We’ve put together a comprehensive guide about why you shouldn’t be paying more for PPC marketing and should trust affordable PPC management companies. However, it’s important to first establish the basics: what is PPC marketing, and why is it only one piece of the search engine marketing puzzle?
Pay Per Click is Only One Piece of the Pie
This is one marketing term where the definition is basically in the name. PPC stands for “pay per click,” meaning that your business must pay a fee every time someone clicks on one of your ads.
And the very nature of PPC marketing has made it very controversial over the years. Some see it as a big and reliable piece of the digital marketing strategy; pairing with SEO and content marketing very naturally. Others see it as an outright way of paying for visitors, marking it as a kind of desperate, “last resort” attempt way of driving traffic to your site. Done well, pay per click can significantly supplement the marketing in your business plan. It takes a skilled hand with an eye for data to do it well as a pillar of your strategy.
As you may expect, PPC marketing offers a number of unique advantages and disadvantages. We’re going to explore what those are before rendering a verdict on how much you should (and shouldn’t) be paying.
PPC Costs to Know
No matter what business, CEOs, owners, managers, and the accounting personnel all want to know the answer to the big question: what is the ROI? To know your PPC return on investment, you must have two things: a strategy and a cost structure for your paid advertising.
One of the most popular forms of PPC is Google’s Ads. Cost per click (CPC) can obviously vary, but what do these ads get you? They can help to boost your conversion rate, and you can personally contain costs: If you’re worried about clicks costing too much, you can set the maximum CPC to any amount that fits your budget. It’s possible to streamline everything by creating an ad group, which is simply a group of ads connected by a related keyword. Keep in mind that the default PPC option is “broad match”, which means that your ads with multiple keywords may appear to users who search for any one of those words. To make your ads extra user-friendly, you can pay for PPC extensions, which provide additional business information to users (such as business location and phone number).
With Google, you should know what you are paying for. There are search ads and there are display ads. Search ads are PPC advertisements that will appear as users search using Google. Display ads, however, display your ads on websites that users may be interested in..
Another unique way of targeting users is to use Facebook for PPC instead of Google. Generally speaking, Facebook advertisements have the advantage of letting you reach a large, targeted audience while using a robust series of analytics.
Remember, affordable PPC management companies can make sure you are getting value for your money.
Analytics that Prove ROI
If you are considering PPC marketing, then you absolutely must track your analytics each month. Good affordable PPC management companies may be able to provide more detailed analytics software than you can easily access on your own. These analytics let you determine key factors such as how many new visitors your PPC has brought to your site and, ultimately, how many additional sales can be attributed to the PPC.
Which analytics are the most important? You need to pay attention to conversion rates, search impression shares, click through rates, and bounce rates. This lets you get a fuller understanding of effectiveness instead of simply measuring whether you’re getting more clicks or not.
Benefits of hiring a professional digital marketing team
PPC marketing can be highly effective, but only in the right hands. Worried about getting it right? That’s why you need to hire a digital marketing team.
One of the biggest benefits of having professionals on your side is that they can help you maximize your budget. That means making sure that you are maximizing the effectiveness of PPC and using the kinds of keywords that offer the most value for your money.
On top of that, a professional digital marketing team can help you discover new paid opportunities. In this way, you marketing will constantly be innovating, and you can avoid falling into the trap that most companies do of simply using the same strategies year after year until becoming fully obsolete.
Finally, a professional digital marketing team can do what you cannot: monitor the effectiveness of your PPC marketing on a daily basis. Not only does this free you and your team up to focus on other aspects of your business, but it means that you can get daily updates on the effectiveness of your marketing techniques.
Get the Most Out of Your Old Ads
Some people are reading this because they have tried and failed to use PPC marketing before. If this is the case, you may be tempted to throw the old ads out and start over. However, by making a few small adjustments, you may be able to get more out of these ads without overly increasing your PPC budget.
For example, you can focus on improving the quality score of any given ad or group of ads. To do so, you might make some small tweaks to the advertisements you already have. Alternately, you may want to revise your landing pages so that you have a better alignment with keywords. In this way, you can help ensure more customers visit your site, maximizing your PPC effectiveness.
Sometimes, improving your old PPC is just a matter of changing the time slots you are advertising on. If you reflexively chose a time slot after midnight, then you may be getting a high number of spam clicks. Obviously, this is hurting your conversion rate and bounce rate, but by simply adjusting when consumers see your ads, you can better connect your business to the customers who are most interested.
How to Check Up on your PPC Agency
We’ve been recommending that you work with affordable PPC management companies to make the most out of PPC. However, it’s important that you regularly check in with your company.
What does this mean? Request weekly check-in meetings to touch base with your facilitator. And be sure to request monthly analytics data to track how well the PPC marketing is helping you meet your goals. Between the agency and this data, you will know if you need to fine-tune your approach.