PPC Marketing
5 Advertising Myths That are Hurting Small Businesses
When it comes to digital advertising, small businesses especially often struggle with where to focus their limited advertising dollars. The debate often centers on the two giants: Google Adwords and Facebook. Let’s take a look at a few of the biggest myths about advertising on these platforms.
How Much Should You Spend on Google Adwords?
The blessing and the curse of PPC marketing campaign is that you can spend whatever amount you want. Google Adwords lets you set your maximum budget, with no minimum daily ad spend. So if you want to spend exactly $823.47 a month and not a penny more, you can. So the real question is: how much should you spend on Google Adwords campaign?
PPC Advertising: What Is It and How Does It Work?
If you’re new to PPC marketing, it can be confusing to figure out exactly what someone means when they say “PPC.” Even if you’re already doing PPC marketing, knowing how the process works helps you understand your costs and how to get the most out of your investment. Let’s dive in!
What is PPC Marketing?
Pay-per-click is an online advertising model where, like it sounds, you pay every time someone clicks on one of your ads. PPC marketing is a paid alternative you can use to drive more traffic to your site, versus relying only on organic traffic.
Many different sites use a PPC marketing model, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bing, Yelp, Amazon and more. But when most people think of PPC advertising, they think of Google display ads, which is the most common platform.
In fact, Google captures a whopping 78% of the US search ad revenue. Each PPC marketing platform works slightly differently, but we’ll focus on the biggest fish and talk about how Google AdWords works.
PPC MARKETING on Google Adwords
Google didn’t become the largest PPC marketing system in the world by accident. Adwords gives you an incredible amount of control over where, when, how, and to who your display ads are presented. Not only that, but they have two powerful networks you can use:
The Search Network
PPC advertising displays on Google’s search engine results page when a user searches for a related topic. Top paid results appear above the normal organic links. (Of the two networks, the search network is normally what people think of first when you say, “Google Adwords.”)
The Display Network
Through the Display Network, you can place banner ads on millions of websites, news pages, and blogs across the internet. According to Google, the network includes over 2 million sites, reaching 90% of global internet users.
Both networks fall under the Adwords umbrella, but you shouldn’t assume that the same ad will work equally on both networks. On the Search Network, users have a need and they are actively searching for information, products, or services to meet that need. They’re likely further along in the buying cycle.
In contrast, Display Network ads are reaching people who are on other sites and may not be looking for your product or service at all. Banner ads are by nature interruptive. They succeed when they are relevant enough and compelling enough to get someone to stop doing what they’re doing to click the ad.
How DoES PPC ADVERTISING Work?
While there are some variations between the Search and Display networks, both work essentially the same way.
First, you determine relevant keywords related to your product or service. Then, you determine a cost-per-click that you bid on those keywords.
The instant when a user performs a search, Google decides if your keywords are relevant to the search query. If so, the Ad Auction begins, where Google compares your ad against similar ads from your competitors.
The Ad Auction
The Ad Auction decides your Ad Rank, which determines where (or if) each ad appears. The advertiser with the highest ad rank gets placed first.
Ad Rank = Max CPC Bid x Quality Score
Ad rank is determined by multiplying your maximum cost-per-click bid by your ad’s Quality Score. Quality Score is Google’s rating (on a scale of 1-10) of how relevant and valuable your ad is. Google keeps the exact formula a mystery, but we know the key factors include:
- Click-through rate
- Landing Page quality
- Relevant keywords
- Relevant ad text
- Historical Adwords account performance
Thankfully, PPC advertising isn’t just a pay-to-win system. By factoring in quality, you don’t necessarily have to be the highest bidder to grab the top spot. This is good news for small businesses, who can actually out-rank large corporations without paying a fortune.
Let’s say, for example, your CPC bid is $2.00. Your ad Quality Score is 8.
Your Ad Rank = $2.00 x 8 = 16
You’re competing a big corporation who bid $5.00, but their quality score is only 3.
Competitor’s Ad Rank = $5.00 x 3 = 15
Your Ad Rank is higher, so you will rank first, despite the fact that they bid more than twice as much as you. Take that, mega-corporation!
Your Actual CPC
After the Ad Auction, Google compares your Ad Rank with your competitors to determine your actual cost per click.
Image Source: Wordstream
Good news: your actual cost per click is often less than your maximum bid.
Let’s say you’re Advertiser 1. Even though you’re willing to pay $2.00 for each click, you’ll only be charged $1.61. That’s even less than your competitor is paying for the spot below you!
