In the 1960s-1990s, the top global brands made memorable TV advertisements. It was the era when no one had smartphones, and the only way to reach the audience was through mass marketing campaigns. The effectiveness of some campaigns led these brands to develop a strong brand name and grab a huge chunk of the market share.
Nike exemplifies how the right marketing leads a business to grow tenfold. Nike elevated its sales from just $800 million in 1988 to $9.2 billion in 1998. The brand amassed many customers in just ten years through its “Just Do It” campaign. The slogan was short, sweet, and memorable. But it was notable also because it was repeated on TV and applied to many situations. Today, pay-per-click (PPC) is an innovative marketing tool that, if used correctly, can help the business to make its brand memorable.
In the era before the internet was popularized, TV commercials were the way to go. But the internet, smartphone technology, and data have helped brands target customers according to their age, demographics, and interests.
PPC or pay-per-click is one of the ways brands can create a higher brand recall because of repeated advertisements. It is a better approach to online advertising than pay-per-view (PPV) advertising. It is because even if the brand’s ad is displayed, the business only pays when there’s a click. So, advertisers can easily use PPC retargeting to help create brand awareness and get a click when they have established trust with their customers.
An optimized PPC campaign on search results also helps establish a top-of-the-mind recall for the brand or website. In fact, according to a source, PPC Ads can help increase the brand’s awareness amongst potential customers by 80%. It also allows people to associate keywords with a certain brand.
For example, people might associate TalkSpace or BetterHelp with virtual mental health help because they have been conditioned to associate these words with the brands. So, whenever they consider seeking mental health help, the 2-3 top brands will come to mind. The right PPC strategy can help businesses position themselves as the solution to the problem that comes to mind.
We have established that PPC is critical for brand awareness in the digital world. But how to effectively put PPC to use? Here are five tips that can help you use PPC effectively for business growth:
You must choose the right platform to get the best results from a PPC strategy. The right platform is one that your audience uses the most. If you are an e-commerce business and your target audience is 18-30, you should go for Instagram PPC. If your audience uses LinkedIn, it is better to choose that platform despite PPC rates being higher than others.
LinkedIn charges an average of $5.26 per PPC ad. On the other hand, Google display ads cost around $2.32 per click. Instagram ads are also higher than Google’s at $3.56 per click. These rates vary based on the expected conversion rates of the audience clicking through these platforms.
SEO is a strategy that allows your business to get organic reach. However, ranking your website through SEO is not easy. Compared to this, PPC can help you get to the first page of search results within a day. Also, over a quarter (27%) of website visits come from paid ads, and these clicks through PPC are 50% more likely to become customers than the organic audience. Still, 53% of website visits are organic, which shows that you cannot beat the importance of SEO.
Since PPC has become quite competitive recently, you need to target the right keywords and ad group structure. So, unless you focus on striking visuals, impactful copy, and effective retargeting strategies, PPC won’t work for you. So, optimized PPC – a blend of SEO and PPC is the way to grow your business.
92% of the visitors on your website are highly unlikely to buy anything on their first visit. It is true for brands selling luxury apparel and products at high prices. So, it is important to remarket to your visitors to get that top-of-the-mind position. You could even retarget them with a different ad or get their emails on their first visit to make them a part of your marketing funnel.
Nowadays, people mostly use their smartphones to browse the internet. If the business’ website is not mobile-friendly, potential leads will take no time to close it. When your bounce rate is high, it shows a problem with your website or your PPC targeting.
Furthermore, if your website loads slowly, it will drastically increase your bounce rate, no matter how much you spend on your PPC campaign and landing page copy. The bounce rate difference between a website that takes 2 seconds to load and one that takes 5 seconds to load will surprise you. From 9%, the bounce rate goes up to 38%, only with a 3-second delay in the loading time.
It is important to focus on the website design, reduce the loading time, and use stellar copy to help further the potential customer make the purchase decision.
If your business has multiple products, the same ad copy might perform well for one audience rather than for another slightly different one. Whether starting from scratch with PPC or having had multiple successful PPC campaigns, you cannot underestimate the power of A/B testing. This testing helps you determine how changes in ads like the description, headline, keywords, audience, and location impact PPC performance.
