04/When it comes to PPC advertising, getting people to click on your ad is only half the battle. From there, you also need them to click on the call to action (CTA) on your landing page.
That’s the only way to actually convert leads. So if your landing pages are struggling to convert visitors, maybe it’s your CTA.
Fortunately, there are many ways to get more users to click on your CTAs. You just need to learn the tricks of the trade.
In this article, we’ll go over what those landing page CTA best practices are, but first, let’s define what a CTA is in the first place.
A call to action (CTA) is the most important part of a PPC landing page. It’s what converts visitors into leads and drives your conversion goals.
Basically, a CTA is a prompt that invites users to take a specific action.
Most CTAs offer something valuable (like a free ebook download or newsletter signup) in exchange for the user’s contact information (like their name and email address).
The point of the CTA is to lead potential customers into your sales funnel. From there, you can nurture them with more valuable content until they eventually make a purchase.
So how do you make the CTAs on your landing pages as effective as possible? Here are ten tips:
The call to action button is just what it sounds like. It’s a virtual button on your landing page that contains the CTA text. For example, the call to action button might be a green rectangle that includes the words “Download Your Free Ebook.”
Whatever your call to action button is, you want it to stand out from the rest of the page. To do this, you can use a different text font (e.g., bolded or italic) and contrasting colors.
Humans are visual creatures, which means (among other things) that we are naturally attracted to sharp variations in colors. You can use this to your advantage by playing off different color contrasts. For example, if your landing page background is blue, you might make your call to action button orange so it really stands out.
You can also try using a free online color scheme generator to come up with ideas. A good CTA example would be one that blends seamlessly with the rest of the page elements while still grabbing users’ attention.
Source: https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/color-scheme-definitions-types-examples
Another way to make your call to action button stand out is to play with its size. Make it big enough to call attention but not so big that it becomes too distracting from reading the rest of the page.
By focusing on the visual design of your call to action button, you can encourage users to click on it and improve the overall conversion rate of your marketing campaigns.
When writing a call to action, it’s easy to resort to phrases like “contact us” or “learn more.” But such calls to action are so overused that many people gloss over them.
Instead, try to put yourself in your target customers' shoes. What are their pain points? Then craft your CTA according to that.
For example, if your target customers have a hard time remembering birthdays, lure them in with a CTA that says “Install this scheduling tool to never forget another birthday.” It’s much more specific and tailored to the value proposition your service provides.
That said, you also need to make sure you keep your CTA clear and to the point. Most people skim the internet, whether they’re reading a blog post or browsing an online store. So if your CTA copy is too long or clever, people will probably move on. And if you can’t convince them to click on your call to action button the first time, they probably never will.
So make your CTA crystal clear. Say exactly what you want the web visitor to do and exactly what they’ll get by clicking. Use action words to evoke a quick reaction.
By writing clearly and directly, your CTA will be much more persuasive.
The last thing you want is for visitors to be looking for a call to action button on your landing page and not find it.
To ensure people always have the opportunity to click the call to action button, place it somewhere it can always be seen. For example, you could include it in a floating header or footer that moves along the web page as the user scrolls up or down.
The point is you want the CTA placement to be visible, no matter where the web visitor goes on the page. If you only place it at the end of the page, visitors may never get to it or see it.
The call to action button should be easy to locate. So, place it where it makes the most sense, whether on desktops or mobile devices.
That said, you don’t want to include so many calls to action that you come across as too pushy or spammy. This will only turn people off.
But you also don’t want web visitors to leave your page without clicking on the call to action button. Otherwise, what’s the point?
So, find the right CTA frequency balance.
Even if you place multiple CTAs across your landing page, you want to stick to just one kind. Here’s what I mean:
If the landing page’s main purpose is to get visitors to sign up for your email marketing list, don’t also include CTAs to order a product off your website.
You can have multiple CTAs, but they shouldn’t call on visitors to perform more than one action.
Why? Asking target customers to do more than one thing can be confusing. In fact, this may overwhelm them so that they don’t click on any call to action button at all.
If you have multiple marketing campaigns running, create separate landing pages for each of them. That way, each blog post or landing page is focused on one specific value proposition and action.
