Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns operate much differently than SEO campaigns.
While you expect SEO campaigns to take their time to bear fruit, PPC(Pay Per Click) campaigns are expected to produce almost immediate results.
SEO campaigns are easy to scale, depending on the type of effort you put in.
PPC campaigns can spiral out of control and take your PPC budget with it if you don’t properly manage them.
When the time comes when your campaign is successful, you’ll need to explore ways to scale it and make every dollar count.
However, scaling your PPC is a concentrated effort.
To accomplish this task, this guide will teach you all you need to know about growing your campaign to new heights.
Before you decide to scale your PPC (Pay per click )campaign, it’s important to make sure that everything is in working order.
Also, you need to be sure whether or not scaling your campaign is the best choice for your business moving forward.
Below are some essential questions you should ask and answer before growing your Pay per click campaign.
One of the most common causes of PPC(Pay Per Click) campaign failures is that the landing page or website hasn’t been built. It can be frustrating to spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars every month, achieve impressions and clicks on your ads, only for them to visit your website and leave.
PPC campaigns are only a means to an end. This means that your website or landing page needs to actually work properly before continuing with your campaign. To make sure your website is working and heighten your campaign’s conversion rate, here are the following steps you should take:
You wouldn’t believe how many PPC campaigns aren’t configured with Google Analytics. Some forget to install this feature, and others figure it’s not very important. Nonetheless, Google Analytics is instrumental in tracking conversions down your sales funnel.
With Google Analytics, you can find out the exact keywords customers are using to find an ad. You can also check on important SEO benchmarks such as dwell time (average session time), bounce rate, and more.
Google Analytics is most important in observing how leads react to your website when they’re away from your ads. This is the type of information you won’t find on Google or Facebook Ads.
When you run an eCommerce store, dealing with B2C clients, there’s no need for investing in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. After all, people are going to click on your ad, visit your store, buy, and leave.
When you’re targeting B2B clients, you have to groom them before they’re ready to buy. Before you scale your campaign, you have to make sure that your business is ready to deal with a sudden influx of new prospects.
Thus, be sure to research and invest in a premium CRM platform that aligns with your business’ needs.
Once you’ve made the decision to begin scaling your PPC campaign, it’s time to put in the work to make your changes happen. By following these 10 convenient steps, you can begin the process of growing your PPC campaigns.
If you haven’t done so already, invest sufficient resources into creating a landing page that can visibly attract prospects delivered from your paid ads and convert them into paying customers.
Landing pages are the most important aspect of any PPC campaign, as they are responsible for improving conversions. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to hire a proficient copywriter and UX designer to ensure that your landing page design is a success.
When your landing page is complete, conduct regular A/B tests and perform tweaks to make sure that it will perform it’s best over time.
This may seem obvious, but increasing your ad budget is one of the most sure-fire ways of scaling your PPC campaign. The more you’re willing to spend on PPC ads, the more placements you can earn on the internet and social media.
Let’s say that your competitor is spending $1,000 a month on Google Ads. If you’re not prepared to match or exceed their investment, then you can’t expect to achieve similar results.
Granted, you can achieve remarkable results with any reasonable ad budget if you’re creative enough. But, if your competitors are allocating more money towards foundational keywords that are bringing in vast amounts of traffic, then you’re always going to be at a disadvantage.
As a result, make the decision to increase your budget at a rate that’s financially feasible for your business.
A lot of businesses spend a lot of time, effort, and money targeting new prospects. Depending on your industry, some people may not be interested in learning more about a product outright.
After all, paid ads aren’t really considered to be an inbound marketing strategy. You’re essentially paying for your ads to be placed in front of a person if they type in a familiar keyword.
This doesn’t mean that the person is automatically interested in buying a product or service. For this reason, you need a contingency plan to subliminally keep your business in the minds of prospects who aren’t yet ready to convert.
Remarketing in PPC campaigns helps you to achieve this. Google Ads allows you to structure existing campaigns to retarget people who have viewed your ads and are on different websites:
This allows advertisers to use an internet user’s cookies to send ads even when people are on completely different websites:
Remarketing adds a “moving ad” effect to a PPC campaign. No matter where a prospect goes online, your ads can follow. Be sure to create a cookie policy to stay GDPR compliant and respect your audience’s privacy.