Testing helps you optimize your PPC strategy, so designing your campaign before you run it is essential.
In this digital era, if your business is still not using PPC advertising, it is missing out on much potential. But because of the competition for customers, PPC is the new SEO. You must expect sales by paying a lot of money. The tips mentioned in this article will help you perfect your PPC strategy and ensure that you maximize lead generation through each dollar you invest in PPC marketing.
PPC advertising is effectively captivating the attention of an audience and driving traffic to a website. But since PPC campaigns aren’t free, you want to make sure that every dollar you invest offers a good return on advertising.
In this blog post we look at 10 essential tactics you can use to ensure a PPC campaign delivers a great return on advertising spend (ROAS).
Before launching a new PPC campaign, dive deep into keyword research to ensure the keywords you use to target those who are more likely to convert.
In other words, target keywords with high purchase intent. These are keywords potential customers type into search engines when they’re almost ready to take action.
Competitor research tools can yield valuable insights and reduce or eliminate guesswork.
We suggest using these tools to find out:
To lower your ad cost, you can also use keyword research or discovery tools to explore keywords that your competitors have overlooked, as their cost-per-click will be lower.
Both Google Ads and Bing Ads feature a negative keyword tool. With this tool, you can create a list of keywords that aren’t likely to generate conversion straight away. When someone does an online search using those keywords, your ad won’t be shown to them.
Negative keywords are the keywords you don’t want to pay for. Let’s use an example to illustrate this.
Imagine you sell laptops and you launch a campaign for gaming laptops. In your negative keyword list, you could add terms like “laptop 500GB HDD”. Gaming laptops have a higher HDD capacity and therefore cost more, so there’s no point in getting clicks to a product that the user isn’t willing to buy.
In 2019, Google introduced a seasonality adjustment feature that can maximize PPC ROAS at specific times of the year. To use it, you need to know how a seasonal campaign performed in the past, for example by looking at year-on-year data for Black Friday.
Let’s say you find out that during last year’s Black Friday campaign, you got the highest conversion rates on Friday, but they dropped significantly on Saturday. Using the seasonality adjustment, you can invest more ad spend on this year’s Friday campaign, and less on Saturday.
If your campaign targets more than one buyer persona, you can use different landing pages and personalize them to each persona. You can then use the keyword of geo-location filters to ensure the landing page copy changes dynamically based on who is seeing them.
Some studies show that conversion rates can be 25% higher when using dynamic landing pages.
Speaking of conversion rates, you must make sure every aspect of conversion is fully optimized. This includes ad copy, the user experience, call-to-action-buttons, forms and check out pages, and abandoned cart re-targeting.
This is a good strategy for small businesses or those with a physical store. This allows you to target a smaller audience (so the ad costs are lower) while ensuring the audience is highly likely to convert.
To dial in your local PPC campaign, use location targeting or geo-targeting. You can find this feature in most campaign tools. Geo-targeting allows you to define who sees your ad, limiting it to users within a specific distance from your location.
Google lets you check how well your ad performs when compared to competitors. The ad performance is given a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best score you can aim for.
To improve your score, make sure your ads are hyper-targeted, relevant and useful.
Conversion rates for Product Listing or Google Shopping ads are 30% higher than for regular ads. To drive more traffic to product listing ads, use all the strategies listed above.
If you create small product groups in your PLAs, you’ll have a more granular view of how your campaign is performing in case you need to make adjustments.
Boosting your ROAS involves tracking and analyzing campaign performance constantly. Having a well-designed analysis strategy allows you to be agile and fine-tune your ad campaign as needed to get even better results. If you’re having a hard time here sometimes it’s good to outsource PPC to someone that can provide good insight and value.
Conclusion
Now that you know how to improve the ROAS of a PPC campaign, don’t forget to incorporate these tactics into your 2022 marketing plan.
