01Digital marketing and PPC companies use advanced marketing techniques to reach online audiences, and one of the most important is PPC or pay per click.
Below are some of the most frequent questions we hear about PPC.
There are several reasons you may not see your PPC ads when you search Google:
You may be seeing remarketing ads which many digital marketing companies recommend.
Remarketing takes effect by using a cookie when searchers to go your site. The cookie lets your campaign target them as they look at other websites on Google’s network.
You should try this as well because it can really drive up your conversions.
You probably have competition going after your keywords. Just as your team is doing keyword conversion optimization, your competitors are too, which boosts the price. Just one competitor being more aggressive can make the CPCs much higher.
Another issue that drives cost is quality score.
If you see a decrease in quality score, you may have higher costs per clock.
There are many variables that influence quality score, but some of the most vital is CTR, the relevance of the ad, and the relevance of the landing page.
You can help here by making sure all of them are being improved by your team.
Improving the metrics that affect quality score is one of the best ways to improve the effectiveness of your PPC ads.
There are some challenges when you start PPC, and the biggest is being good at it. First, you need to do a lot of work upfront to have a solid PPC campaign.
For example, you must do a great job researching and picking perfect keywords. Then you must organize your keywords into effective ad groups and campaigns. You also need to establish good landing pages that have been optimized to convert traffic and also programmed to defeat click fraud, which is when a person or bot clicks your ad to drain your budget.
When it’s done effectively, PPC is one of business’s most powerful marketing tools. But if you don’t do it right, it’s just throwing money down the toilet. Whether it is best for your company depends on what your objectives are.
For brand awareness, PPC can work great. No matter whether your ads work as far as ROI or not, if it gets impressions, more people know about your company.
For increased revenue, PPC can work well, but you need to have a high-quality website set up to convert your traffic to sales.
There are several ways you can optimize your PPC campaign depending on what your business does. For instance, the Google Shopping Network may be ideal for companies because it can have ad text and images. But if the company offers services, you may want expanded ad text.
If you find Google is doing well for you, it makes sense to advertise on Bing. You will get a lower volume of leads but the traffic may be more cost-effective than Google.
Your competitors know that searchers looking for your company could be customers for them, too. They’re trying to nab them. There isn’t anything you can do to stop this as it’s not illegal. This is another cost-effective way to get prospects that you may consider.
The quality score is how Google views how good your ads are compared to your landing pages and keywords. It’s important to have a high quality score because you get better positioning and lower CPC.
You can improve this score by making sure your text for the ad is relevant to your landing page and keywords. Also, look at the landing page and what the user experience is like. You also may add negative keywords that aren’t relevant to your business.
First, double-check that your conversion tracking has been set up correctly. It can be hard to get conversions when you first start your campaigns. But to make them happen, run tests all the time. Be sure every ad is relevant to your keyword and landing page. And use negative keywords, too.
Next, competitor analysis is vital for PPC and there are many tools that will help you do well with it. If you look in your Google Ads Interface, you can go over Auction Insights to find out the competitors you have for the identical keywords.
Doing well with PPC takes a lot of time, planning, and execution. But if you carefully select your keywords, negative keywords, and optimize your landing pages for conversions, you should be able to increase sales and brand awareness over the year.
If your Google Ads aren’t showing or if you are having issues with your PPC ROI, get in touch, we can help!
Do you want to rank better in search engines? Do you want more traffic coming to your website? If so, then you should not be ignoring other link building tool.
There are many different strategies that SEOs use to generate links for their clients such as link building strategy, but some are much more effective than others. In this article, we will review the best paid or free link building tools/link builders for SEOs and how each one can help improve your rankings.
Responsa is a link-building service that has been around for many years and offers great customer support. Using Responsa, SEOs can help bring backlinks or broken links to websites that have few or no links pointing to them.
The best thing about this tool is the fact it’s all automated – just type in your URL (or competitor website) and they’ll show you insightful data to improve your link building campaigns.
If you’ve got limited time on your hands or don’t know how to get started with other tools, then this might be a good choice for you.
Majestic SEO is another link-building tool that allows users to analyze backlinks and get a lot more information about where they’re coming from. It has been around for many years, so it’s very popular among SEOs who are looking for reliable and trusted software.
A great feature of this program is the ability to find websites linking to your competition by entering their website URL into the Majestic interface (or vice versa).
In addition, you can use this tool to see how fresh links are in relation to other sources as well as what type of anchor text was used when they were created.
For those reasons, we think that Majestic may be one of the best tools out there if you want to use an amazing tool with higher-end features.