If you’re going to scale your PPC campaigns, chances are that you plan to advertise several more products and services your business offers. The problem is that you can’t group all of these potential ads together.
This makes it very difficult to track results and measure your campaign’s ROI.
When scaling your PPC campaign, you’ll need to create distinct ad groups for different products and services.
For example, let’s say that you sell home security equipment. If you’re planning on advertising both home security cameras and alarm systems, then it’s best to place these products in different groups.
Why? Both of these products are very similar.
The reason is because when you separate different products and services into distinct ad groups, you make it easier to target hyper-specific keywords. This way, you can not only create keyword-rich ad copy, but you can develop ads that are just what your audience is looking for.
When designing a PPC campaign, it can be tempting to just target the low-hanging fruit. After all, there’s no harm in bidding for low-cost keywords that can net minimal traffic for your website or landing page.
The problem is that all traffic isn’t good traffic. Just because your ads are gaining impressions online doesn’t mean that they are successful. Even if you’re targeting keywords that total hundreds of thousands of traffic, your ads will never be completely efficient.
As a result, make sure that you analyze the demand of your targeted keywords before moving forward. This goes beyond determining how much traffic a standard keyword receives.
You can analyze the demand of a keyword by using external solutions, such as WordStream, SpyFu, SEMRush, and Ubersuggest.
Do you know how many keywords you’re targeting? Are they organized accordingly so you can monitor their performance? If not, then you better get busy in establishing a keyword list.
Google Ads already shows you a complete list of the keywords you’re bidding for. Though, if you plan to use any of the external keyword research tools mentioned before, you’ll need to explore these keywords into a list.
A major part of building a keyword list is deciding which keywords you don’t want to target. This may not seem important right now, but you could possibly be wasting money on irrelevant keywords that won’t net any bang for your buck.
If you’re attempting to scale your PPC campaign, the first step is analyzing areas where your ad budget is being wasted. Here are some effective ways to optimize your ad spend by creating a list of negative keywords:
If you’re going to be successful in scaling your PPC campaigns, then you’ll first have to spy on your fiercest competitors and understand how they’re structuring their campaigns.
In fact, this is one of the most important steps of building a PPC(Pay Per Click) campaign in the first place. Competitor analysis is the crux of both SEO and paid search. The good news is that there are several tools available to get a sneak peak into the campaigns of your competition.
Auction Insights via Google Ads, SpyFu, SEMRush, are all great tools to utilize in this regard.
Don’t fall into the trap of spamming keywords into your ad copy and headlines just to improve its quality score. While your ads will appear for relevant searches, it will fail to compel potential customers to click.
Remember, ad copy is for people, not Google or other. Make sure you are communicating clear and concise information to your target audience, such as your offer, contact information, and buzz words (such as buy now).
The important thing when writing ad copy is to always write for the end user.
Like the ad copy, the call-to-action (CTA) is also one of the most important structural components of any campaign. Therefore, pay close attention to the verbiage and contact information you use in your CTAs.
If you’re selling products, you should strive towards attracting your audience to “buy now”. On the other hand, if you’re selling services, it would be best to convince your audience to “learn more”.
These are clear differences, as most online products are geared toward consumers who have natural impulses to splurge in comparison to key decision makers who are interested in a service.
Since your CTAs will impact your entire campaign, place them in rigorous A/B tests to ensure they are effectively converting your target audience.
Scaling your PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign will ultimately require a great deal of experimentation, time, effort, and money.
When you choose to do all of the work yourself, you can run the risk of wasting your valuable investment and ruining your campaign.
In such cases, it’s time to fire your PPC agency.
Nonetheless, if you’re still interested in growing your Pay per click campaign, then you’ve come to the right place. Contact us today to receive a free proposal to begin scaling your campaign.
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When you want to use paid search marketing platforms, Google Ads often leads the list. Because of its versatility, simplicity, and popularity, it’s obvious why it’s a popular choice. But when you drop all of your PPC advertising money into one marketing strategy, you could lose some leads.
That’s why some businesses explore paid advertising marketing outside of Google, with many turning to Linkedin Ads.
Google Ads and Linkedin Ads are highly efficient ways to market your products and services to businesses and consumers. But each marketing channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever you choose, make sure you discuss the matter with your web development company.
Below is a closer look at each option.
