PPC Goals
The goals of your PPC advertising campaign should be to reach your intended audience, deliver a compelling message, incent them to take an action, and measure your effectiveness so you can improve next time around. Ultimately, your goal is to achieve a return on your investment for every ad you run, e.g. make more money in new revenues than you spend on each ad. You do this by throwing a broad net when you start; then, over time narrowing it to a laser focus on just the search terms and ad copy that work for you. The immediate goal is to make constant improvements in your campaign; longer term, you'll make statistically significant improvements in your bottom line and gain insights that will improve your marketing efforts overall.
How it Works
A PPC campaign starts with keyword research, to determine a broad list of search terms you want to test. The goal is to optimize your ad copy and landing page copy using the words that your potential customers use to describe your offerings. How do you find this out?
When we setup a PPC advertising campaign, we use a calculated approach and a variety of specialized tools. We split an ad campaign into multiple ad groups to test effectiveness of ad copy, landing pages, and specific keyword phrases. If necessary, we'll create multiple campaigns to test different geographical regions and different groups of keyword search terms. We then perform iterative testing of these multiple variations (called multivariate testing) -- let them run, collect data, analyze the data, and improve. This is the essence of PPC advertising campaigns -- ongoing iterative optimization. Throughout the process, using our experience and tools to constantly tweak and optimize, we keep the best performing variations and update the worst, in an ongoing process of improvement.
The Control Levers
Picture yourself inside a big black box. Big - as in the size of your house. On one wall, picture rows of knobs or levers, and then imagine yourself poised to turn them, pull them, or simply adjust and tune them. In reality, all the knobs and levers are on your computer, controlled with a simple mouse click. Best of all, they take effect immediately and will start generating immediate feedback. When it's done well, PPC gives a level of control that's superior to nearly every other form of advertising. Here's what you can control to make your PPC campaign work its best:
Keyword selection
- Lets you determine which search terms, when entered, will cause your ad to display on the search engine results page (called - you guessed it - the SERP)
- Iterative testing tells you which words are most successful
- In bringing traffic to your website
- In getting visitors to take the actions you want them to take on your site
- Allows you to hone your keyword selections over time to pinpoint the terms that bring you the most visitors for the least cost
- Iterative testing lets you determine which version of ad copy, linked to a specific landing page, is most successful in getting searchers to click on the link, come to your page, and take a desired action
- You or your website design/development team will create the landing pages; then you can test them and analyze the feedback on how to optimize them best for your PPC campaign
- Gives you control over where your ads will appear (e.g. for searchers located in what zip codes, as identified by their computer's IP address)
- Lets you determine what days of the week, season of the year, or even time of the day your ad will display
- Allows you to set your budget limit per day. When that limit is reached, your ad will be paused automatically so you don't run up costs that will over-run your allocated advertising budget
The Control Metrics - Measuring ROI
If it's indeed about control and ROI, then the metrics are key to PPC. And they are. There are innumerable Web Analytics tools available to help you measure and analyze the activity on your website, but the easiest to start with (for free!) is Google Analytics. Anyone who wants their website to work for their business should use Google Analytics. If you're running PPC ad campaigns, it's a good place to start, and here are some key metrics to watch:
- What search terms are most effective at bringing traffic to your site?
- How effective is each of your ad copy/landing page variations:
- At getting people to click through to your site?
- At keeping them on the landing page long enough to do something?
- At getting them to take your desired actions?
How much does a PPC ad cost you to run, per day/per month? How many new leads has it generated for your business? What is the value of a new lead to your business (and how much do you pay for a lead in other forms of advertising/marketing)? How much additional revenue does an average new lead generate for your business? How much additional revenue was generated by specific PPC ads? This list is not exhaustive, as the combination of metrics you can track is endless. But when you collect the answers to the above questions, you'll be able to answer the BIG QUESTION: have I achieved a positive return on my advertising investment? If so, you should be asking yourself another important question: "can I afford NOT to do PPC advertising for my business?"
What You Can Learn - And What To Do With It
A well-planned and well-executed PPC ad campaign can achieve your advertising goals AND a positive return on your advertising investment. Data collected from your campaigns can help you answer important questions about your ad campaign, your website and your business. Certainly you can use the information to improve your PPC ad campaign. But the insights you'll gain can also go further than that.
Critical things you can learn about your market
- What search terms are people using when they look for a product or service like what my company offers?
- Where (what websites) are people are coming from to visit my website?
- What words, designs, or ad copy get them to spend more time on my site?
- What gets them to take the actions I want them to take on my site?
- How much revenue am I generating for the cost of my PPC campaign?
Your most effective keywords
Finding the actual words your target customers use when they're looking to buy products or services like yours is like finding marketing gold. You may think you already know how your customers think and talk about your offerings. If you are a travel agent, for example, you might expect your customers to be looking for flights and hotels, or destination tour packages, or cheap things to do in San Francisco, or other categories of travel information. You might be correct. But there are likely other terms they are searching for that might surprise you. Once you know the best keywords for your business, here are some other ways you can use them productively:
- Website content and SEO. Focus on these keywords to optimize your website pages so you can rank higher in Organic Searches. This is the essence of Search Engine Optimization. Optimize the specific page(s) on your website you want to send a searcher to so they can take an action (buy your product, contact you, download something) when they get there.
- Link Building. Build these words into any link text that links to your website from articles you distribute, press releases, comments you make on blogs, etc. This is also an important element of SEO and will help your website to rank higher in search engine results.
- Blogging. If you have a blog, use these words liberally, choosing one or two as the focus of each blog post. This too will help your blog and/or website improve in search rankings for your target keywords.
- Email Marketing. Use these words in your email marketing campaigns, esp. in the subject line. If searchers are using the keywords when they research using a search engine, they are likely looking to take action and will be more likely to respond to an offer you send in email.
- Offline Marketing. Weave those words into the copy of your offline marketing activities, and remember that they represent how customers think of you, even if it's not how you view your brand from inside your company.
Your best ad copy and landing pages
For the combination of ad copy and landing page that works the best at converting visitors to buyers, make note of the design elements, the call-to-action, and the content. Use it elsewhere on your website and in your other marketing vehicles.
Your best referral websites
Which websites are sending the most traffic your way - and especially the most qualified traffic, as defined by what actions people perform on your website? Identify those sites and contact them (email or phone call) and find out more about what they do, how they relate to your business, and what marketing or other goals are important to them. This could be the beginning of a mutually-beneficial relationship. Does it make sense for you to link back to their website? Are there opportunities for partnership, joint marketing, or cooperative special offers you could undertake together? Or do you just owe them a special thanks for sending traffic your way? These are important questions to investigate.
Your return on investment
Since PPC advertising can give you extensive data on the amount and quality of leads generated for your business, it offers a tremendous opportunity to more tightly and effectively manage your marketing budget. With this data in hand, you can make smarter decisions about the ad campaigns you run and about how to allocate your marketing dollars across different marketing channels.
Cindy Lavoie is a partner at Sound Web Solutions, an Internet Marketing agency in Seattle, WA. At Sound Web Solutions, we help small to midsize businesses increase traffic to their website, build online credibility for their brand, and turn their website visitors into prospects and sales. Cindy is a hands-on marketing expert with 25+ years experience driving marketing strategy and executing campaigns for technology-driven companies.