MozBar is another popular tool with SEOs. It’s a browser extension that you can use for free to access/day free trial their features and data from the toolbar in your browser window.
This program allows users to see how many backlinks they have, rank on search engines like Google or Bing, as well as get an idea of what type of content might be attracting visitors at first glance Also link building efforts, broken link building & outreach campaigns.
It also gives users information about website authority, domain authority, keyword research tool & seo metrics – something which may help them decide whether or not they want to invest any time into building links for it.
For these reasons, MozBar could be one way to generate valuable insights when looking over your link building campaigns if you don’t already know where else to start off with this process or link building process.
Raven is a tool that lets you know how popular your website or webpage is on the internet.
This means it can show SEOs what search terms are driving traffic to their site, who might be linking back to them, and more all in real-time!
For those reasons, Raven could be something worth checking out if you want never-before-seen data for insights as well as an all-inclusive dashboard with tons of information at once.
Ahrefs is another reliable link-building software for those who want to spend some money.
It’s a tool that provides users with an overview of their backlinks, broken links as well as the ability to find new ones/ link building opportunities, link prospecting, referring domains, link building outreach efforts and track them over time.
This means you can see how long it takes before they start driving traffic, when the links were created, etc. You’ll be able to gather more insight into what content has been working on your site too – this will help SEOs decide where they should invest resources next!
For these reasons, we think Ahrefs may have one of the best link building tool, most in-depth features around for anyone looking for something robust that offers all kinds of metrics at once (including pages indexed) than other link building tools.
Screaming Frog might be the most robust link-building tool on this list.
It’s a desktop program that lets you crawl through your site or competition and find any links pointing to them – which is great for SEOs who need something easy-to-use but also incredibly powerful at the same time!
You can choose from different types of crawls, use filters when searching for anything by keyword (which helps with accuracy), and automatically export all information in an Excel file too.
For those reasons, we think Screaming Frog might be a good choice if you want more control over what type of data you’re looking for during your research process without needing some kind of complicated software.
BuzzSumo is a tool that can help you find out what content has been most popular on social media.
This means users will be able to see which types of blog post are generating the most attention, who created them in the first place, and where they were shared too.
For those reasons, we think BuzzSumo might be one way for SEOs to get an idea of how content performs in this channel. It could also be a good tool if you’re looking for some content marketing inspiration as well.
SEMrush is an SEO software that lets you find keywords/keyword research for SEO campaigns.
This means it can generate long-tail search phrases, tell users how popular they are on the internet, and even show what percentage of traffic goes to them – which could be immensely valuable information for anyone who wants in-depth data about their site’s performance!
For those reasons, SEMrush might have one of the most exhaustive functions out there when it comes to finding new ideas for content or anything else related to your campaign. It also has tons of metrics at once which may make this tool one worth checking out if you want something with lots of different features.
Link-building is the most important aspect of digital marketing because it’s a major driver of website rankings on the internet. Using the right free tools (google search console) will help you maintain a competitive edge in your industry and elevate your website’s ranking.
Still, managing a build links/link-building campaign takes a lot of time, effort, and SEO knowledge. Do you want to learn more about how we can help? If so, contact us today to speak to a member of our team.
These days marketers and businesses excessively rely on digital marketing to achieve their goals. Finding leads, generating interest, qualifying leads, and ultimately converting them into paying customers – all of it can easily be done online. And pay-per-click (PPC) digital advertising is an efficient way to do so. Brands across the globe invest in comprehensive PPC as it builds brand awareness, drives more web traffic, and produces more high-quality leads.
However, like all other online marketing strategies, it is essential to keep an eye on the results and tweak your PPC campaigns for maximum effectiveness. This also includes knowing that you are getting the expected return on your investment in PPC.
ROI is a critical success metric. Let’s find out how you can calculate the ROI for your PPC campaigns and even improve it.
There are three commonly-used ways to measure PPC ROI/calculate PPC ROI success:
Calculating PPC ROI as part of a PPC campaign management shows its actual effect on your business. At the same time, it is vital to check vanity metrics like clicks and impressions to measure PPC success.
As a marketer, you already know that click costs are just one part of the equation. You also need to factor in a range of other expenses when calculating the total cost of a PPC campaign. Some of these include:
All of these expenses affect your PPC campaigns’ total cost. Next, retrieve the total revenue so you can calculate your ROI.
The simplest formula to calculate ROI is:
(Profit – Cost) / Cost
Generally, advertisers refer to ROAS when they talk about ROI because the difference between the two is whether you consider your business’s cost of carrying out PPC advertising business.
