With a very large percentage of all clicks for buyer keywords coming from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising isn’t it time that you learn how paid search marketing can drive high quality traffic to your website immediately?
Many business owners feel that consumers are becoming immune to online advertisements and focus their marketing dollars and efforts on search engine optimization and inbound marketing. While SEO and inbound marketing is a great strategy, you shouldn’t ignore the power of PPC advertising.
Google brought in $57.86 Billion in revenue for 2013, with a majority of that from advertisements. Still think consumers are immune to online ads?
You should include PPC advertising in your online marketing strategy for a number of reasons, including:
- You can push high quality traffic to your website immediately
- PPC allows you to target consumers that are ready to buy and don’t require to be sent through your sales funnel the same way an organic visitor would
- You have the ability to target your specific audience (local or national)
We wanted to put together some PPC tips for beginners to help business owners get started with PPC advertising. So, what exactly are pay-per-click ads? They are the advertisements that you see on the right side and very top of the search results. All of the major search engines have paid search ads and even Facebook has PPC ads. For simple demonstration purposes we will just focus on Google. Here is an example of where the paid search ads are displayed within the Google search results:
Pay-per-click advertising do not interrupt the consumer the same way a pop-up ad does, or a content locking ad that forces the visitor to view the ad for a specific amount of time before they can continue. PPC ads are displayed in convenient locations that allow the consumers to click on them if they wish. This is one reason why PPC traffic converts so well – they are actively seeking out your product or service!
Some additional reasons why PPC is a great addition to your marketing efforts:
- You have full control of your PPC advertising. You determine the amount you are willing to pay per click, and you also control your daily and monthly spending
- You can reach the top of page #1 immediately, while SEO can take several months and a he budget to attempt to get top rankings
- PPC allows you to target specific geographical locations
- You have 100% control of PPC, while SEO has several variables that are out of your control
- It is highly measurable! You can see exactly how much each visitor, conversion, and sale cost you to generate. This data allows you to scale your effort and quickly grow your business
Identify Your Target Audience
It is important that you have much data as possible on your ideal customer. It is very easy to quickly blow through a PPC budget and target the incorrect keywords. Driving a lot of traffic to your website doesn’t do any good unless it is “buyer” traffic. Your ad copy and landing page copy needs to attract and convert your target audience.
You will need to do some keyword research and then test your ad copy and keywords. Start small and continue to optimize and test until you find a winning combination. Attempting to run a campaign on your own is going to take a lot of testing (and failing) – if you want to skip the learning curve you might want to look into professional PPC management.
Once you have tested some ad copy and have found a combination that delivers a nice ROI it is time to scale your campaign. You will need to focus on these three things:
Your PPC Budget
Once you see a nice ROI it is easy to simply just increase your budget, but this can spell disaster. PPC campaigns require constant monitoring and adjusting. Slowly increase your budget over time and continue to optimize and monitor your performance. Build slow and strong to make sure your efforts and hard work don’t come crashing down.
Conversion Tracking
Constantly monitor your conversion tracking to see where the majority of your sales are coming from. If you notice that some keywords or ads are driving a lot of traffic but no sales then you will need to pause them and focus on the ads and keywords that are responsible for producing revenue. PPC gives you the ability to track so much data, yet so many businesses don’t take advantage of it.
Monitor Your CPA
You have to know what your ideal CPA (cost per acquisition) is – determine how much you can spend to bring on a new customer and make sure to stay under that number. If you are careless and don’t monitor this you could end up paying more money to land each customer than they actually bring into your business.
This is just a very simple introduction to pay-per-click advertising. See below for more blog posts about PPC advertising. If you are interested in our fully managed PPC give us a call our request a free consultation through our contact page.
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