local restaurant might target the local geographic area but also target users’ interests and behaviors related to entities across a broader region. By using custom combination segments, you can refine targeting strategies to identify high-performing segments and discover new consumer groups and behavioral insights, which can guide broader marketing strategies and potentially increase ROI.