Author Bio:
Diarmuid Hennessy is the Operations Manager of HomeCheck. Since 2016, they have been providing property survey services to homeowners throughout Ireland. To learn more click here – https://homecheck.ie/.
business, internet earning and finance concept – close up of computer mouse on us dollar money
Many companies rely on a pay-per-click campaign (PPC), which is a type of online paid advertisement for goods and services designed for search engines or website placements. An advertiser pays the search engine, for instance, Google, or a website where these ads are placed whenever a user clicks on them. However, fraudulent clicks have been a perennial problem since the onset of the digital age, and fraudsters show no signs of stopping, leaving widely-used platforms, such as Google and Facebook, vulnerable.
If you’re interested in knowing what fraud clicks are and how to identify them, read on.
Click fraud most often occurs in PPC ad campaigns, such that an automated script or computer program imitates the actions of actual web users clicking on web-based advertisements. In rare instances, actual humans are involved in this type of online advertisement scam.
As an ad is placed on a search engine or website, a bot, malware, or a real person clicks on this ad to produce an artificially high amount of monetized user interaction. Being a form of performance-based advertising, website owners or advertisers pay a specific amount of money, which is calculated based on the number of visitors who clicked on the ad. The sad part is that there’s no genuine interest on the part of the ‘attacker,’ hence, becoming a wasted yet costly opportunity for the advertiser.
In 2015, it was reported that an estimated USD$6.13 billion worth of revenues was taken away by predominantly bot-driven clicks from the advertising sector.
Typically, promoting click fraud is, in itself, not an act of malware generation. However, as this type of scam is performed mainly by a standalone ‘bot,’ the capacity to automatically generate clicks becomes incorporated as one of the capabilities of the malware, which is software that’s created to deliberately damage a computer, server, or a computer network.
A click fraud then becomes one of the functions of malware that causes a bigger threat. Once a user innocently clicks on a malware-laden app or e-mail attachment, these risks could occur:
It’s extremely challenging to detect all forms of click fraud and other malicious activities on the Internet. Google, for its part, implemented Captcha and ReCaptcha systems to ensure that a human and not a robot is clicking on specific sites or ads.
However, you can spot click fraud and reduce the risks by doing the following:
With the help of modern technology, you can quickly detect the presence of click fraud in your PPC marketing efforts. This is through the use of a reliable click fraud software whose task is to protect your business against the manual or automatic efforts to inflate click numbers on certain advertisements.
In addition to using a click fraud software, you can also identify click fraud by looking at the essential signs. These can include:
Another way to save yourself from the budget-draining effects of click fraud is to always check on your PPC analytics. Be on the lookout for unusual and questionable figures. Suspect click fraud if you’re seeing a high number of clicks without seeing any uptick in conversions.
For instance, take a close look on time stamps to see how things are being clicked. If it’s done really fast, it’s likely done by a bot. Humans have significant time delays for the first, second, and succeeding clicks. On the other hand, traffic coming from a cold service ISP is most often generated by bots running on servers, thereby it can be considered a form of click fraud.
While it’s impossible to root out all malicious activities online, click fraud included, there are steps you can take. Among these are diligent monitoring of PPC analytics, downloading an application that protects you from click fraud, and checking the ISP, as well as other details, to identify and minimize the risks.
There are many options when it comes to “PPC” promotion. Just to name some common platforms, Google AdWords and Facebook are two very popular ways to get PPC traffic. Both work very well when it comes to getting paid traffic. As for the best one I’ll let you decide.
Both Google AdWords and Facebook ads are very powerful, because you can test and view your results and see what is working and what you need to cut from your campaign. You can build a target audience with factors such as age, gender, geographical region, interests, and view your conversion rates. You can set up a daily budget or set up a campaign budget, change that budget on the fly, and cancel it at any time should your campaign be a stick in the mud. Therefore, let’s get into some of the reasons.
“PPC” results can be seen within a few hours of your ad being up and running. You can filter between mobile and desktop, browsers, geographical areas and see how many people have clicked on your ad and how much it has cost. You have the option to pause your campaigns at any time and restart them when you need more traffic and/or your budget allows. This really is a great way to get more traffic when you need it. And traditionally works faster than organic traffic.
