WHAT IS PPC?
The way to run a successful campaign is to do your homework at the setup stage. Organise your campaigns so they are easy to manage, making sure you are bidding on the right keywords, not just to obvious ones, but using the right search terms that your customers would use to find your services/products making sure that you eliminate all those terms NOT relevant to what you do. Just as important is the ad text making sure it’s engaging, descriptive and informative, that it links to the best pages for your customers to maximise your chances of conversion.
PPC is paid advertising through Google or Bing, these are the search results that you see in the top 3-4 positions and bottom 3 positions within the search results of Google or Bing search results page.
How does it work? Well, you create an account with Google Ads Manager or Bing Ads then add a bunch of campaigns that contain ad groups with consecutive keywords/phrases that you bid on to try and attract the right customers to your website. You set daily budgets for each campaign and optimise the keywords to try and get the best type of conversions for your business.
Interested in how we can help you with your paid advertising?
IS PAID ADVERTISING RIGHT FOR MY BUSINESS?
First Things First, Get All Your Ducks In A Row
My top piece of advice to anyone thinking about starting to use paid advertising or using paid advertising and not getting a good conversion rate or ROI (Return On Investment). Is to look long and hard at
- Your website
- Your sales team
- Your tracking methods
If any of these is not up to where it should be, paid advertising will be like pouring 50% of your marketing spend down the loo!
Here's why your PPC might be failing
Your Website
Depending on what your business is, it will either be taking online sales (selling products or services) or it will be an information driven site looking for you to contact them to discuss your services further. If when a customer client hits your site after clicking on your advert and can’t find/see the information they need to make the purchasing decision, they will go elsewhere. If they can’t see the size, material colour. If some of the information they need is missing then you have probably lost them, a wasted click wasted money.
Along with having the correct information on the site, it needs to be easy to use, navigate around and fast! The average time a user spends on a website is 2 minutes and 17 seconds (depending on whether the site is B2B or B2C. So you haven’t got long to get that customer interested in what you have to say/sell. The average load time of some of the most popular website pages on Google is under three seconds,taking into account that 57% of people leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load, You have to optimise the site not only for speed but making sure the information they need, telephone numbers contact information live chat facilities are there ready and easily accessible.
Your Sales Team
Ads are set up and sending great traffic to your website, your optimised website which is fast and packed full of all the information your customer needs to make a decision, your customers can find what they need and are filling in your contact forms and calling your sales team, so what went wrong? And why are your sales still down?
This is one of our favourite quotes about training employees…
The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave, is not training them, and having them stay
We can’t emphasise enough how important your sales team is. Making sure your team is trained and motivated to do well, to make the most out of every lead, to build and nurture relationships. To collect every bit of data/information they can on a customer so that your business can use that to make the sale and continue to sell to them in the future. We all know the salesperson we love dealing with, that nothing is too much trouble and you can trust to get what you need when you need it, and we all know those ones that fall short, if they worked for you, how would you feel about it? Would you even know?
Another super important thing they need to do for your company is find and record how your customers got to you, whether you were recommended by another client, they saw the PPC advertisement on Google or Bing or they saw your advertorial in a magazine publication, all of that data is relevant to how and where you spend your marketing budget, this now leads me nicely on to…
Your Tracking Methods
There are some great and FREE ways to track your PPC conversions here they are:
- Google Ads Call Tracking
- Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking
- Google Analytics Event Tracking
Google Ads Call Tracking
Google offers FREE telephone numbers that you can use on your ads and your website that will record as a conversion in your analytics so, even if your customer doesn’t make an online purchase or contact your company via a form on your site we can still attribute that phone call back to the campaign/ad group/ keyword that made the conversion, if you need help setting up call tracking on your website, please get in touch with us.