What’s the lesson here? Your Quality Score is critical to getting a good ROI on your PPC marketing. A better Quality Score will boost your Ad Rank and reduce your cost per click. Increasing your bid will only improve your Ad Rank. So invest the time in developing quality ads and great landing pages – it’s the best way to ensure your PPC marketing is a success.
Want to Know How PPC marketing Can Help Your Business?
Check out our free e-Book: Using PPC to Improve Your Bottom Line. We go into more depth about the benefits of PPC advertising and how to put together a successful PPC marketing campaign. You can always talk to our PPC agency in Lancaster to get even more insights.
How to Run an Incredible PPC Holiday Campaign
The holidays are a make-or-break time for many retailers. It’s the most wonderful time of the year – to ramp up your PPC holiday campaign!
Recent Updates to Search Results – What Do They Mean for PPC and SEO?
In 2016, you’d be hard-pressed to find an internet user that hasn’t used the Google search engine, at least once, in an effort to solve their query. Whether this user is looking for a solution to their problem, searching for the perfect something to buy online, or they’re just curious about “how far away is the sun from the earth,” Google certainly has the answer. And sometimes, you don’t even have to leave the search engine to find it.
Google isn’t the only search engine on the market, though. As of January 2016, Google’s market share remains the same as 2015 – at 63.8%. Maintaining the same market share year over year speaks to a stable company, especially when your closest competition is more than 40% behind you.
But when you’re Google, maintaining your market share isn’t good enough. While Google remained the same, their closest competitor Bing actually increased their market share. As Bing continues to increase their market share, even if it’s only by a few tenths of a percentage point here and there, they’re encroaching on Google’s territory.
Competition within any market keeps it healthy and alive. In the case of search engines, stiffer competition means more updates to search results and functionality. Cutting edge technology is being developed at Google every day to ensure that the search engine keeps evolving before the competition has the chance to catch up.
PPC Marketing
With so many recent updates to Google’s advertising service, Google AdWords, the search engine continues to make it clear that paid ads are the future of search. More and more advertisers are paying to play in Google’s search results – and the search results are starting to reflect that.
Ads stop displaying in search results sidebars
In February, users may have noticed that their search results suddenly looked different. In fact, it was around this time that Google pulled pay-per-click ads from displaying in the right sidebar of a user’s search. Instead of a sidebar full of paid ads, it’s now blank. PLAs (product listing ads) and knowledge graph cards are the only elements that may still display on the right sidebar for select searches.
This change to the search engine results pages (SERPs) was one of the biggest of the New Year from Google. Advertisers were understandably shaken by the adjustment. Instead of eight to ten chances of your ad appearing above the fold, you would be left with only four. The effects of removing sidebar ads were felt on mobile devices, too. Some searches from a mobile device like a smart phone return mostly ads, well above the fold. Currently, most search results pages display only three or four paid links above the organic blue links.
Since this change, advertisers have had to get serious about the PPC marketing accounts – weeding out low-ranking keywords that just don’t work and cutting down on the excess. Even though bids haven’t skyrocketed like some advertisers feared, the competition for those four spots has become even harder.
Shopping ad changes
As search ads disappeared from the right sidebar, shopping ads stuck around. The placement of PLAs hasn’t changed much. In a search for “kitchenaid mixer”, we’re still seeing results displayed to the right of the search result in the sidebar.
Instead of products being displayed on their own, we’re starting to see many more useful extensions accompanying each listing. Along with reviews, new PLA extensions include things like special offer tags, price drop percentages, and in store location pins. Google has made it easier than ever for users to shop right inside the engine, never having to navigate to another website.
More changes for PLAs are still to come. For listings at the top of the SERPs, Google is experimenting with expandable blocks. A user can toggle a button to reveal or hide more sponsored product listings. Upcoming product filter buttons will allows users to go even further, sorting PLAs by price, location, and ratings.
Expanded text ads
Aside from an impending overhaul coming to Google AdWords in the next year, the biggest change affecting PPC ,marketing is expanded text ads. Currently, Google AdWords allows for one 25-character ad headline and two 35-character copy lines.
Instead of 60 short characters, advertisers will soon have 115 to work with – that’s almost 50% more room to grab users’ attention! Advertisers are understandably excited about this change. More characters mean more opportunity to craft a really great ad.
The expanded text ads aren’t currently a feature in Google’s AdWords platform, but will be soon. This is just one of many updates coming to a revamped AdWords. No word yet on when this platform will be released to the public, but it’s already being actively beta tested by select users.
SEO Marketing
Google’s focus on updates to its paid advertising service show how much focus the company is placing on paid advertising. So much so, that some businesses feel as if there’s no other way to rank within the search engine. As many updates as Google AdWords and paid search have receive in the past few month, organic search isn’t far behind.