We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google reaches a vast audience worldwide – its ad reach is a stunning 4 billion people. Google search handles about 70% of desktop searches, and many companies report that they get about 90% of their organic traffic from the search engines. Also, up to 95% of the mobile search market comes from Google.
People use Google’s search a lot, and having the ability to target search terms with specific search ads is a massive benefit of Adwords. People tend to search for very specific things in Google, so if you can customize your Google advertising for your targeted audience, you’ll receive plenty of leads.
So, we can assume that most people’s targeted audience uses Google to some degree. That’s a massive advantage for companies when they want to target an audience.
However, businesses that want to narrow down their search may have issues getting their Google ads settings right with both Google Ads. And if you blunder when segmenting your audiences, your digital ad campaign could suffer.
LinkedIn features a narrower audience – 500 million users – namely businesses and business professionals. But this more limited audience makes it the perfect place for effective B2B marketing. LinkedIn lets marketers serve online ads to decision-makers and vital audience members in several ways.
Summary: For B2B firms that want to reach decision-makers, Linkedin is a terrific advertising platforms. If your B2C company intends to increase its reach, Google Ads could be the best fit.
When you target your audience with Google Ads, you have a few options: location, affinity, technology, buyer behavior, demographics, and interactions with your app or website.
No matter how much you know about your buyer, you may struggle to avoid clicks from worthless leads that cost too much.
In some cases on Google, people may not even know what they’re looking for. You can try to advertise to your desired targeted audience on Google Ads, but it can be challenging to get to the precise people who will most likely buy what you sell.
When people sign up for LinkedIn, they usually provide many details, such as their occupation, title/job title, experience, industry, education, interests, and more. All of this information can be leveraged for great advantage when you start your marketing campaigns.
Also, LinkedIn users can join many groups, start conversations, and obtain followers. The data is priceless when you want to target a specific audience and market to them. LinkedIn also has a Matched Audience that helps advertisers match their email marketing lists and website visitors with users on LinkedIn.
Many marketing experts think that LinkedIn Ads offer more value. LinkedIn has refined targeting, and you can make your product known to them so that you can tell them about something they didn’t know existed.
Summary: For B2B and B2C companies looking for a broad audience, Google Ads has enough targeting features. But for B2B firms that want to target specific groups, LinkedIn Ads has about 100 segmentation methods for micro targeting.
When you want lead generation, Google Ads has a broader reach and is the most effective. First, you can bring in a lot of prospects to your site without breaking the bank. The audience you’re after on Google visits the search giant with the idea to find the best product or service. This makes generating leads easier.
Getting leads from LinkedIn can be more challenging. Users of the platform may sign in to read industry news or talk to group members. No matter how perfect your ad is, viewers may not be in the mood to buy anything.
That said, Linkedin has a way to target ad leads through in-site messaging, which can generate plenty of leads.
When it comes down to dollars and cents, LinkedIn Ads usually are more pricey than Google Ads. As in Google, you can select cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.
LinkedIn also features a cost-per-send for InMail advertising. Typically, you’ll pay about $5 for each click, $6 for 1,000 impressions, and .80 for each send.
With Google Ads, the average CPC is $1. But to leverage that low cost, you need to work on your audience segmentation. If you don’t your ROI may be below what you want.
Summary: Advertising budgets for each platform depends on several factors. On average, Google Ads cost less than LinkedIn Ads. If your B2B company has a tight budget, you may want to focus on a limited variety of LinkedIn ads instead of a broad range of Google Ads.
So should you advertise with Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads? Yes!
What we mean is, it depends. The correct choice depends on your budget, product or service offered, marketing goals, and target audience. You should not assume that when you need a digital marketing campaign, Google Analytics Adwords is the only choice.
It’s critical to evaluate the market, understand who your buyer is, and make a data-driven decision about the best marketing platform to reach your well-defined goals. One type of company might do better with Google Ads, and another may find LinkedIn Ads preferable.
The great news is you don’t need to choose between the two platforms. Many businesses use both, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and others. If you have the budget, it may pay off to diversify your paid search advertising to get the best ROI.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Digital marketing is a classic marketing strategy that’s commonly used to supplement organic web traffic, but it’s hardly the most straightforward way to increase your site’s audience. In fact, from a technological perspective, it’s a rather fussy practice. That’s why brands that want to include a PPC marketing strategy in their overall strategic decisions need to work with an experienced agency. Agencies facilitate ad distribution, track clicks, and calculate fees – and the best ones can help their clients thrive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of subpar agencies and bad actors out there, and you need to know how to spot them.