Having an attractive CTA is not enough. You also need to direct visitors’ attention to it with visual cues.
You can do this in two ways: subtle or not-so-subtle cues.
A subtle visual cue could be images or converging lines whose linear pathways indirectly point toward the CTA—like a photo of someone whose eyes are looking at the CTA. Users will then subconsciously want to look there, too.
Source: https://instapage.com/blog/what-are-visual-cues
A conspicuous visual cue could be bright red arrows that point toward the CTA. This can also be effective, but you must be careful not to make it appear too distracting or promotional.
Whatever you do, you want your landing page to have a clean visual flow that ultimately directs users to the CTA button.
Another way to make your CTA stand out is to put white space around it.
White space (aka negative space) refers to the areas of your landing page that don’t have any text or images—nothing.
While you might think white space is a waste of precious real estate, it’s not. It actually helps provide some balance to your landing page and, if used artfully, can actually make your CTA stand out.
For one, if you leave a lot of white space around the CTA, it won’t look cluttered—like it’s drowning in text and graphics. Instead, it will stand out because it’s set off by itself.
Play with the white space around your CTA to call more attention to it.
Source: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-power-of-white-space
To stand out, your CTA also has to offer something unique. What are the benefits of clicking on it? How will it improve your visitors’ lives? What’s in it for them? If your CTA doesn’t answer these questions, you may want to rethink it.
Consider your typical visitor’s pain points. Then show how your offer is a solution to their problems.
For example, if your CTA is to sign up for a weekly newsletter that offers actionable tips on how to double your productivity, point that out. In this case, your CTA might read “Sign Up for My Weekly Newsletter to 2X Your Productivity.”
At the end of the day, concrete and relevant benefits help sell visitors on your CTA.
People are heavily influenced by their emotions. Though the rational brain plays a role in the decision-making process, emotions play an arguably bigger one.
That’s why it’s important for your CTA to appeal to people’s emotions. If you tap into people’s emotions, visitors are more likely to pay attention and click.
For example, you might create a sense of urgency by promoting a limited-time offer. This may activate their fear of missing out (FOMO). Or you might appeal to their sense of danger with a CTA that says “Sign the Petition to Keep Your Neighborhood Safe.”
Don’t forget to also surround the CTA with relevant images (where appropriate).
So if, for example, the CTA calls on the reader to improve their life by getting a copy of your new self-help book, include a photo of someone reading the book with a smile on their face next to the CTA.
This will draw a more immediate emotional response from the user than words alone ever could. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Last but not least, subject your landing page CTAs to A/B tests.
An A/B test (aka split test) refers to developing two slightly different versions of something (in this case a CTA) and then running a test to see which performs better according to common marketing metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate.
You could test a CTA’s button size, copy, color, font, placement, page frequency, and more. Just make sure to test only one variable at a time so you can narrow down what exactly is contributing to a CTAs performance.
By constantly conducting A/B tests, you can gradually fine-tune your landing page CTA until it becomes a reliable conversion machine.
Now that you know the best practices for crafting effective PPC landing page CTAs, you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level.
Don’t have the time or manpower to handle your ad campaigns? That’s okay. We’re here to help.
Partner with PPC.co to take advantage of our managed PPC services. We can help you run ads across Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. Whatever your advertising needs, we have you covered.
We’ll also help you optimize your landing page CTAs so that they bring you more business. To get started, contact us for a free proposal. We look forward to chatting!
Keywords are, arguably, the most important piece of your pay per click (PPC) advertising strategy.
Choose the right keywords and you’ll reach the right people. You’ll get more impressions and clicks. You’ll get more purchases from the clicks you generate. And you’ll even spend less money in the long run, since you won’t be wasting money on bad matches or weak opportunities.
The problem is, choosing and controlling keywords in PPC advertising is challenging.
Yes, even for the pros.
There are so many keywords to choose from and so many different controls you can use to tinker with your campaign that it’s almost inevitable to make conversion mistakes – and if not outright mistakes, then inefficiencies that reduce your potential.
Fortunately, once you understand some of the most common and impactful keyword mistakes in PPC advertising, you can take caution to avoid them and optimize your campaign for the better.