ROAS is calculated as:
(PPC Revenue – PPC Cost) / PPC Cost
The result is written in a percentage form. For instance, if your PPC sales are $1,200, while you paid $600 as PPC click costs, the ROAS will be 100%:
($1200 profit – $600 cost = $600) / $ 600 cost = 1.0 = 100%
The ROAS formula is very straightforward, and you can gauge your overall PPC performance and make optimization easy. ROAS is used in bid optimization algorithms to calculate these bids with the help of the bid management platforms.
The calculation of all possible costs, including those to generate leads and sell products, is still insufficient. PPC helps you maximize your profits bringing in maximum visitors and sales at a reasonable cost.
Conversions are highly dependent on the right keywords being used in ads, getting clicks at a good cost, showing Google ads to searchers, and converting visitors to buyers.
To calculate profit per click/impression, you need extensive data for clicks, impressions, total sale, and total cost. First, calculate the profit by subtracting the total cost from total sales (you can also factor in the overhead costs).
Use this formula to calculate the profit per impressions:
Profit / Impressions
Use this formula to calculate the profit per click:
Profit / Click
With these calculations, you can figure out which metric to go for with the keyword or ad or carry out further testing if the information still seems insufficient.
Digital marketing is tricky because it’s constantly evolving. You have to be on your toes and continuously improve your numbers to stay ahead in the race for PPC and search ad domination.
If you find out that the return on investment Or PPC ROI isn’t as good as you expected or could be better, it’s time to improve your game.
Here are a few ways you can increase your PPC ROI:
It is essential to target the right audience for your ads, regardless of the time you display the Google ads to them. Since audiences differ from another for every ad, there might be Google ads that follow a better trend at a specific time.
Generally, ad networks let users schedule the Google ads for the time and days that best suit their needs. For instance, if a local garment store’s ad performs better during a FIFA game, go ahead and pick the same schedule for all your ads.
PPC ads depend on keywords, even more so than they do on demographics. You can understand the customers’ intent with the keywords they use in search or the websites they visit. You can use this data from online activity and enhance your PPC campaigns’ effectiveness using the exact keyword matches.
The exact keyword match will result in the ad being displayed when that phrase is used without any other words. Since you limit an ad’s reach in this way, you have to make sure you use this approach properly so the people who watch the ad are the ones who will most probably buy your products.
For instance, a car dealer selling a Honda Civic EX must use the exact “honda civic EX price” keyword in their ad. Since this is a particular keyword, anyone who searches for it must be a potential buyer of the car, and as a result, the perfect target audience for your car ad.
Even though you have a target audience base, there will be different groups within them who will respond differently to your ads for several reasons. As a result, it is essential to make multiple campaigns so you can cover all of them.
If you resort to using a single PPC campaign to appeal to all these people, you will have a poor ROI. Marketers should carefully design various ads, considering the kind of consumers who would like to use your products and the type of ad that will best explain their value to them.
A great way to improve your PPC campaigns is through negative keywords. This way, your ad won’t be shown to uninterested or unrelated audiences. For instance, a men’s shoe store should use the negative keyword “women” because why should the business pay for a wasted click or view’?
Similarly, a luxury brand that sells expensive goods should use the negative keywords “cheap,” “sale,” or “affordable” to avoid showing the ad to those who want cheaper or imitation brands.
While getting a click on an ad from a customer is huge, your job doesn’t end over there. Ad clicks aren’t enough to generate revenue, and as a marketer, you can improve your ROI with features like videos on your landing page. This helps to increase conversions of customers who click an ad and get there.
Furthermore, you can test your landing page to see if you can easily convert customers once they arrive. When you design targeted landing pages, you allow users to reach a specific page, depending on the clicked ad.
Marketers using Google AdWords should focus on improving their ad’s Quality Score to increase their ROI. The frequency with which the consumers click on an ad and convert after clicking on it affects the score.
Successful ads give more money to Google, and as a result, high-quality score ads are placed higher. It is best to see your ad’s Quality Scores to observe what aligns the most with your target audience.
It is essential to include keywords in your ad copy and target information to capture your viewer’s attention. These words are the ones they consciously or subconsciously look for in an ad when they scan it.
While it depends on an ad’s format, generally, keywords are bold to make them stand out to increase attention and consequently get people to click on your ad.
You cannot improve your ROI and campaigns unless you thoroughly track their results. You can make variations in an ad or its targeting in several ways to affect outcomes. Try out various combinations and track results to determine which target audience and ad type are the most effective.
For instance, you can use variations like different CTAs or distinct background colors for your PPC advertising.
The PPC return on investment/PPC ROI is an essential measure of success since it shows how well you are doing in your campaigns and how much you need to improve.
