1. Best PPC Services
For a digital marketing agency, offering PPC services requires careful thought and also a well-established robust strategy. To set up PPC accounts correctly and manage them well need many checks and balances. In this article, we outline what we think are the most important.
It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But, surprisingly, many agencies give this very little attention. If they even do think about it properly it’s left until after the keyword research is complete. Sometimes it’s not done until after ads are written. There is a great quote from the questionable movie, Under Seige 2. It’s something like “Assumption is the mother of all f**k-ups.” It’s very easy to think you know what a business is all about but really getting to the ins and outs of its services and products is beyond essential.
Evaluating the market, where the clients fit into the landscape, competition, prices and what’s unique, different, better or worse, is super-important. As usual, when it comes to planning, the more time invested here, the less costly mistakes and the better the results.
This deep dive is also not a one-time thing. If you’re providing PPC services for any business, it’s very important to keep up-to-date with its latest offerings. We never count on clients to let us know because often they forget or they’re too busy. Schedule regular calls and ask what’s new.
2. Track Everything – Find the ROI
Google Analytics for all its UX clunkiness really is your friend. We like to create conversion goals that include the main objectives such as transactions or leads but also every micro-conversion leading up to that. This could be a tap on a phone number on a smartphone or click an email link, request a brochure or download a whitepaper. Any interaction that suggests a prospective customer is worth recording. Provided the rules of statistics and common sense are applied, this data allows you to optimize ad copy, keywords used at various parts of the funnel, demographics, geographics, device bidding and more.
We give all conversions or goals a value based on an estimated contribution to the final sign-up of a customer or lifetime sales. In other words, if typically, one out of ten visitors who download your brochure end up spending an average of $300 we would give the conversion goal a value of $30. If every four leads sent as forms, convert to a customer spending $600, each conversion is worth $150. When you know the conversion value, it’s a simple calculation to work out the ROI or more accurately the ROAS (return on ad spend). Here’s the formula for this.
ROAS = Conversion Value / Cost of Advertising
3. Produce Ads Carefully and Split Test
You may be the rare amazing copywriter who always delivers stunning, powerful high CTR, high conversion rate ads every time. If you are you might want to skip this section. Although most experienced copywriters produce at least reasonable results most of the time, it doesn’t always happen and rarely does anyone write their best ad straight off-the-bat, the first time around. Going back to the first tip above and using this detailed understanding of the client’s proposition, USPs, features and benefits, it’s possible to start assembling important compelling and persuasive copy.
When it comes to improving PPC services, creating good ad copy makes a big difference to results. We find doing this in stages helps. First, brainstorm snippets. Look at competitor ads as well as your own website and marketing materials. If you don’t want to end up copying local competitors (which happens), search for competitors outside the geographic target area. For example, if your client is an architect in North London, search for architects in San Fransico for ideas. We’re not suggesting you copy ads here. This is only to make sure what competitors include as important, you don’t miss.
Create at least three sets of ads using different phrases and key messages. For search ads, we typically include the keyword in each ad, usually as headline 1 and sometimes using keyword insertion. The rest of the ad is the fixed template for each set of ads. Catchy phrases although possibly cheesy do work well. Try to make each ad flow and read well.
Writing ad copy over several days, with a revision each time, is usually far more effective than trying to throw something together in 20 minutes. This is your one chance to get the attention of the buyer. Try not to undersell; you want visitors coming to your landing page and good CTR. Equally, don’t oversell – don’t make ridiculous statements or promises that lead to disappointment on the landing page.
4. Landing Pages Make or Break PPC Services
We’ve all visited hundreds of websites that left us unimpressed, confused, annoyed or waiting for something to download. It’s critical to test the page both technically and also in terms of its ability to convert. These days you have milliseconds to deliver your landing page, grab attention and confirm that this is the page a new customer has been waiting for all her or his life.
It’s incredibly important to use tools like Page Speed Insights to check the mobile landing page for anything that will slow the page on a 3G or 4G connection. If the score is low, make sure images are properly optimized to keep file sizes small and ask your developers about plugins or content delivery networks.
Ensure the page meta title (shown in the browser tab), main heading (H1 tag) and first paragraph of text reflect the keywords or services advertised. If not consider creating more landing pages with that more accurately target those searches or to match ad copy. Make sure these pages are 90% or more unique to help your organic search using a tool like Copyscape.
Include a prominent unique selling proposition in a large font to answer the question “Why should I buy from you?”.
Make sure there is a single clear call to action – Buy Now, Contact Us, Get a Quote, etc. What is it you want the customer to do on this page? Don’t be afraid to ask.
The rest of the page should be clearly and concisely written to explain the service or products your offer and the reasons why buying from you is preferable to going elsewhere.
Finally, ensure you use cookie notices, privacy policy and terms of use. This reassures customers in terms of how you deal with any data they provide and keeps search engines and social platforms happy.
5. Automate Campaign Optimisation
Sadly, gone are the days where five minutes of fiddling around with a Google Ads campaign every couple of weeks is all you need to keep the leads and online sales flowing. Competition is ever-present for every type of business and if you aren’t doing everything possible to help your odds, you can bet your boots your competitors are taking a large chunk of what could be or was yours.
Some processes such as checking search reports are difficult to do well automatically. Examining what users type in to make sure it’s a match for what a business usually needs human intervention. Apart from this and the need to watch for sudden changes to campaigns, it pays massively to implement effective automation. Particularly, it leads to happy clients who will continue to pay every month for the good work you do.
Search engines offer in-built tools for CTR and conversion optimisation but you have to bear in mind that these tools are designed to keep as many people happy as possible and that just isn’t possible unless you have no competition in your market – very unlikely. We find these “smart” tools are usually worse than running campaigns manually. Test them but be cautious.
There are also third-party software tools out there to help with this but they are often difficult to set-up and complicated to manage. They can also cost up to 3% of your advertising budget. Trials of these applications are a good idea to identify what works best for you. Make full use of support until you are sure you understand exactly how to set up and use the software. If you are used to running campaigns manually and know what works for you, it could be worth investing in something like Google Ads scripts. These are either off-the-shelf if you can find something suitable, or it’s possible to hire a developer to write something for you. Using automation effectively saves a lot of time and reduces errors and ommissions in your day-to-day management of PPC services offered.