These are some of the most common keyword mistakes in PPC advertising we see from clients, competitors, and other advertisers online.
Optimizing a PPC ad campaign is all about improving efficiency. It’s almost impossible to be efficient if you’re using too many keywords at once. On one hand, we understand the temptation to keep adding keywords; each new keyword is a new potential demographic segment and a new opportunity for your brand. But it’s usually better to keep your selection of keywords relatively narrow and focused.
There are a few main problems with using too many keywords. For starters, your attention is going to be split across too many different areas; instead of becoming a true expert on a small handful of keywords, you’ll end up knowing very little about the dozens you’re following. Additionally, you’ll be wasting money on keywords that are strictly underperforming your best options.
If you want to fix this problem, simply focus on a narrower range of keywords. Generally, you should only keep the keywords that are generating around 200 clicks or more – and filter out any keywords that seem to perform worse than your best ones (as well as ones that seem irrelevant).
At first glance, using broad match keywords seems like a no-brainer. With broad match turned on, your keywords are going to appear for a wide variety of different searches, including those that are synonymous with your main keyword and some types of related searches. That means your ad is going to appear to a wider range of people and earn more impressions.
However, using broad match keywords recklessly and without strategic focus is usually bad for your campaign. More isn’t always better in the world of PPC advertising; in fact, it’s usually worse. You’re better off targeting a small handful of people who are positioned to buy your product than targeting thousands of people who are practically irrelevant. This is one of the common keyword research mistakes that can drain your budget without delivering real results.
You can fix this in a few different ways. For example, you could stop leaning too heavily on broad match keywords and start focusing on phrase match and exact match keywords, which give you much more precise targeting options. This aligns better with search intent, ensuring your ads are shown to users who are genuinely interested in what you offer.
You can also use broad match more effectively with the use of modifiers, which allow you to control how your keywords are considered with respect to search engines and user searches. As examples, adding a + to a word will ensure it appears in every search – and including phrases in [brackets] will make sure the entire phrase is present in every search. Implementing these refinements is a crucial part of a strong SEO strategy and effective keyword research.
Ad groups exist to give you more insight and control over your PPC ad campaigns, so try to avoid misusing them by compiling keywords into bulky and unnecessarily large groups. If you put all your conceivable targeting options into one gigantic mass, you’ll have difficulty delineating the different elements of your strategy.
Instead, make sure each of your ad groups is laser-focused on a specific theme (such as a product or service you offer, a geographic location, etc.). The exact theme doesn’t matter much, as long as you’re using ad groups strategically.
Most newcomers to the PPC game are so focused on finding the perfect keywords to add to their campaign that they don’t realize how powerful negative keywords can be. In case you aren’t familiar with them, negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want to appear for a given search. You can use these to filter out specific types of people who may not be interested in what you’re selling – and save money in the process.
If you don’t use negative keywords at all, you’re probably missing out on your true potential in this field. For example, imagine you’re advertising a bakery and you’re placing ads for people who are searching for “chocolate chip cookies.” You want to appeal to people who might buy your chocolate chip cookies, but people who search for this phrase might be looking for recipes or instructions for how to make their own; you can filter out this traffic simply by adding negative keywords like “-recipe.”
There’s a certain point in most PPC ad campaigns when managers begin to feel confident in what they’re doing. Your ads are working period you’re getting clicks. You can claim the campaign is profitable. What do you do at this point?
Novices are typically tempted to keep things running exactly as they are, potentially indefinitely. After all, if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it, right?
The logic here makes sense, to a degree, but if you go this route, you’ll be crippling your potential. You’ll miss out on all the experiments that could push your campaign further and all the little refinements that could make your campaign even more efficient. Instead of remaining complacent with decent results, you should always strive for better results. That doesn’t mean you have to change your entire campaign, but you should be allocating at least a portion of your budget to pushing for more.
What’s your ad conversion rate like? If this metric is disappointingly low, it could be an indication that your ads aren’t relevant for the keywords you’re choosing. This may sound like a simple and obvious problem, but it’s something that many advertisers run into.