Laser targeting your audience is very easy and has enormous potential to get the right people at the right time to your website. Never in history has it been so easy to target the exact people who you are trying to reach with your website. Set your keywords and let Google and Facebook point the right people to your ad.
Before the internet, it was almost impossible to target by demographics without having to place advertisements in magazines and newspapers which were published in the country you were trying to reach. Now you can select any country in the world to target your ads to.
With the added option of targeting your audience by their interests it makes “PPC” even more business savy. For instance if someone has shown an interest in dog grooming then they may see your advertisement if that is what you are promoting. This will really narrow down your results and get the exact audience that you are looking for.
Tracking pixels can be used to see how many users have gone through to your Thank You page. This will give you real-time results and let you see how many conversions you have achieved in your campaign. You can of course place your tracking pixels on any page on your website for instance a sales page for a certain product you are promoting. You can put your tracking pixels on a thank-you page for your opt-in email list.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, blog, promotion, email subscription landing pages, and sales, but pay-per-click advertising with Google or Facebook is one of the fastest ways to really make an impact. Google something or scroll your Facebook feed and you will see right away how many people and businesses use this pay-per-click advertising.
Author Bio
Jonathan Ketterman has been working with WordPress and online marketing since 2011 and has run a few successful blogs through affiliate marketing, content marketing, blogging, and eCommerce. Jonathan is Currently a student at Texas A&M University Central Texas pursuing a degree in Aviation Science and Management. For more info please visit Www.amerdus.com.
Let’s face it — Google AdWords can be awesome for visibility. Most businesses want it but learning it can be overwhelming for some. So where do you start? How about the Academy for Ads from Google.
Image Source: Google
Advertising has always been a way to build awareness and drive sales. The ad industry was once dominated by TV, print, and radio. Now Google is one of the largest ad sellers that can put your business in front of thousands of highly qualified prospects. Many brands have leveraged SEO as a way to gain “free” exposure. But with algorithm updates and organic results now showing below the fold, it’s becoming more difficult to earn top positions on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Is buying ads the solution? Some advertisers have been surprised to eat through budgets quickly, spending between $6 to $10 per click. Sometimes even more for highly competitive keywords. All this effort just to show up on page two or three on Google. Why is this happening?
Organizations that better understand online advertising will pay a fraction of the cost most advertisers pay. The same keywords that are killing your budget are working wonders for your competitors. Why is this? What can you do to make Adwords cheaper for you?
You should first be concerned with search engine optimization. SEO isn’t for organic ranking only, it’s also essential to ad placement, ad cost, and how your web pages convert.
If you have a quality site with good SEO, Google will give you a higher ad rank. This will make your ads cheaper and give you better placement. The video below explains how the system works. At around 4:02 it goes into detail about the role quality plays in your advertisements.
To spend less with Google AdWords, you also want to make sure you’re targeting the right audience. Having the wrong people click your ads will drive up cost and lower conversions. If you’re looking for impressions (for brand exposure and not conversions), it’s best to advertise using CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rather than cost per click.
Use Googles Keyword Planner to help you identify the right keywords for your campaign. If your target audience is located in Florida, be sure you target that location. If most of your customers speak only English or Spanish, use language settings to include certain languages.
Making these selections doesn’t mean you’ll find the perfect audience, that’s why testing is essential.
You’ve probably heard of A/B testing, in order to test one campaign against another. However, I suggest A/G testing, where you compare multiple campaigns using different keyword groups to see which keywords and phrases perform the best.
After a few weeks of testing, compare click-through rates (CTR’s) and conversions to see which campaigns are most profitable. You can even compare data such as times of day, device, and demographic information to better tailor your ad copy.
When testing or running multiple keyword groups, be sure not to bid against yourself. When choosing keyword and phrases for a campaign, make sure the keywords you are targeting aren’t similar to any other groups. If so, you will be competing against yourself and drive up cost.
Avoid this by grouping only closely related keywords in each campaign and segmenting your audience.
