Introduction To PPC
Pay Per Click advertising is a form of digital marketing where you pay each time your ad is clicked, rather than earning clicks organically.
Search Engine Marketing is more effective and efficient when your marketing strategies are targeted towards the right audience. With Adwords and pay per click marketing, you can easily segment your market and directly target and optimize your paid ad campaigns.
The numbers show the efficiency of PPC in online marketing campaigns.
When done properly, PPC gives you the power to grow your overall website traffic, leads, and reach audiences at the right time to purchase your product or service. In this guide, you will learn how we maximize your PPC campaigns to bring in new leads and increase conversion rates at different touch points, giving you a higher ROI.
PPC Management
Ensuring the campaign is set up correctly from the start is critical. Let’s go through the process below.
Campaign Goals
It's very important that we start the campaign by gaining critical insights regarding the goals of the campaign.
Critical questions to ask include:
How will we know the campaign was successful?
Do you want to build brand awareness?
Do you want to increase traffic to the website?
Do you want to increase sales?
Do you want to increase leads?
Asking these critical questions gives us the foundation we need to build a successful
PPC campaign.
Research & Analysis
Keyword research:
In order to target the correct audience, we need to choose keywords that they would use in order to find your products or services. It’s a time consuming exercise, but absolutely necessary in order to build the foundation for a successful PPC campaign.
Even though keyword research is one of the starting points for any campaign, it's a process that we revisited regularly in order to yield the best possible results for our clients.
Competitor & industry analysis:
By completing a competitor and industry analysis, we can determine how your business stacks up against competitors in your industry. We need to determine:
Who is dominating the ad space? Why?
Where can we improve on what your competitors are doing?
What strategies are they using?
This process allows us to identify threats that need to be addressed or opportunities we can take advantage of.
Ad Copy Optimisation
The next step is creating and optimizing the copy to be used for the campaign. During this process we utilize the keywords we identified and create various permutations of the same ad.
This allows us to test various ads against each other in order to determine which ads yields the best ROI. Ad Copy never stops getting optimized as audiences and industry trends are always on the move.
Landing Page Optimization
Your landing page may either be an existing page on your website, or a dedicated landing page with content tailored towards a specific promotion you are running.
We optimize the content based on what part of the marketing funnel your target audience is in, keeping your campaign goals in mind every step of the way.
Landing page optimization includes both design and copy to ensure consistency between your website, brand message and ad copy.
Bidding Management
Managing and monitoring bids is essential to maintaining a healthy PPC campaign. We use proven methodologies in order to define bidding strategies for our clients.
The bidding strategy is largely determined by the goal of the campaign as each goal requires a different bidding strategy.
Important considerations:
Recommended budget for the entire campaign
Cost per click (CPC) of each PPC ad
Estimated gains from the ad campaign
These values play into the strategy to where we can get the keywords we want at the best cost per click.
Campaign Tracking & Reporting
We monitor and track campaigns continuously in order to gain insights on how our strategies are performing. We use the following as a base:
Overall number of clicks & CTR (click through rate), which tells you how effective your copy is;
Bounce rate and time spent on the landing page are both indicators of how effective your engagement and call to action is;
Goal conversions, whether it is a sign-up, a download, or a purchase; and
Return on investment, which shows how much your client profited from the PPC ad
campaign.
All the above metrics form part of our monthly PPC campaigns to our clients.
Sales Funnel Optimization
Using sales funnels to lead search engine users towards your desired goal is one of the most efficient marketing methods today. This strategy lets you guide visitors by the hand and direct traffic where you need it to go, when your audience is ready to move forward. This four-step process includes the following:
Keyword Contextual Targeting
Our keyword selection process involves looking at keyword competition, popularity among your target audience, and contextual relevance to your brand.
Placement Targeting
It’s important to know where to place your ads to reach the widest audience possible. We look for space in the websites of online influencers, industry leaders and high-traffic, high-authority pages.
Interest Category Marketing
In this step, we will help you develop PPC marketing collateral based on your target audience’s interests and placement in the marketing funnel. The conversion goals set for each market category will differ based on the funnel as well.
Remarketing
This method lets you trail and target previous site visitors who have exited your page without fulfilling a goal conversion. It will be discussed in detail later on in this document.
Ad Group Segmentation
Reaching out to specific niche markets effectively through PPC requires carefully planned targeted marketing. This is best achieved through a combination of keyword and profile based ad group segmentation. Keyword research is described comprehensively in our other Keyword Research Guide. Profile segmentation, on the other hand, is a process that involves the following:
Selecting Profile Parameters
The first step is identifying the possible ad groups we can create. For example, we can group your target audience based on their needs and interests, their location, their culture, or traffic source, among others.
Finding Viable Custom Segments
Sticking to the basic marketing group (one based on their product/service interest) and on demographics as our only profile parameters will cause us to hit major challenges in terms of competition. We drill down into your audience’s behavior by studying Analytics data. Information such as which page converts the most or which pages your visitors go to before completing a conversion allows us to group your audience accordingly and create targeted campaigns to lead them across their standard purchasing habits much faster and much more efficiently.
Lead Scoring
In order to Maximize your budget to achieve the highest ROI we go through a process of scoring your ad group segments. The scores are based on a combination of explicit factors, such as demographics, click rates and CPCs from past campaigns, and other quantifiable data, and on implicit factors like conversion history, purchase history, sales-readiness, data quality, and sentiment marketing efficiency.
Remarketing
Remarketing may be done as part of a funnel strategy, as previously mentioned, or as a standalone marketing strategy to control and direct traffic accordingly. It is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies at directing traffic as it promotes brand awareness each time your visitors see your ad, and it leads your audience back to your site when they are ready to buy.
Our PPC Remarketing Methodology
Segment Audience
In all of the pay per click campaigns, it’s important to segment your audience in order to reach the most relevant people with appropriate retargeting ads. We segment your audience based on the pages of your site abandoned for example a specific product page.
Clear Design & Call To Action
Because retargeting ads are not plain text ads and can be designed, we modify the look and feel to represent your brand more accurately. Keeping the message direct and urgent, making the layout clean, and ensuring the call to action stands out immediately are important parts of the process.
Offer Best Products/Services
We keep your message in line with your conversion goals. We look to offer promos, free downloads, packages, and new services, and highlight your unique selling points in the copy.
Optimize Your Landing Page
If your landing page is an existing page in your website, we make sure it is well-optimized for both search engines and for visitors. If we find your pages unable to convert, you may need better copy, visuals, and stronger calls to action.
PPC Advertising In A Nutshell
Driving real results with PPC advertising is tangible and 100% data driven. It is the fastest method to grow your customer base and gain leads and you should consider making a Search Engine Marketing campaign apart of your online marketing strategy.