Remember, the people searching for this keyword phrase are looking for something specific. If your ad isn’t carefully crafted to appeal to those people, it’s not going to get much interaction. Always make sure that your keywords and advertisements are very closely aligned.
When it comes to audience targeting, you have to think beyond mere demographics. You also have to think beyond simple product or service searches. If you want to add more power to your campaign, you need to think about your specific sales funnel and how searchers might fall into that sales funnel.
Different businesses and different industries model their sales funnels in unique ways, but usually, sales funnels follow a process similar to awareness > consideration > purchase. Targeting the right people at the right stage of the sales funnel could dramatically increase your results. Choosing specific phrases and including keyword modifiers targeted to people at the end of the sales funnel could greatly increase the number of people making purchases after clicking your ads. At the same time, targeting people earlier in the sales funnel could help you avoid some of the most prominent competition in your industry, saving you money while earning you customer loyalty.
The only wrong approach is to ignore the sales funnel in your strategy entirely.
Landing pages play a massive role in determining the success of your PPC campaign. No matter how well your ads perform or how much traffic do you generate, your campaign is going to fall flat if you aren’t able to convert your new visitors.
The critical flaw here for most PPC advertisers is a landing page that doesn’t match the ad or doesn’t match the keyword phrase. If you promise a special discount in your ad, that discount better be present on your landing page. If you’re advertising running shoes, don’t take your visitors to a landing page that features boots.
Obviously, you’ll also need to spend time optimizing this landing page so it’s as persuasive and perceptibly trustworthy as possible.
The bulk of your campaign is going to focus on product and service keywords, but if you totally neglect brand keywords, you’ll be sabotaging your own potential.
Many people ignore brand keywords entirely because they feel like these targeting options are practically irrelevant. After all, if a customer already knows about your brand, there’s no use trying to raise their brand awareness further. And there’s a good chance your brand website is already ranking at position one for brand keyword searches.
However, there are some good reasons to bid on your own brand keywords. Branded keywords have the potential to increase your account’s quality score. They almost guarantee your brand will be featured at the top of the search results page. You’ll generate more traffic to your website. And perhaps best of all, this serves as a competitive defense – so your worst competitors can’t try and dethrone you by targeting your branded keywords.
Targeting competitor brand keywords, eh? If you’ve never considered the option before, you’re certainly considering it now. Bidding on the branded keywords of a competitor can be a powerful, if cutthroat move. You can siphon traffic from a major competitor, increasing your traffic while dealing a blow to your peers simultaneously.
However, it’s reckless to approach this without an effective strategy. If your ads aren’t relevant to the people conducting these searches, you’re not going to generate clicks, and your quality score could go down. If you don’t have a plan to convert these prospects, you’ll end up wasting money trying to sabotage competitors rather than building your own business. And the worst part is, if you’re actively trying to sabotage your competitors, you could end up harming your brand reputation.
None of this means that you have to avoid targeting competitor brand keywords. It just means you need to have a carefully considered strategy in place for them.
We’ve covered 10 of the most common mistakes that people make with keywords in the PPC world, but this list is by no means comprehensive. There are many other strategic flaws and examples of poor decision-making that can negatively impact your campaign.
On top of that, the PPC ad world is always changing with new controls and features for advertisers, new competitors, and changing consumer attitudes. Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, which means what worked yesterday might not work today.
If you want to avoid all PPC ad mistakes (or at least as many as possible), you should follow these important golden rules:
Are you tired of PPC advertising mistakes bogging down your otherwise profitable campaign?
Do you need some extra guidance in targeting the best possible PPC keywords?
PPC.co is here for you. We’ve got the experts. We’ve got the experience. All you need to do is reach out and we’ll send you a free proposal. Contact us today!
So, you want to start a digital marketing agency.
Awesome.
You probably already realized this is a challenging endeavor – or else, you wouldn’t be looking for guides like this.
But don’t fret. With the right strategy, the right resources, and enough diligence and follow through, you’ll be in a position to make your digital marketing agency successful.
There are currently more than 90,000 marketing agencies in the United States. That’s a lot of competition. But it’s also an illustration of just how appealing the idea of owning your own successful digital marketing agency is.
