PPC Marketing

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising is one of the best ways to reach people performing searches on Google all over the country, and even all over the world. With Google AdWords, PPC ads appear as sponsored links on the results pages of Google above and to the right of organic search results. Your exposure is instant – and your ability to reach millions of people with your company is truly powerful.

Unlike a standard Pay-Per-Click campaign, remarketing using Google AdWords goes beyond appearing on search results pages. When you choose to advertise your company with remarketing, you’re able to reach potential customers who have already visited your site. Let’s take a look at how you really can reach more customers through remarketing:

What is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a method of advertising used to reach people who have already interacted with your business online – in one way or another. These actions could be a website visit, a product view, a form submission, or a click to your site from a search PPC ad. Remarketing allows you to reintroduce your product or service to someone who has already visited your site.

Advertising with PPC remarketing is an untapped marketing channel for so many businesses. Reaching the people that are already interested in your company is a priceless marketing investment. With Remarketing, you have the power to reignite interest in your product or service, driving traffic back to your website. This is how you can lead visitors back to your site, in hopes of nudging them towards a purchase.

How does Remarketing work?

Remarketing starts by gathering information about the people who have visited your site. The purpose of tracking users is to see how they behave on your website – like what pages they visit, where they exit, and how they all lead to a conversion. All of this tracking is made possible by scripts that are added to your site, running in the background of users’ sessions.

These same basic tracking principles that supply data for programs like Google Analytics are applied to remarketing. When a user visits your site, a cookie is dropped into their browser by the tracking script. Remarketing uses these cookies to add users to pre-defined lists based on criteria you set for your campaigns. If a user matches your criteria, like visiting your site without buying a product or filling out a contact form, they’re added to your list.

Users can stay in remarketing lists for up to 180 days. During this time, they’re eligible to see your display ads while browsing other sites within the Google Display Network. The whole purpose of remarketing is to gently nudge users closer to a sale or contact inquiry on your site. They’ve already visited your site, so you know they have interest in your company. More exposure with subtle reminders of your products or services is an effective way to lead users to a conversion.

Remarketing and the Google Display Network

To really understand the power of remarketing, you need to first understand Google’s Display Network. The Display Network is a collection of websites where ads are eligible to appear in sidebars, footers, headers, or even inside content like blog posts. Site owners opt into this network, making a profit by allowing Google to use their sites for display advertising. A typical display ad for EZMarketing looks something like this:

Ads like this are eligible to appear in a massive network of sites. The network is so massive that it’s made up of over 2 million sites. That means there are over 2 million advertising opportunities at your disposal with remarketing. From eCommerce stores selling knit hats to racecar blogs, the sheer diversity of sites is unmatched by other advertising platforms.

When you choose to advertise with remarketing on the Google Display Network, you have the ability to reach your ideal customer across millions of websites. You know you’re targeting the right people, because they’ve already visited your site. Other marketing channels and advertising tactics like link building or print media ads rarely have the ability to reach your target customer in such a scalable way.

Remarketing and scalability

In a world of smarter search engines and constantly updating algorithms, the gap between organic and paid search marketing grows smaller every day. Just 10 years ago, a business used to be able to run successful organic marketing campaigns like link building or content marketing with little effort. Those were the days of easy links and engagement, where automation got you results.

Today, organic marketing takes hard work from seasoned professionals. Getting links and mentions takes a vast network of connections and even greater patience. 10 years ago, paid advertising like PPC wasn’t necessary. In 2016, a well-rounded marketing plan isn’t complete without at least one Google AdWords campaign.

With Remarketing, all you need is a solid understanding of Google AdWords and time to put towards continuously optimizing your campaigns. Just like PPC advertising on the search network, running a successful remarketing campaign does take some time to manage and monitor. You don’t need endless resources to run an effective remarketing campaign, though. You can see real result and know exactly how much you’re spending every step of the way. Total flexibility and customization is what makes Remarketing such an excellent advertising channel for almost all businesses.

Remarketing and results

When flexibility and scalability combine, you’re left with an extremely cost-effective online advertising model. If you’re familiar with Google AdWords and PPC marketing, you know you set a budget for the month. This budget is then split into daily spends. Google will never exceed your monthly spend, ensuring your ad dollars are not spent carelessly.

It’s up to you to optimize your remarketing campaign with things like placement exclusions to avoid displaying on irrelevant websites. You’re in total control when it comes to your ad copy and design, where your ads display, and at what times. But, you never have to worry about overspending. Google AdWords takes care of the math for you. What you’re left with is a dashboard full of real metrics and results.

From here, you can easily see how many clicks your ads received, how many conversions happened after user clicked on your ad, and exactly what you spent to get every sale or lead. This is where you determine just how successful Remarketing is.

If a sale from remarketing cost you $10, and that sale is worth $100 to your business, your return on investment is 10 times what you spent.

This is where remarketing comes down to how much you spend, versus how much you make in returns. You rarely get this much solid, tangible data with conventional marketing tactics. From here, you can fine-tune your Remarketing campaign to better fit your business goals. Being in front of your customers when they’re ready to buy is invaluable to your business – making remarketing the right choice.

To learn more about remarketing, call the experts at EZMarketing and talk about your PPC campaign. We’re a digital marketing agency with offices in Lancaster, PA.

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Holiday sales are the ultimate chance for companies to boost their profits and make it (back) into the black with PPC marketing. Shoppers are flocking to the web to make their purchases—and to research potential buys—days (and sometimes even weeks) before the big fourth quarter holidays roll around, which means you should be planning your campaigns and ad work early.

The key to boosting holiday sales and bids on products is to make more than you’re spending, so if you want to keep your budget the same here are 7 PPC marketing strategies you can follow to grow your profits.