You may be targeting multiple groups of people with different interest that match your varying offers. Say for example you are a car dealership, with customers in the market for vans, trucks, and sports cars. Don’t target too broad of an audience, these people have different interest and triggers that motivate them. The woman in the market for a sports car may be single, with no kids, so words like “fast” and “red” in your ad copy may cause her to click on your ad. The dad in the market for a truck may be looking for a work vehicle and something large enough to pack tents and coolers for family camping trips.
To save money on ads, know your audience and segment them accordingly.
Finally, to save money on your Google Adwords campaign, it is essential to have a good landing page. When driving traffic to your site, you want to avoid high bounce rates. A bounce is what happens when visitors come to your site and leave without engaging with your content (e.g. click a button, sign up for email). If your bounce rate is above 50% you either need to change your ad copy to make sure you are targeting the right audience, or make changes to your landing page.
I suggest making multiple landing pages to test different images, buttons, colors, and keywords.
Don’t just send users to your homepage. Create pages specifically for your ads and eliminate distractions on that page. For example, don’t feature too many links that may cause your site visitors to explore and navigate away from your sales or email sign up page.
Google also gives precedence to well-optimized landing pages. So make sure your landing page gives you the best possible chance to convert your site visitors.
Author:
Larry C Lewis is an Internet behavior scientist best known for his work in social media and video marketing. He is the head of marketing at Digital Exponents and the founder of Marketinglikeapro.net. For more information, Larry can be reached on Twitter @larryclewis.
Copyright: dennizn / 123RF Stock Photo
PPC or Pay Per Click is a unique and powerful method of marketing or advertising. It’s the core of paid searches and it gives businesses and brands an opportunity to target their audience in a specific and flexible way. It’s a user, geography and demographic-based method of boosting traffic to sites.
PPC results are dependent on search engines and their regular updates or trends. It’s therefore important to be aware of latest PPC trends to get more benefits out of paid searches. A great care is needed with pay per click as paid searches are now an essential part of the overall marketing strategy of small and big brands alike.
PPC brings an edge over natural searches and that’s why it’s preferred a lot. With measurable results and options of stopping ads midway, this form of marketing is best suited to those seeking highest kind of flexibility and extensibility. You just can’t ignore pay per click trends as this will take away your competitive edge. So, be careful and be attentive with pay per click.
Let’s look at latest PPC trends and their impact for your business:
Mobile searches have already outpaced those from desktops, and the trend is going to continue. In that scenario, your business can’t ignore the power of mobile and its rising clout. Your PPC campaigns have to consider mobile, smartphones and tablets to get its share of paid search pounds. You will thus need a mobile-friendly website which has responsive designs. If you don’t tweak your website to suit hand-held devices, you will lose out on a massive prospect for sure.
More brands are using informative and engaging videos to target their audience. As videos deliver more engagement and entertainment value, they are now becoming an integral aspect of marketing strategy of brands of any scale and magnitude. You need to leverage video ads more than ever before as they impact rankings and catch attention when posted across social media channels.
Search engines have already rolled out the option of persona targeting and it’s going to get more popular in the days to come. This option will give PPC advertisers a better understanding of the site’s visitors, their tastes and preferences, their level of interactions etc. This option means marketers can retarget customers based on some valuable info regarding their manner of using websites and accessing its content. With both Bing and Facebook already jumped into the fray, brands now find an opportunity to get a deep insight of their customers and seek prospects out of them.
Keywords or phrases of the search are not as important today as their intent. Search engines have put in place Semantic Search where all words are going to hold value. With this, sites have to publish quality content only and they have to cut their focus on keyword stuffing. Searches have to be responsive and that’s why keywords had to find less emphasis. For brands, this latest PPC trends means they have to be careful with their content and avoid excessive use of keywords.
Gone are the days when almost any and every kind of content brought rich rewards, but not anymore. If the content is not informational, it won’t fetch any benefits. If it’s not adding to user experience nor delving deep into some topic or theme, it won’t serve any purpose. More so, the content has to be based around the readers’ requirements and information, and not try to gain advertising benefits in a visible way.
Cookies will no longer be a preferred more of targeting users on the internet. Rather, your business will benefit from ID-based targeting to deal with the issue of multi-screen identities. And with that, you will never lose your customers even when they switch the device. In a sense, traditional way of doing PPC is losing ground at a time when users have multiple devices to access the brand.
