Factors for PPC Success
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a challenge for business owners. Here are some tips to help optimize your budget.
"Schedule Campaign check ups at the beginning of every season or whenever you feel your campaigns need a revision ... If you let Google optimize it all, it will likely consume your budget."
If you are a business owner chances are you have invested a fair amount of time planning your budget, just to realize that you might need to invest more than you thought to advertise your product or service. And with the increasing costs of Pay-Per-Click advertising (in Google Ads, Bing, and the like) comes the uncertainty and anxiety of not knowing if what you currently have set as a daily or monthly budget will be enough to get enough leads and sales to keep your business profitable. Having worked as a PPC Campaign Manager, I’ve identified some factors and basic KPIs that I’m going to share with you and will hopefully help you get better Pay-Per-Click results in the long run.
Campaign Objectives
For most business owners, unless you have unlimited budget, every dollar spent on online ads must be directed to generate sales, or at least conversions. Hence, your main campaign objectives and key metrics should be directly related to Lead Generation, while keeping healthy levels of Return On Investment (ROI).
Budget Seasonality
It’s important to establish a budget that takes in consideration minimum levels of investment during low season and more investment during high season when all competitors are active outside in the field chasing leads. IMPORTANT: You should never pause or stop your PPC campaigns or you will risk losing leads and potential clients to your competitors.
Meetings & Reports
Schedule Campaign check ups at the beginning of every season or whenever you feel your campaigns need a revision or a tweak and, if you have one, establish with your PPC provider a report format to keep track of how your campaigns are performing every month. If you let Google optimize it all, it will likely consume your budget.
Keywords
Yours and your competitors’. All keywords and their combinations have a different cost based on search volume (number of queries that potential clients submitted in Google search engine when searching for products or services), and competitors bidding on them. Some categories have more aggressive bidders and this makes the cost of some keywords’ CPC (Cost-Per-Click) to be higher than others.
Customized Landing Page
This is what your leads see after they click on your ad. I said before that your main objective should be to generate sales or leads but it’s not recommended to have your Contact Page (with the Online Form to submit a message) as the Landing Page for your PPC Campaigns.
Ideally, your PPC vendor should offer creating a landing page customized for your specific ads, ad-groups, or campaign. When people click on an ad and don’t find information relevant to the ad they just clicked on, they get upset or confused and leave the page. You will still be charged for that click that didn’t convert into a booking or sale.
Quality Score
It has direct impact on the cost and indicates how compatible your page content is with your campaign keywords. The higher your Quality Score, the lower you’ll have to pay for your ads to get a top position. For example, an ad leading to a landing page with generic content will have a lower score and will pay more than an ad leading to a page with specific purchase intent content.
"An ad leading to a landing page with generic content will have a lower score and will pay more than an ad leading to a page with specific purchase intent."
Ad Copy & Call-To-Action (CTA)
The copy of your ad should be relevant and use the natural language and keywords your customers use when doing web searches. The Call-To-Action of the Ad or Landing Page must be appealing enough to make the Conversion and can be anything from “Book a Free Consultation” to “Get 20% OFF”.
A/B (Split) Testing
Talk to your PPC vendor to run split testing alternating several versions of Ad texts, Images, or CTAs during the campaign and keep the mix of elements that have driven the most sales, conversions, website visits, or engagement (time on site).
Remargeting / Retargeting Campaign
A campaign set up to track and follow visitors to your landing page that didn’t convert, showing them ads to make them recall their purchase intention (the abandoned shopping cart or booking site) and persuade them to complete the purchase, submit their contact information through an online form, or enticing them to make a call to ask about your service or offer.
These are by no means the only factors you have to take in consideration to have better Pay-Per-Click Campaigns but it will give you a better understanding of what’s entailed, and also will make more productive the relationship that you have with your PPC vendor.
Thanks for reading this article. Click on the red button and let’s get in touch to discuss what I can do to grow your business.
