Latest posts

What do you really need to know about PPC? Part 2!

Google Analytics: your new best friend! It’s impossible to run your PPC campaign without Google Analytics being installed, so first, ensure your website has it running. Next, make sure your AdWords and Google Analytics are linked to each other and you have goals (from Part 1 of this article – your ‘conversions’, what you term a success, as in what you want customers visiting your website to actually do) set up. That way you can grab specific insights quickly and make any adjustments you need to as the campaign continues over time.

A successful AdWords campaign will consist of a few key elements:

1. The right keywords

Choosing which keywords to bid on is the single most important decision you need to make. You can bid on broad terms (e.g. ‘dogs’) which usually cost significantly more because lots of people are interested in them. Or you could go for what’s called long tail keywords (e.g. ‘specialist dog trainers’) which are a lot more detailed and specific, but likely to be cheaper because fewer people will be bidding on them.

To get it right you need to stop thinking about what you want people to search for in order to find you, and instead start thinking about what your potential customers might actually be typing into Google. In the example used above, a dog trainer may look at terms like ‘dog trainer Lincolnshire’ but what their potential customer actually searches for would be something different but related, like ‘how to make your dog stop barking’, or ‘how to control your dog on a walk’, for example.

Another set of basic keywords to include in your list is your own branded terms, like your company website, your company name and competitor websites. Just don’t get too carried away – unless you have a pretty large budget, as competitor branded terms can quickly eat up your money. When you’re starting out it’s always going to be more effective to build up your keywords gradually. Start with a small list and add more to it as you go along. Get some results in and then change your tactics based on the results – Google Analytics will be telling you what’s working and what’s not, so it’s vital that you use its reporting tools on a regular basis so you can tweak things as you go.

1. The right ad text

You will only have limited space for your ad and to get your message across to secure that all important ‘click through rate’ – those are the % of clicks you’re paying for, so it’s important you get it right.

If what they are looking for doesn’t match what you are offering, then you’re really wasting your money as you’ll be paying for clicks that have no hope of ever leading to anything – plus Google will mark you down (quality score, more info below) if your ad search terms don’t match your users landing page experience.

The secret here is to realize that volume should not be your main goal. You’re not just aiming for high numbers and to get the most clicks you can, you’re aiming to get the clicks you really want and those that will spend money with you. That means thinking about the ‘spending power’ of a searcher and having an advert, landing page and call to action (your chosen conversion type) that is going to be relevant to them.

This landing page experience (ensuring that it matches the advert, for starters) is a particularly important point because it will also affect your quality score – a measure Google uses to calculate how and when to show your ad, and how much you’ll pay for it. The higher your score the better you’ll do in these metrics and the more Google will show your ad so you get more clicks for less money from having a properly optimised campaign.

The number of options you have may feel a little overwhelming at first, but try not to get too overwhelmed. If you simply begin by thinking about the narrowest possible search terms and an offer you can make, thenconcentrate on doing them really well that will be a great starting point for your first AdWords campaign.

PPC Basics Part 3 will be released in a few days. In the meantime, go to our PPC section for more PPC information! Dont forget to request a callback to see how we can help you and your business.

What do you really need to know about PPC?

Pay-Per-Click (or ‘PPC’ as it is commonly known to save us all time!), is the fastest available way to drive web traffic to your company’s website. Every time you do a Google search, the first (and last) few entries on Page 1 are paid-for-adverts. And as we all know, 92% or internet searches don’t go beyond page 1 of Google so paying to be on that first page will more than likely earn you your money back, and then some.

Google estimates that businesses generally make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on AdWords. Not a bad ROI to shout about, although results do vary by industry so be careful and liaise with your digital marketing agency about what results you can expect to see.

As the name suggests, PPC is basically a form of Online advertising where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. This may be a set amount per click, or you may need to bid against rival companies on how much you’re willing to pay to secure pride of place beside the search results – again your digital marketing agency will consider your budget, anticipated conversion rate, profit per conversion, and of course your keywords before advising on what type of campaign you should be running.

Before you go splashing your cash, it’s important to know what you’re doing (or you could quickly find your budget has vanished but you have nothing to show for it!). Here we’ll give you some valuable pointers on how to get started with your own PPC campaign – of course if you’re not very ‘tech savvy’, the correct course of action is to turn the whole thing over to a digital marketing agency from the start. In which case, use the below as a guide to get you more up to speed with the basics of PPC.

The first point to cover is strategy. As with anything in marketing, in order to be successful, you need to think about what you want to achieve and to have a solid strategy in place. There’s no point wasting your money by not planning, so planning the campaign becomes your first port of call. Here are some key questions you need to answer before you get going, in order to ensure you set everything up correctly.

1. What constitutes a conversion for you? What specific action do you want visitors to perform in order to record their visit as a ‘success’? Do you want them to download an e-book, purchase a product, activate live chat, subscribe to a newsletter, etc etc? You need to be clear what a conversion is, and make that clear to your digital marketing agency.
2. How are you going to record these actions, (Google Analytics?) and are they being pulled through into AdWords?
3. What figures do you need to achieve? Is there a target CPA (cost per acquisition) at which point the campaign will be profitable? (This is obviously a vital point: if you spend £1,500 pcm on AdWords to generate 13 ‘conversions’ and each conversion is worth an average of just £100 then you’ve not broken even….so you must be clear on your figures when setting your budgets, including what you expect to earn per conversion).
4. Are you willing and able to commit for a six month period? As you’ll need to set a budget and stick to it for a minimum of this period in order for the campaign to be properly refined and optimised. Ideally, we’ll sign clients up to a 12 month PPC campaign with a break clause at month 6 because by then we should all be seeing the benefits. So you need to understand from the get-go that this is a long-term commitment and it takes time for results to be refined.

So to summarise, the first and most important thing you need to do for a new PPC campaign is to outline why you want to use PPC and what your goals are: this will help you set up your campaigns well from the start.

www.digitalox.co.uk for more information: PPC Part 2 released on the 11th of September 2018!