Conclusion
It’s obvious that PPC is witnessing quite a lot of trends and changes and bringing a new angle to paid search. It therefore becomes important to avail the best PPC Management services to benefit your business in the desired manner. Let experts set up your campaigns and help you reach your target audience in a desired manner. Never ever set up your campaign by own.
Coming from an SEO background it took some time for me to warm up to Pay Per Click.
My first years working in Internet marketing was 100% focused on pure Search Engine Optimization. The fact that the vast majority of people, including myself, often prefer the organic results over the paid ads was only reinforcing my opinion. The other pretty common opinion between SEO professionals in the early days of digital marketing was that it’s either SEO or PPC.
Fast forward a couple of years and the situation could not be more different. The vast majority of the projects I’m working on are integrated campaigns covering SEO, PPC and social media.
Working with a couple of brand I’ve quickly realised that when I search for my own client’s brand, the competitors appear on top of the results with their paid listings. Even more so when I was doing search for a compound keywords my brand + keyword(s). The way paid ads are displayed, prominently on the very top of results, means that even if most people ignore the ads, a percentage of the traffic which would go to my site will end up clicking on the competitor’s ads. This can happen even when they search for my own brand name.
Using PPC and bidding on your own brand name can help you get more traffic which otherwise could potentially end up on the sites of your competitors.
Of course there will be a cost associated with running these ads but your quality score should be high on your own branded term so CPC (cost per click) shouldn’t be too expensive. AdWords is a very complex platform and I suggest you do proper research and get all the training you need. You can even consider getting AdWords certifications. You can check this guide which explains the process in detail.
As we all know, SEO is a long term game. You build your website, invest in content assets, run link acquisition campaigns and slowly build up your site’s authority. With time your sites rank well on a number of keywords, usually around your key pages/services. However, there are times when you need to deploy new pages quickly – you may have a new service, product or seasonal promotion. Using very targeted PPC campaign, you can drive targeted customers to these pages. At the same time, you can work on the SEO so eventually these will start ranking organically.
Let’s say you have a new service or product, something that hasn’t been done before, and your potential clients simply aren’t aware of it. If they are not aware of it and if it’s something completely new then they will be very unlikely to search for it. This is where paid discovery, display advertising and video ads on YouTube can come in very handy. Using services like Facebook Ads you can target very specific audiences and get your message to the right crowd. Video ads on YouTube can also be very efficient in building awareness of your new product or service.
We all work hard to create good content and then we work even harder to promote it, earn links and earn shares. When it comes to links, in my opinion, nothing can beat good contacts and highly targeted manual outreach. However, when you have invested heavily in your content it’s often worth spending some money on paid discovery services like StumbleUpon Ads. The more people see your content, the better the chances are of attracting natural links and shares.
Keep in mind that some audiences are more likely to link then others, with bloggers being probably more likely to link to you than taxi drivers.
Before you jump into PPC, make sure you get yourself familiar with all the main platforms.
The two main platforms are Facebook and Google AdWords and there are plenty of resources available online to get you going.
Considered as one of the tactful marketing methods on the web, several companies are utilizing Pay Per Click to get better visitors and conversions. It is cost effective orientation because you only disburse when someone clicks on your ads. Really, PPC campaigns will substantiate inexpensive for your gallantness as it promotes your online business by targeting millions of feasible clients without heavy burden on your pocket. Becoming a winner with PPC marketing and rising your ROI (Return On Investment) consists of first cognizance about the essential concepts. In the following post we shall be appearing into a few simple to apply PPC tips that you can use for maximize your Pay Per Click’s ROI.
This doesn’t unavoidably mean that you require having undersized keyword lists for your campaigns; some of the most successful PPC campaigns applied gigantic amounts of keywords to amplify visibility. Yet, avoid the more common one-word keywords as much as feasible. Adhibit long tail keyword phrases inclusion of 2 or 3 targeted words whenever applicable, and stay away from utilizing keyword phrases terms such as compare, cost, reviews, etc, without those distinctly relate to your conversion goals.