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In a world of instant results, people have come to expect instant gratification from their marketing investments. When a user performs a Google search query, their results are returned in under a second. Your marketing efforts often aren’t so instantaneous. You can spend months and months trying to improve your organic search presence in an effort to land among the page one links. Organic search engine marketing is hard – it takes time and dedication to get right.

 On the other hand, you can implement a paid marketing strategy like a PPC marketing campaign for more tangible, and faster, results. This is not to say that organic internet marketing tactics don’t work and shouldn’t be used as part of a comprehensive strategy. Adding PPC marketing into your digital marketing plan is one of the best ways to get ahead now while you also spend time working on your organic presence.

There’s no denying that PPC advertising is an instant way to get your website in front of people. By using the right keywords and crafting the right ads, and sometimes even targeting return users, you can create a really successful PPC marketing campaign. If done correctly, you can see massive gains from those PPC campaigns.

Let’s take a look at the ROI of PPC marketing and how to win with your paid campaigns.

Test and test again

The beauty of PPC advertising is the depth of customization. You have control over your ads, spend, audience, and more down to the smallest detail. Getting your business in front of exactly the right customer isn’t always easy with more traditional, organic marketing tactics. With PPC marketing, you know your ads are serving to the right people.

Simply put, you’ll never know the value of PPC advertising until you try it. Adding PPC marketing to your marketing strategy may not be the right move for everyone. But if done with care and good PPC management it can work for B2B, B2C, and ecommerce companies alike. If you’re not sure of the value PPC marketing could bring to your digital marketing strategy, we encourage you to try a test campaign.

Testing is a cornerstone of any good Google AdWords campaign practice. You should test, optimize, and re-test often – not just when you’re new to the PPC marketing game. Testing allows you to gather the data you want from the audiences that are important to you. Without this data, we can’t begin to make educated decisions about the ROI of any PPC marketing campaign.

Gather your data

New campaigns and ads should be left to run for at least two weeks to gather a good baseline of data. This is when you can start to sort through valuable metrics like clicks, impressions, click-through-rate, average cost-per-click, and conversions to name a few. Understanding an applying these metrics will allow you to calculate real, actual ROI from your PPC marketing campaigns – something that’s not as easy to do with organic marketing campaigns.

A good, high-level view of important data appears at the campaign level. In Google AdWords campaigns, this view displays your different ad groups and corresponding important metrics:

In this example, you can see data for a fairly new search network campaign. We want to focus in on number of impressions, CTR (click-through-rate,) average CPC (cost-per-click,) average position, conversions, cost per conversions, conversion rate, etc.

We’ll use this data through-out the rest of this blog post to calculate ROI data.

Calculate return on ad spend

After you have a good set of data from your campaigns and ads – about a month’s worth – you can do some simple math to get an idea of your ROI. In the case of PPC marketing, ROI is referred to as ROAS, or Return On Ad Spend. ROAS is a high-level calculation that lets you see the effectiveness of campaigns with just a few metrics. Here’s how to calculate ROAS:

(Profit – Cost)/Cost = ROAS

Using the data above, let’s see what ROAS would be if the business profited $1,500 from this PPC marketing, spending $512 on the campaign:

($1,500-$512)/$512 = 1.92 or 192%

This means that this business’s Return On Ad Spend is 192%. At a high-level, they’re not only breaking even from a PPCmarketing campaign, but profiting.

If your cost begins to outweigh your profit,  you should revisit those PPC marketing campaigns. This is where you need to edit and optimize your campaigns to bring ROAS positive.

Calculate profit per impressions and clicks

You’ll also want to understand how valuable impressions and clicks are to your bottom-line. Profit per impressions and clicks goes beyond the usual click-through rate and conversion data and gives you another valuable metric to gauge the value of your ads. Too many people spend time racking up impressions and clicks on poor-value ads without understanding how these numbers actually effect their spend.

We’ll use this data again for two equations – profit/impressions and profit/clicks:

For these two equations, we arrive at the profit metric a little differently. In this case, profit is equal to the cost of the campaign minus your sales value. To get the most out of this equation, you’ll need to know the value of a sale to your bottom-line. For the sake of numbers, we’ll use a cost of $512 again and a total sales value of $312:

$512 – $312 = $200 profit

The math becomes simple for the rest of the calculations. You simple divide your profit of $200 by your total number of impressions, then by your total number of clicks:

$200/7,855 = $0.03 profit per impression

$200/288 = $0.70 profit per click

In the case of this example, we can see that impressions aren’t costing this business much in total. On the other hand, we can see this business is paying more on average for a click than they are making. Even though we saw a positive Return on Ad Spend in the previous calculation, there is room for improvement. It would be a good idea to find ways to drive the Cost Per Click closer to the profit per click to ensure more is being made than spent.

Make educated decisions

Return on PPC advertising spend, profit per impression, and profit per click are just a few, high-level numbers you can quickly calculate to your ROI on your Google AdWords campaigns. There are many, more complicated numbers you can dive into to really see how PPC marketing affects your bottom line.

In all of your calculations, don’t forget about the obvious data you have. Sometimes, no math is needed to see if something is or is not working. In the example about, the cost per conversion is around $260. We used a total sales value of $312 to calculate profit per impression and click. We can clearly see that a conversion costs less than the value of a sale for this business, adding more positive ROI to this PPC marketing campaign.

These metrics are quick and easy to use. They allow you to make educated decisions when editing and optimizing your PPC marketing campaigns. Instead of following the best practices you think you know data can give you hard evidence of what’s working, and what’s not. Remember, if PPC advertising is making you money, you’re already seeing a good ROI. If it’s not talk with our PPC agency in Lancaster, PA for help.

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