Ads stop displaying in search results sidebars
This update was already covered from a paid advertising perspective. However, removing ads from the sidebar has had an equal effect on organic search, just in a different way. When Google removed ads from the sidebar, they added one more ad to the three that would previously display above organic blue links on a SERP.
Four paid ads instead of three on the new SERPs mean there is even less room for organic results. In a search for “loose leaf tea”, a user is confronted first by four paid ads, then by a block of PLAs to their right, and finally a few organic results toward the bottom of their screen. Depending on their screen size, sometimes only one organic ad is visible above the fold.
One more ad may seem insignificant, but the amount of prime real estate is takes from organic results is not. You may have already noticed how things like knowledge cards, local packs, and PLAs effectively push organic results further and further down the page. Sometimes, the first organic result isn’t even visible above the fold.
Rich search results
Elements we’ve mentioned quite a few times already, like knowledge cards and local packs, are all known as “rich results.” These are search results that have been enhanced, making them more valuable for users. Just in the last month, Google has begun expanding the rich result repertoire.
Now, when a user searches for “applesauce”, their SERPs are filled with even more images of food! Instead of a standard blue text link, all searches involving recipes are accompanied by recipe thumbnails. Some searches even include knowledge cards in the sidebar with a definition, access to more images, and nutrition facts.
One can only assume since Google is setting such a visual precedent with recipe searches that they won’t stop there. Marketers need to get more creative with their content, producing even higher quality information that’s made to draw users in. The use of thumbnails beside results is just the beginning.
AMP pages
AMP pages, or accelerate mobile pages, aren’t new to Google this year, but they are starting to gain some serious traction. Simply put, these speedy mobile pages are made to be consumed quickly. The way in which AMP is built allows for fast load times with little downtime for users. In addition to Google mobile results, you’ll find these pages on Facebook as Instant Articles.
As more and more users search on their mobile devices every day, the more people have a need content that loads quickly. In fact, 80% of internet users own a smart phone. It’s safe to assume that most of them have performed a Google search at least once from their smartphones.
AMP allows content to be more on-demand than ever. Nothing turns users away faster from your mobile site than slow-loading content. AMP isn’t only the future of mobile search, it’s the future of all search. As the amount of content on the web continues to grow, so does the need for ridiculously fast load times.
Google continues to grow and evolve, and the driving force behind most of their changes is to better serve their users. When you understand all of the recent changes and how they impact your PPC marketing and SEO marketing, you can better serve your customers, too. Talk to our digital agency in Lancaster, PA for more information or if you’d like to try digital marketing for your small business.
Questions to Ask About PPC
PPC marketing is offered to marketers by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The most popular search engine to run search ads on is Google since they continue dominate search engine use (although their market share is declining). There are many ways to utilize PPC marketing effectively, so following is a list of questions to ask about your PPC marketing campaigns.
Before we do, though, it would be beneficial to explain what PPC marketing does. At its most basic, PPC advertising allows business owners to advertise their websites in search engine results and on related websites within the Google Display Network. These ads help drive traffic instantly to specific product or landing pages on your site. You bid against others that are using PPC marketing for the same keywords to determine which advertiser’s ad displays higher on the page.
To get an idea of how each search engine display PPC ads, this is how they currently look for the three major search engines:
Google PPC
In this example, PPC advertising efforts dominate above the fold. Most search results do not show any organic results until you scroll down, well below paid advertisements. Google currently uses a yellow “Ad” button to clearly indicate which links are PPC ads, and it displays up to four ads above the organic search results.
Bing PPC
Bing just shows the word “Ad” to the left of the URL, which in this case, is also dominating above the fold with paid results. Bing still shows PPC advertising in the right sidebar, unlike Google, which recently removed its sidebar advertising placements.
Yahoo PPC
Yahoo shows ads under “Ads related to:” and also shows them in the right sidebar, similar to Bing. As with the other search engines, searches with enough PPC advertising bids dominate the above-the-fold search results over organic results.
Is PPC marketing a short- or long-term strategy?
Depending on the industry, your business, and your cost per lead, PPC marketing can be a short-term strategy. To create and maintain a successful strategy, you need the data to have a successful campaign or you could burn through a lot of money very quickly.
To build a successful PPC marketing campaign, you have to determine at what cost you break even and how many products or services you would have to sell to justify an ROI on ad spend. PPC marketing can be a great long-term strategy because you can turn the campaign on and off as you wish.
As for a long-term strategy, ongoing split-testing with more data can further improve the campaign to enhance your ROI month over month.
Outsourced or in-house PPC management?