Your Value per Visitor is the returns you make from each pay-per-click guest to your website. In simple words, it is determined of how impressive your website yield sales from the visitors it receives. The superior your value per visitor, the more impressive your website is at switching them into sales or goals.
Most search engines provide tools that facilitate you to masterly manage your campaign and track operation. Click-through rates, GEO-targeting, comparison bid displays, conversion percentages, and position auto bidders are all valuable features that you should apply to raise your campaign performance and minimize extravagance. Currently, most of search engines provide an ROI tracker which is an extremely useful tool to assist you decide which keywords are useless. Analyze measure and check different campaigns, keywords and landing pages using these tools to understand what works best.
Don’t put all of your efforts to dissipate by sending shoppers to a non targeted homepage. Do not lose guests and a possible sale by making things knotty for them by using meaningless content. Rise with a page that will lift up where your ads gone off. You can use keyword creators, but not copiously. It is still good to go with your sense since you recognize how to search for things. You must to learn PPC and how to use it to your gain in order to be clever to use these notifications correctly. When you do it, you can able to see that Maximize Your Pay Per Click ROI.
You can hire Digital Marketing Agency or the right person who has the ability for the work because the cash you pay them will be simply regained when you start to get sales and leads out of your campaign. On the inside, this will assist you relax your resources by quite a bit and you will be up to consider boost your sales and growing your business. If you don’t want to have any whacking deficits, then you should be stalwart with your PPC management.
About Author:
Sean Pritchard is founder of Madword-Media. Bringing over 7 years experience in Internet Marketing and he is Google Certified PPC Expert. Follow Madword-Media on twitter @MadwordMedia.
PPC marketing is one of the most effective ways to acquire new customers and boost your brand, but the cost of acquiring new customers can vary significantly depending on the keywords you choose and the way you structure your campaign. The price per click can vary from pennies to more than £30, depending on the keywords you choose, so it makes sense to do your homework and pick the lower-competition, but still high conversion, keywords.
The most obvious way to improve your conversion rate, while still keeping costs low, is to use long tail keywords. Instead of targeting “Nike Trainers”, a fairly generic phrase that attracts a huge number of searchers, target “Nike Women’s Flex Trainer 3”. You can be pretty confident that someone who searches for that specific type of trainer is either a woman, or shopping for a woman they know. In addition, they’ve already done their homework because they know the style of trainer they’re shopping for. Not only will you pay less per click for such a narrow keyword, you’ll find it easier to convert a customer who already knows what they want.
Using long tail keywords is common sense, but it’s hardly creative. Many brands get great conversions from bidding on keywords that don’t include their product name at all.
Ann Summers made headlines when it ran a campaign for the Chinese New Year during the Year of The Rabbit. The campaign displayed ads for the Rampant Rabbit. This slightly risqué and eye-catching campaign improved the visibility of the brand, and got people talking about the company. It’s unlikely that many searchers bothered to click on the ad, so it’s not something you’d do as a long term initiative because of its impact on your quality score, but it achieved what the creative team wanted – publicity.
Another off-topic (but successful) campaign came from Converse, the shoe brand. In an attempt to reach teenage boys, the brand ran ad campaigns on keywords such as “how to kiss a girl” and “how to chat up women”. The ad team knew that teens don’t go actively searching out things that are cool, so they decided to put themselves in the places where their audience already spends time.
Converse created microsites around things that teens are interested in, and used those microsites to advertise their products. They got inspiration for the keywords that they needed to target by using Google Zeitgeist. The campaign succeeded because their microsites were interesting, relevant and content rich.
Many other brands have achieved similar results with loosely related searches. Car insurance firms market themselves to people who are looking to buy cars. Advertisements for computer motherboards go hand-in-hand with searches for a new CPU, and if someone is searching for flights they probably need a hotel as well. Few products are bought in isolation, so consider what goes with your product. You may find that you can save a fortune by bidding on related searches.
Author bio:
This article has been written by Philippa. Philippa often writes about affiliate marketing and PPC and has decided to share her PPC knowledge in the form of PPC campaigns. Philippa gets ideas from the Twist site.