There are various ways you can measure the ROI and track their results to figure out how you can improve them to make money on your PPC campaigns. Try different methods and see which one aligns with your audience and ads the most. Stick to it instead of going back and forth to ensure a steady approach.
In order to get a positive return on investment with your pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign, you need to pay attention to the numbers.
That’s really all PPC Online advertising is – a numbers game. And if you get the numbers right, you win.
But which numbers matter most? And how can you boost those numbers as much as possible to increase your success and revenue?
Well, it all starts with a good click-through rate (CTR).
In this article, we’re going to dive into the nitty-gritty of what click through rate is, why it’s important, what percentages you should be aiming for, and clever (somewhat random) ways you can get better results.
Let’s go all the way back to the basics and dig into what the Average click through rate(CTR) metric represents, how to calculate it, and all of the basic 101-level information that usually gets glossed over.
If you already know this stuff, great – consider it a quick refresher (or move on to the section below on benchmark PPC CTR rates). If you’re totally new to the PPC game, then this will give you a baseline understanding so that everything else we’re about to discuss will make sense.
So, without further ado, let’s get into the definition.
An Average click through rate(CTR), is basically the percentage of impressions that result in total number of clicks. In order to calculate this number, you simply take the number of clicks and divide it by the total number of impressions (people who saw the ad). Then you multiply that number by 100.
For example, let’s say your online ad got 5,000 impressions and 75 people clicked. The equation would look like this:
(75 / 5,000) x 100
The result is (.015) x (100). This comes out to 1.5 percent. This is your click-through rate. It means 1.5 percent of people who saw your online ad clicked.
Okay, great – but so what?
The simplest answer is that the click-throughs on paid ad platforms like Google and Facebook use Average click through rate CTR to quickly evaluate the health and value of an ad. If lots of people are clicking, then it tells the algorithm that this is an attractive ad that’s making them lots of money. And if the ad is making them lots of money, they want to make sure you keep serving the ad. This leads them to lower the cost per click (CPC) as a way of incentivizing you to continue online advertising on their network.
In the case of Google Ads management,(CTR) also impacts something known as a “Quality Score.” This score is awarded on a 1-10 scale and is determined by a mixture of factors like Average click through rate(CTR), landing page UX, and ad relevance.
An ad’s Quality Score impacts its “Ad Rank,” which Google uses to determine where ads show up on search results. A high CTR leads to a higher Quality Score, which in turn leads to a higher Ad Rank. This ends up putting your ad in front of more of your target customers at a lower price.
If that’s all a bit confusing, here’s a simple visual to make it easier:
CTR → Quality Score → Ad Rank → PPC Ad Placement → Higher CTR
It’s basically a self-feeding cycle. As your CTR increases, so do all of the other metrics. This usually leads to a higher CTR, which…well, you get the picture.
Once you understand what (CTR) is and why it’s important for PPC ads, the next logical question is, what’s a good click-through rate?
The answer is…it depends!
I know – that’s not the answer you’re looking for – but we’re going to take a deeper dive in just a moment. The point is that there’s no concrete figure. There are dozens of circumstantial variables that come into play based on your product, industry, creative, and the PPC platform (Google vs. Facebook vs. Others).
When evaluating baseline PPC CTR, there are a few quick factors you can take into account right from the start. This includes (a) how the ad is being displayed, and (b) the industry you’re in.
Let’s start with how the ad is being displayed. With Google ads, there are two different networks. You have the Google or other search engines network and the Google display network.
The search network includes text-based ads that pop up within Google search results (at the top and bottom of the page). The display network serves ads on other websites. These are typically image-based ads and banners.
Google search network ads tend to have a slightly better click through rate(CTR), simply because they appear within the search results. Averages across all industries are usually somewhere in the 1.75 – 2.00 percent range.
Ads in the Google display network are usually much lower – somewhere south of 0.50 percent. (This is due to the fact that many users use ad blockers and other plugins that make it less likely they’ll even see the ad.)
When it comes to the industry, the average click through rate(CTR) can change dramatically from one sector to another. Here are some examples pulled from recent reports:
As you can see, the standard from industry to industry is different. Achieving a 4 percent CTR in dating and personals might be extremely low, whereas it would be an incredible rate in technology. This just goes to show there are a lot of unique factors in play.
Even within specific industries, averages vary based on the offer, type of product, brand, etc.
The fact that click-through rates vary so much can actually be viewed as a good thing. It means you always have the ability to increase your numbers. And, sometimes, all it takes is a little creativity.
Now that we have some basic context established, let’s dig into the juicy stuff. How can you improve your PPC click-through rates so that you stand a better chance of producing conversion rate and increasing revenue?