These are just some of the reasons that attract people to the realm of digital marketing company ownership:
In this guide, we’re going to cover all the little elements of starting a digital marketing agency.
But first, it’s helpful to establish a high-level overview – the architecture on which we’ll build our next points.
Starting a digital marketing agency usually unfolds over four distinct phases:
Let’s start by focusing on the initial skills and experiences you’ll need to be successful in the digital marketing world.
As an agency owner, you may or may not be doing the ground-level work responsible for helping your clients succeed. Either way, you’ll need to have a grasp on the fundamentals of digital marketing so that you can communicate with clients effectively, appropriately pitch your services, and step in as a leader when necessary.
Digital marketing skills can help you significantly, but there’s more to running a digital marketing agency than just practicing digital marketing.
You also need skills and experience related to entrepreneurship and management.
In other words, how do you run the business?
Once you feel confident in your skills and experience, you can begin developing a formal business plan for your digital marketing agency.
While it’s not strictly necessary to have an official, written business plan, it’s typically helpful.
This is your opportunity to evaluate the idea behind your digital marketing agency, from start to finish, and project how it’s going to operate. This is also going to serve as the blueprint for founding and establishing your digital marketing agency.
Pay close attention to:
With a business plan and a solid vision for how your digital marketing agency is going to develop, you can find the business and begin establishing it.
At this point, your digital marketing agency has all the fundamentals in place to make money and continue operations.
But if you want to make even more money and keep growing, you’ll need to invest in scaling your operations. There are many marketing and advertising strategies that can help you here, such as:
It’s also important to recognize that people are going to pay close attention to how you market yourself. You’ll be describing yourself as a marketing expert on your website and throughout your marketing and advertising materials, so if the quality of your work doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, you won’t be able to scale successfully. Think of yourself as your first major client.
Are you ready to start your own digital marketing agency?
Are you looking for a partner who can support you with white label PPC services?
Or do you need help scaling up your own PPC ad campaign?
We can help you with all of it. Just drop us a line and we’ll send you a free proposal for any of your PPC advertising needs!
As an advertiser, getting more ad impressions and clicks is a constant battle. Sure, you can pay your way to the top of sponsored search results, but this can get expensive fast and cause your marketing ROI to suffer.
Another way to improve your ad performance is to work on ad relevance (aka keyword relevance). Search engines like Google and Bing will reward you with higher ad placements if your ads are more relevant to user searches.
In this article, we’ll go over what ad relevance is, why it’s important, and six ways you can start improving ad relevance today.
Let’s get started!
Google defines ad relevance as” how closely your ad matches the intent behind a user’s search.” Bing defines it the same way: “how relevant your ad and landing page are to the customer’s search query or other input.”
Basically, ad relevance is how closely your ad (including keywords and landing pages) matches what users are looking for.
Ad relevance is also one of the three main components of your ad’s Quality Score (along with expected clickthrough rate and landing page experience), which Google uses to give your ads a status of “above average,” “average,” or “below average.”
Source: https://help.ads.microsoft.com/apex/index/3/en-us/50813
To measure ad relevance, Google compares your ads to other ads targeting the same keyword over the last 90 days.
Ad relevance is important for a couple of reasons.
For one, it helps you cater your ads to your target audience. The more relevant your ads are, the more likely users are to click on them and turn into leads that ultimately buy your product or service.
But improving ad relevance also helps you indirectly by lowering your ads’ cost per click (CPC). Let me explain.
When you score higher on search engines’ ad relevance (and overall ad quality) metrics, they will favor your ads in their search engine results pages (SERPs). How? By displaying your ads over (or higher than) other ads.
This means your ads will gain more impressions and clicks, and more clicks for the same budget means a lower cost-per-click (CPC) rate. Basically, it’s getting more bang for your buck.
If that sounds like something you want, here’s how to start making your ads more relevant today:
The first step to making your ads more relevant is to match them with search terms.
Think like a customer. If you were searching for a new pair of men’s running shoes, you might type “buy new men’s running shoes” into Google.
As a consumer, you’d be more likely to click on an ad that said, “shop for new men’s running shoes” than one that said, “buy men’s apparel.”