There are plenty of horror stories of in-house marketers doing PPC management who are not AdWords Certified (Google’s distinction for those who meet rigorous standards to understand PPC marketing campaigns) or simply have no idea what they are doing. You could easily overspend if you aren’t targeting the right keywords, and filtering out negative keywords as they come in as irrelevant search terms. If you don’t have someone in-house that is certified and experienced in AdWords, then it’s probably a better idea to outsource it or hire someone that is well-practiced.
Without an experienced professional, you may end up with a campaign full of low quality scores. Low-quality ads require your bids to be higher than others just to achieve the same placement. You need to have access to make changes to your website content to help increase low quality scores. So if you also don’t have an in-house web developer, then it is likely something you should outsource.
If outsourcing your PPC marketing campaign, ask the vendor if they are AdWords Certified and/or a Google Partner. If they do not have at least one certified team member, you can filter them out as a legitimate agency offering PPC management as a service. Once you have determined their credentials, ask for an estimated budget and cost per click for certain buyer keywords pertaining to your industry. You want to see whether a campaign will bring you the impressions, clicks, and conversions that you need it to within your budget.
Also, based on the products and services you are selling, ask if it is feasible to earn a positive ROI that justifies a PPC marketing campaign. In a competitive market, if you are spending a lot per click but your campaign doesn’t lead to a big enough margin for profit, it’s probably better to spend your money in other marketing channels.
What are some important PPC MARKETING metrics to understand?
- Quality Score – Gives your ads a score based on quality and relevance, along with the landing page and content that it leads to.
- Click-Through Rate – Not to be confused with conversion rate, your click-through rate is the ratio of clicks to impressions (or how many times your ad displayed versus how many times it was clicked).
- Conversion Rate – How often an interaction with your ad leads to a defined conversion on your site.
- Cost Per Conversion – How much did each one of those conversions cost?
- ROI – Your return on investment – is the cost of each of those conversions still bringing you a profit?
- Call Tracking – Outside of a defined conversion, a call tracking number helps you clearly identify calls that are coming directly from your PPC advertising, and not elsewhere online or from your website.
How do you split-test and optimize PPC marketing campaigns?
To really understand the success of your PPC marketing campaigns, try split-testing keywords with three or so ads in a daily rotation. Take notice of what the CTR, or click-through rate, is for each ad. If it’s lower than 1% on all ads, then you should consider switching them out of the campaign for a better-performing ad. It could be that you are targeting the wrong keywords or just that the ads are under-performing.
If there is an ad that has a higher click-through rate than the other ads, then pause the ads that aren’t converting as much so the best ad is always being displayed. This allows you to maximize your budget while you avoid spending on ads that just won’t perform.
If there are keywords getting irrelevant clicks or that have a higher cost-per-lead conversion rate, then pause those ad groups or remove those keywords too. You need to be filtering out negative keywords so that your ads aren’t showing up and being clicked on for irrelevant searches. If you don’t filter out those irrelevant keywords, than users that click on your ads will bounce from your site. When users don’t find your ads to be helpful or relevant, you can end up with a low AdRank or quality score… not to mention you will be wasting money.
You could also be spending money on ads in the wrong locations, the wrong days of the week, and even at the wrong times of the day. For example, most restaurants generally would want to spend more on advertising over the weekends and less during the weekdays when business tends to be slower.
You should also be taking advantage of extra features like site links, locations markers, tags, clickable phone numbers, reviews, seller ratings, and social extensions. Missing these extensions can result in sub-optimal click-through rates and a poor performing campaign.
Knowing what to ask
If you put forth the right questions – and know the answers that you should be looking for – when running or outsourcing a PPC marketing campaign, your results can only improve. So make sure you know what to ask about PPC marketing: what search engines would be the best fit for your business, an estimate on what you can expect to spend to get to the top of the PPC auctions, if you should do it in-house or outsourced, what you need to break even and see a profit, the metrics you should be paying attention to, and how to continuously split test and optimize your campaign with PPC management. The answers to these questions could result in campaigns that generate a huge return on the investment you’ve made with paid search. Have other questions? Get in touch with our Lancaster PPC agency. We offer a complete array of digital marketing services for small businesses.
Split Testing for PPC – Increase your Conversions and ROI
A strong PPC advertising message is often the difference between visits to your site and a stale PPC marketing campaign. The tone and content of your PPC advertising is the first thing potential customers are confronted with during their customer journey. Regardless of where they fall into your sales funnel, a PPC ad can either seal the deal or direct them to one of your competitor’s sites instead.
When your advertising message is so crucial to PPC marketing campaign success, how do you make your ads stand out among millions of other advertisers selling the same services? A PPC marketing campaign earning a high number of clicks may appear to be successful, but are your ads converting visitors into buyers?
