PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing is an effective way to drive relevant organic traffic to your website. It’s a paid advertising mechanism that involves bidding on specific keywords in search engine results pages in order to occupy the top spots or paying for ads that are displayed at the top of those results.
Crafting an effective PPC campaign requires careful attention and planning; keyword research, audience segmentation, content optimization, conversion tracking, and more all come into play when marketers look to deliver successful Paid Search campaigns.
However, many overlook how their website design can also affect their PPC campaigns—yet it has just as large of an impact if not more, than any other factor considered during setup. Website design has become increasingly important recently due to its ability to create customer relationships, which ultimately impacts long-term profits.
In this article, we will discuss why good website design ties directly into successful PPC campaigns and how you can use web design to increase your returns on ad spending.
Having a tailored landing page for your ads is one of the most fundamental steps toward succeeding in PPC campaigns.
Without one, you’re essentially shooting yourself in the foot and limiting your potential ROAS (return on ad spend).
The importance of placing a call-to-action (CTA) on your landing page cannot be understated when running a successful PPC campaign. A CTA is essentially an instruction to the user, either prompting them to take action in some form or simply encouraging further engagement with content.
CTAs ensure that users know what it is you’re trying to accomplish from each visit and where they need to go once they have arrived at your site.
Having multiple CTAs not only allows you to better segment audiences but also keeps website visitors engaged for more extended periods as there are numerous paths available for them within your site structure—ease of navigation does wonders for overall user experience and therefore affects conversion rates directly related to effectiveness campaigns.
Having a clear continuity between the messages of your PPC ads and corresponding landing pages is paramount for success in most campaigns.
If an ad has targeted certain keywords, you must make sure to adjust any given page content accordingly so that customers don’t feel misled or confused when they get there—one metric known as ‘intent landing rate’ looks into whether visitors meet what they were promised with the initial message.
It might sound like a slight difference, but subtle elements such as typos and minor grammatical standings affect the level of engagement around calls-to-action (CTAs) regardless of how attractive chosen design layout themes may have been, so the best practice is to keep everything consistent from the beginning to end for a very successful campaign.
Having a website that offers great usability is as essential to PPC campaigns as any other metric related to it.
Aspects like how quickly users can access information, ease of navigation while they’re within a page, and logical structure all play their part in ensuring a good user experience. If these elements are neglected, then you may find yourself paying more for clicks than competitors or, worse – falling behind on the goals set out for your overall campaign performance.
Utilizing proper calls-to-action (CTAs) on your landing pages is an excellent way to help increase user conversion rates and return on investments –contact forms, add-to-cart buttons as well subscription emails effectively guide visitors in the desired direction, which, in this case, directly correlate with having a successful PPC campaign.
It is important that these CTAs are configured correctly so there are no confusing paths for users to take, which may lead them away from whatever it was you were trying to accomplish beforehand.
For example, contact forms have become somewhat standard optimization tactics due to their plethora of benefits, including gathering valuable insights around customer interests and any products/services offered, helping marketers segment visitor types even further detailed levels of conversions conducted as well as gaining additional information about who may visiting business website just generally being companion much success single campaigns across many platforms.
It is of great importance that websites are designed to offer logical pathways for users in order to access information quickly and easily.
This means focusing on user experience when designing a website or its associated landing pages—good navigation, clear brand messaging, and detailed descriptions of products/services being offered must all be taken into account.
Having organized content helps guide potential customers toward the goals set out by your campaign rather than being left confused.
In addition to having good website design and usability, what ultimately determines the success of your PPC campaigns comes down to monitoring tracking & measurement tools over time.
Data Analytics features such as heatmaps & click maps serve a great purpose in understanding how people interact with content when arriving from different channels such as organic search or Paid Advertising – it is known that people behave differently depending on which route they take, for instance, so this form of analytics can be valuable in finding out exactly who visitors are looking for products/services through.
Additionally, A/B testing has become extremely popular due to its effectiveness in demonstrating better results when trying experiments by making small tweaks without necessarily having drastic changes being made while undertaking CRO projects.
Data analytics features such as heatmaps & click maps are essential in understanding user journeys from when they first arrived on a page through to when they take the desired action you set out for them – this type of analytics helps give marketers insight into how people behave and interact with content, what areas should be focused more attention on and other useful information.
Additionally, it is possible to use A/B testing experiments extensively in order to find the best way of attracting customers using small changes while undergoing various conversion rate optimization (CRO) projects.
The use of heatmaps & click maps, form analytics, and A/B testing can be utilized to acquire a greater understanding of user behavior.
Heatmaps show us how users interact with content within sites by displaying popular clicks as well as less popular elements while also focusing on page loading times; this is an important metric in terms of website design since speed matters significantly when it comes to creating great user experiences.
Click-maps focus more closely on interactions such as dropdowns, forms, and buttons which are commonly used for data collection purposes –they display the percentages at which visitors succeed or fail when navigating particular pages so marketers can adjust CTA placements accordingly.
Form analytics help tracks various behaviors, including list opt-ins, site registrations, etc., whereas remarketing tactics further help keep customers engaged over time -all these methods will eventually lead to larger ROIs if executed correctly since better target segments have been accessed through proper tracking efforts implemented throughout any campaign setup.
Remarketing tactics come into play when it comes to maintaining tracking & measurement tools over time. These methods are extremely important for long-term campaigns since they serve as a reminder of what once attracted customers and can help boost conversions in the future, thanks to its “cookie sync” feature that can be used across different channels while also offering insights into previous successes and serving as a roadmap pointing out paths one should choose to keep performance up optimally.
Using conversion tracking tools helps marketers gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of their campaign by allowing them to track various metrics such as referred sales, sign-ups, abandoned cart items, etc. – this is especially germane when during CRO projects as it may become necessary to analyze traction levels through logging points within customer journey reach the ultimate goal.
In conclusion, boosting your paid traffic through optimized web design is vital to the success of any PPC campaigns that you run. It is essential to have a tailored landing page with relevant messaging and an effective call-to-action (CTA), so visitors are not misled when they land on the page.
Furthermore, ensuring continuity between an ad’s message and its corresponding destination pages can be beneficial as it prevents confusion or false expectations from customers due to contradicting messages being experienced in different channels.
Additionally, focusing on creating a great user experience through usability optimization will do wonders for conversions. From optimizing PPC to tailoring your landing page, our comprehensive PPC or SEO campaign have everything you need to win.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you!
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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.