Here are several suggestions:
Humans have a wide range of emotions. And while we like to assume that we’re fairly rational creatures who make logical decisions after having all of the facts laid out for us, the truth is that we typically act on emotion (then justify with logic after the fact).
As an advertiser, you can use this little bit of knowledge to your advantage. Avoid the logical plea and get emotional. Ethically leveraging love, fear, hope, belonging, shock, and surprise can help you get better click-through rates.
For example, let’s say you’re running an ad for roses during Valentine’s. Leading with something like “2 Dozen Roses for Just $29” is actually a fairly weak hook. You might make a few sales, but there’s nothing other than price at play. What about all of the buyers who are less price sensitive?
A better ad might read: “She Thinks You Forgot. Roses Delivered Same Day.” Do you see how much better this ad copy is? It makes an emotional appeal – not just a logical dollars and cents pitch.
Questions can be powerful when used appropriately in your PPC ads management. People are naturally curious and posing the right query can get people thinking about things through whatever filter or context you’d like.
When asking questions, try wording them in a way that the answer is obvious. (Not only that, but the answer should be obvious and certain to push them closer to clicking.)
Going back to our roses example, you could do something like this: “Miss Her Birthday Again? 2 Dozen Roses Will Do The Trick.”
Or if you’re a financial advisor: “Unprepared for Retirement? Learn How to Create a Guaranteed Stream of Income in Your Golden Years.”
A good question can save valuable space in your ad by letting your prospect tell themselves why they should click. This can be more powerful than using a direct command.
Humans have a huge, oversized fear of missing out on something. You might even say this is a distinctly human trait. Dogs don’t see other dogs walking with their owners as the sun goes down and think to themselves, “No! I hope I don’t miss out on a walk with my owner before the sun sets!” Now, if you tell a dog that you’re going on a walk, they might get really excited. (And they might even get sad if you’re then unable to take them out.) But they don’t have a fear of missing out.
With humans, we’re constantly fearful of being left out or missing the boat. In many cases, we’ll do anything to avoid this feeling – even if it means spending time or money on something we might not truly need.
In advertising, you can tap into FOMO by creating urgency and/or playing the scarcity card. You can do this by setting a deadline for a sale, releasing a limited order quantity, or using some sort of tiered discount based on when people place an order.
While not perfect for every brand, humor can be a very useful mechanism for increasing click through rate(CTR) and getting a better response. Having said that, it’s a somewhat risky play – simply because everyone has a unique sense of humor. You could easily miss the mark and drive your click through rate(CTR) close to zero.
If you’re going to attempt humor in your ads, we recommend running multiple variations. Have a humorous version and a non-humorous version and split test the same ad creative. This will give you a pretty good feel for the response. After gathering enough data, you can make a decision on whether to move forward with the funny ad or nix it.
We can talk all we want about ad creatives, copy, and other elements, but it all comes down to ad-audience fit. If you aren’t focusing on the right audience, you aren’t going to have high CTRs.
For Facebook in particular, where you have a massive amount of control over your audience, niching down to a very specific part of the market is going to give you the ability to create much more targeted ad copy and images that resonate.
For example, don’t just target business owners. Target restaurant owners. And then split your ad campaign up so that you can target South Carolina restaurant owners and California restaurant owners separately. This gives you so much more relevancy and control.
One school of thought says you should max out your ad by using every single character you’re allowed to use within the character limit. But is this really the best way to go?
There’s ample research to suggest shorter ads (particularly on Facebook) get more number of clicks and better engagement. In fact, as character count increases, response rates steadily fall off.
The fact that shorter ads do better is likely due to the fact that people have very small attention spans. An ad that can be consumed in three seconds is much more enticing than an ad that takes 90 seconds to read. Even if your copy is great and you can effortlessly compel people to read sentence after sentence with mouth-watering copy, there’s simply too much friction to attract a large percentage of your audience. Keep it short!
When dealing with Google display network ads and/or Facebook ads, the image is the most important part. People will process the image long before they read the copy or call-to-action. So when you run an ad, always split test at least three different images. This will give you a feel for what your customers respond to best.
PPC is both an art and a science. It requires equal parts creativity, technical competence, and experience. If you’re lacking in any of these three areas, you aren’t going to get the sort of results you need.
But there’s good news: We can help.
At PPC.co, we partner with entrepreneurs, digital marketers & email marketers/ email marketing professionals, agencies, startups, small businesses, and established enterprises to make PPC advertising a smooth, seamless experience that ultimately results in more clicks and conversion rate.
Want to learn more about whether we’re a good fit for each other? Let’s chat!
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