Whether your ad is a customer’s first touch or part of your sales funnel and process, the message for every displayed ad needs to be targeted.
Split testing your PPC adverstising between each ad group, and even each ad campaign, is one of the easiest ways to optimize your Pay-Per-Click strategy. When you split test ads, you’re pitting similar messages against each other to see which one performs the best.
Split testing extends beyond your ads, though. You can apply this to more than one aspect of your PPC marketing campaign as a strategy to increase conversions, and in turn, increase your ROI.
PPC Ad copy
Optimizing your PPC advertising helps to get your brand’s message in front of the right customer at the right time. When the right message is presented at exactly the right time, a conversion is much more likely. Creating an extraordinary message is what will make your ad stand out from the other advertising noise that is your competition. You need to know your customer and how to meet their needs in 46 characters or less.
If your PPC marketing campaign is relatively new, you might not have enough data yet to make ad copy decisions. An important best practice for any online advertising strategy, not just PPC marketing, is to use data to make educated decisions. Data should always be the driving force between any major changes. Without it, your campaign isn’t supported by anything tangible.
Once ads have been allowed to run for at least one month, you can begin to analyze their data. PPC management and optimization is all about starting with a broad data set, constantly improving and narrowing the field. When you begin to dial-in on your ideal customer and brand message for your campaign, you increase your odds of success exponentially. Baseline data allows you to see what message customers respond to best, getting rid of ads that fall short before they waste your spend.
The average CTR (click-through rate) for a search ad is 1-2%. Anything over 2% is considered above average.
Look for ads that come as close to a 2% click-through rate as possible. These ads have proven they perform better than others in their ad group, making them the best choice for split testing.
The easiest way to begin split testing is to make subtle changes to your best performing ads. Start by changing the copy or headline of your ad, testing which one is more appealing to your customers. These subtle changes might not seem like they’ll have much of an impact, but you’d be surprised.
You can see from the ads above that changing only the headline message made quite a difference. Adjusting the headline not only improved CTR, it also lowered CPC (cost-per-click). Split testing allows you to find which brand message your customers respond to better. It also allows you to optimize your message by paying less for a click than you would have before.
When more people are clicking your ads and you’re paying less for it, your ROI improves.
Landing page experience
Landing pages work hand-in-hand with your PPC advertising. When you build an ad for your campaign, you also have to decide what page users will be directed to from a click on that ad. These landing pages are displayed as the “destination URL” at the bottom of each search ad. A positive landing page experience is just as important as good ad copy. Landing pages that are well-built and optimized give customers a seamless experience, encouraging conversions.
Think of landing pages as the final push customers need towards completing a conversion. Good PPC ad copy can help get customers to your landing page. If that landing page is confusing, poorly organized, slow to load, or irrelevant, your customer’s journey ends there. Split testing landing page design and messaging is a necessary step towards understanding your customers’ buying journey and how you can work to optimize it.
In the above example from HubSpot, when landing pages are optimized to continue the ad experience, carrying along their messaging and relevance, leads can increase by over 100%. Split testing landing pages is a bit more involved than testing ad copy, as new pages and designs need to be created on your site. Creating new landing pages for your split tested PPC ads helps you fully understand the customer journey and how they lead to a conversion, from start to finish.
Working together
Optimizing your Pay-Per-Click marketing strategy is not a one-size-fits-all approach, nor is it a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. Each advertiser is different, with different goals they’re trying to achieve through a PPC marketing campaign. One thing almost every advertiser is concerned about is increasing their conversions, which ultimately helps to increase their ROI for PPC marketing.
When you split test ad copy, you’re bringing your PPC marketing campaign closer and closer in line with your brand’s message. If you ads rarely come close to a 1-2% CTR, your brand message is not meeting the expectation of your customers. Split testing ad copy allows you to pin-point what works and what doesn’t, getting closer to the perfect ad for your target customer.
Adding landing page split testing into the mix allows you to continue the customer journey, controlling exactly how your customers are presented with an offer. Split testing ad copy is a good start, but focusing on other parts of your customer journey, for example landing page optimization, is important too. Rather than dropping off half way through the journey, you’re seeing it through to the end. Presenting users with the right message every step of their journey guides them through your sales funnel, into a lead, then into a valuable customer. When good ad copy works together with an excellent landing page experience, conversions improve for your PPC marketing campaign, and so does your bottom line.
Learn more about split testing, optimizing your landing pages, or Pay-Per-Click in general from our team of Google AdWords certified professionals. We offer a wide variety of internet marketing services for Lancaster, Harrisburg, and York small businesses.