So, how do you know if it’s time to fire your PPC agencies? Keep an eye out for these 9 red flags. They could indicate you’re working with the wrong agency and that it’s time to make a move.
Companies leave their PPC agencies behind for all sorts of reasons, but according to a 2015 report by the Society for Digital Agencies (SoDA), the most common reasons include outgrowing the agency’s capabilities, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction with their strategy. These are all valid reasons, and ultimately many of them can be reduced to an agency’s failure to generate any or enough growth. After all, disliking the agency’s strategy isn’t likely to be much of a problem if that strategy is generating major growth. Similarly, a brand is unlikely to view itself as having outgrown the agency is their accounts continue to grow.
Ultimately, what these different reasons for firing PPC agencies demonstrate is that, any way you slice it, no one wants to work with an agency that isn’t making them money. So, while it might take a little while for your PPC ads to gain traction, if you’re not seeing growth based on the launch of or changes to your PPC campaign, it’s time to move on to a different agency.
While most brands work with a PPC advertising agency to run their campaigns, it’s not only possible but advisable for you to set up your own accounts with the major PPC advertising platforms, which include sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Facebook. Still, if you’re not the most technologically savvy, it can be tempting to let your agency do it for you. Don’t give in to the impulse. Instead, ask them to guide you through it so that you can ensure that you’re the one with owner access rights.
Unless you have the owner access rights to your company’s PPC accounts, you can’t be sure you have unmediated access to your campaign metrics or feel good/ confident that you’ll be able to transfer your accounts to another agency or bring them in-house if needed. In other words, your agency could be misrepresenting best results to you or could refuse to relinquish control if you end your contract. You need to retain those rights and then give your PPC agent the appropriate permissions to manage your campaigns. If they balk at this arrangement, show them the door.
Typically, when you look at your company’s profile on a site like Google AdWords, you’ll see that your PPC agency has set up specific goals to help your business grow. These commonly include such metrics as Cost Per Acquisition, Return On Advertising Spend, and Cost Per Lead, though there are plenty of other valuable metrics that are worth tracking. Such measurements assure you that you’re spending your Digital marketing money in the right place, help you budget for ad spending, and offer insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Unfortunately, you’ll occasionally encounter PPC advertising agencies that fail to set up these metric reports, and they’re not to be trusted. Even if they claim to be using an in-house system, it’s your right to demand they use the standard reporting system for each PPC platform and to fire them if they refuse to. Dashboard-based metrics exist to provide consistent measurements regarding the success of PPC campaigns ad those are the numbers you want to reference.
In a similar vein, some PPC advertising agencies skip the core metrics noted above in favor of less valuable but more appealing “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics don’t help your business make money and they offer limited insight into your operations. Examples of vanity metrics include any campaign value based on impressions, engagement metrics that don’t drive conversions, and even many of the behavior-based metrics that used to be considered the gold standard in website evaluation, such as bounce rate or time on site.
Ultimately, vanity metrics don’t serve your company because they can be created artificially. An untrustworthy PPC agency might drive up engagement numbers by sharing a great meme on your brand’s landing pages, which will drive likes and other reactions, but won’t actually funnel clients to your site or create sales. Similarly, you can get a huge number of impressions by getting your PPC new ads onto a very popular site, but if no one is clicking on it, all you’ve got is a tally of how many people visited/ web traffic to someone else’s website.
Having the right metrics is important, but if you’re going to meet your goals then your Good PPC agency needs to be adjusting your account settings regularly to refine your campaigns. At a minimum, that means accessing your account to regularly monitoring and fine-tune the settings at least once a week. Such regular check-ins allow your agency to quickly adjust your social media campaigns based on updates to the search engines algorithm, catch any conversion mistakes that could cost your company money, and even react to competitors campaigns.
Be sure that you not only ask your PPC agency how often they access and update your accounts, but that you’re also checking your accounts regularly for updates. The reality is that, although many companies run PPC campaigns, only 10% of AdWords accounts are updated weekly. If your PPC agency can’t meet that standard, ditch them for one that will stay on top of your campaigns.