Why? Because the first ad is much more specific to your actual need, whereas the second is broader and more generic and may not be what you want.
Focusing your ads on long-tail keywords (keywords that are longer but more specific) will not only help you target specific types of buyers but will help you gain more qualified leads.
For example, even if you manage to place an ad for the keyword “buy men’s apparel,” you may attract people looking for things you don’t sell (e.g., men’s ties), and that doesn’t help you or them.
So, target specific keywords and place them upfront in your ads. Search engines bold keywords in search queries, so your ad will stand out more if the relevant keyword is displayed in the ad headline, body, URL, and display path fields.
When it comes to search ads, users are telling you what they’re looking for. So, make sure to deliver by targeting relevant keywords.
Poor ad relevance usually comes from copying ads from one ad group to another without editing or tailoring them. To ensure your ads stay relevant from one product or service to the next, create multiple tightly themed ad groups. You can create separate ad groups for different products, buyer personas (segregated by gender, age, location, and other demographics), and more.
As a rule of thumb, you should limit ad groups to about 5 to 20 related keywords. Then create different ads based on these different keyword variations while also ensuring strong landing page relevance.
The more specific you can make each ad, the more relevant they will be to users, improving both your ad rank and overall landing page experience. Additionally, optimizing your landing page content will help maintain a seamless connection between the ad and the user’s expectations.
Source: https://www.adzooma.com/blog/how-to-use-ad-groups-to-boost-success/
Once you’ve targeted different search terms and grouped your ads, it’s important to make sure each ad is as simple as can be.
Write ad copy that can be understood by a third grader. Why? You have a very short amount of time to grab readers’ attention with your ads. So, the simpler an ad is to digest, the more likely someone is to stop and read it.
It may be tempting to try to make your ad clever because you want it to stand out, but the truth is that this rarely works. People on the internet want instant gratification, so if they have to put in the slightest amount of mental work to understand an ad, they’ll give up and move on.
Instead, make your ads clear and direct. Tell users exactly what it is you’re selling without trying to impress them with your words.
Every ad needs a clear call to action (CTA). Without it, your ad isn’t really an ad because it’s not telling people what you want them to do.
CTAs will look different based on what it is you’re advertising. If you want users to buy some men’s running shoes on your website, your CTA might say “buy men’s running shoes now.” If you want users to download your free men’s running ebook, it might read “download free men’s running ebook.”
You get the point. Tell users exactly what you want them to do and exactly what they’ll get by clicking.
Crafting compelling ad copy is half the battle. From there, you also need to make sure the landing page quality is high and that the landing page your ad leads to is relevant.
The job of the landing page is to close the deal. It’s where users actually become leads or customers by signing up for a newsletter or making an online order. As a result, the landing page needs to match whatever the ad promotes. If the ad promotes men’s running shoes, the landing page better be an eCommerce storefront where users can place an order.
If not, you’ll disappoint and lose potential customers because you’re not giving them what they signed up for by clicking the ad, which could result in a low quality score and hurt your ad rank.
Landing pages should contain all the same relevant keywords as the ad and exclude negative keywords and missing ones. It’s also important to design landing pages to be user-friendly.
Good UX design could be the difference between gaining a lead or a customer, ultimately leading to better ad placements and increased conversions.
Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” And the same goes for improving ad relevance.
To measure how well your ads are performing, conduct A/B tests. This means creating two slightly different versions of an ad and then running both to see which performs better on common ad metrics, such as click-through rate (CTR), ad position, number of impressions, and cost per click (CPC).
You can A/B test different ad copy, keywords, ad channels, and more.
Source: https://www.optimizely.com/optimization-glossary/ab-testing/
If you don’t have a dedicated A/B testing software solution, you can always set up custom experiments on Google’s ad platform.
You can also identify poor-performing ads with the help of Google Ads Scripts.
Whatever you do, constantly reevaluate your ads so you can fine-tune their relevance over time.
Not sure you have the time or resources to run your own online ad campaigns? No worries. PPC.co is here to help.
We can help you run top-performing ad campaigns on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. You can be involved every step of the way or sit back and relax and let us handle all the hard work. It’s up to you.
Get in touch today for a free proposal. We look forward to chatting!
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