Just as your PPC agency needs to be fine tuning your accounts regularly, they should also be reporting back on your campaigns at least monthly. While seeing week-to-week progress would be great, as with many kinds of growth, this can be hard to evaluate. Comprehensive, monthly reports, on the other hand, can help you see what your agency has been doing on your behalf, how your accounts are growing, and allow you to be an active participant in your Digital marketing strategy.
Never settle for a company that doesn’t offer substantive reporting. While great reports may offer added insights from your account manager or more labor intensive explanatory work, the majority of PPC reporting is automated – any company that doesn’t provide it is just lazy.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll speak to the same person every time you contact your PPC agency; that doesn’t even happen at your bank or your doctor’s office. That being said, there should be one person who acts as the lead on your account because that allows them to master your brand’s voice, develop a big picture strategy, and generally build up a knowledge base around your brand’s needs and preferences. They might be busy or out of the office occasionally, but anyone whose experienced both approaches – a core account manager and a rotating cast of agents – can tell you that having a point person makes a difference.
If your PPC agency doesn’t have you working with a single, core agent, you may want to ask a few questions to get a better sense of what’s happening. Do they have an unusual in-house strategy, or are they having trouble with employee retention? Do they think it doesn’t make a difference? You can also request that they place you with a single representative, but if that’s not their standard practice already, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. It just doesn’t bode well.
Google AdWords isn’t a new program and there are plenty of other PPC programs out there, but if an agency is committed to this work, then they should have complete Google’s AdWords certification program. You can check on this by asking them to show you their Premier Partner page – it really is that simple. Not having one isn’t necessarily the worst offense a company can commit, but it’s a good indicator that you can do better and should commit your ads spend elsewhere.
Did you pick your PPC agency based on their portfolio of appealing PPC ads/ads or optimized images? That’s a great starting point – it certainly indicates that they can do high-quality work – but it’s not enough if they’re not actually showing you your brand’s own ads before they launch them. Obvious, right? It should be, but many entrepreneurs have been duped by PPC agencies who tell them that their ad is similar to another ad product, which is called ad copy; the client, not wanting to be pushy, walks away with their own notion of their brand’s ad, and meanwhile the agency may not have done any work at all.
Your PPC agency should be giving you the final say on all your paid ads, so if you’ve supposedly got a campaign running and you haven’t seen your ads, ask to see them right away. Odds are good that if your agency isn’t showing you your PPC ads before launching them that they either don’t exist or they’re extremely low quality for online visibility. Great PPC agencies are proud of their work and they want you to see it. Anything less should raise concerns.
Hiring an agency to manage your PPC campaigns will obviously cost more than just the fees for the campaign itself, but the costs involved in running ads with your agency shouldn’t be confusing. That’s because, ultimately, your money should only be going two different places – to the agency and to the ad platform – and everyone at the company should be clear on the split. So, when we say you should be wary about confusing fees, we’re not talking about total cost (that’s a matter for you and your budget), but rather about how the money is split up. For any payment there should be the fee to the agency and the ads spend and it should always be obvious what the division is there.
As popular as PPC marketing is with businesses today, many of the agencies that execute these campaigns don’t do a very good job. They’re wasting your ad spend and your time, and you deserve better. That’s why you should switch to PPC.co’s PPC Management Service.
At PPC.co, we’re committed to ensuring that your ads are reaching the right audience and we know that most agencies just don’t deliver that. Starting from our understanding that website conversions often top out at 2%, we emphasize PPC marketing that pairs first contacts with retargeting efforts to ensure that your brand remains a top-of-mind solution for past visitors. A non-converting visitor is often just someone who hasn’t seen the right content yet, and we want to help you make those connections.
What else makes our PPC Management program stand out? With dual Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications, we have a deep understanding of the systems & AdWords account that get your ads seen and can use tracking data to its fullest potential of web traffic. In fact, that’s why we start every client engagement with a full PPC audit, because even when we’re not leading the campaigns, our skilled professionals can quickly see what’s working and what’s falling short in your current campaigns. From the start, we put our expertise to work for you.
If your PPC agency has exhibited any of the above warning signs, you can’t afford to wait around for progress. It’s time for the protection of business and moves on – to PPC.co. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC Management Services and say goodbye to wasted ad spend and rock bottom conversions. Once you’ve seen the difference a top PPC agency can make in your campaigns, you’ll never believe you let anyone else handle your PPC needs.
