Paid Search (PPC)

Importance VS Urgency in PPC Advertising

August 28, 2013 by Justin Miller 2 Comments

A few years ago I had someone explain to me the difference between urgent and important. From what I can remember from this conversation, urgent matters were those that needed a decision within a short period of time. Important things were those that are crucial and must get done to accomplish a goal or task. This was explained to me so that I would 1) understand the difference and 2) not confuse the two. In today’s world of instant gratification, it seems that urgency is being given more and more importance, and the two are being blended and confused. One area where this is becoming increasingly evident is in advertising, specifically Online Advertising. Ads are written in a matter to entice the user to not only click, but to convert (buy, sign-up, or another desired action) after the click. As the writer of PPC ads it is up to us as to how to entice them. Should they be pressured into making a rushed decision or shown the benefit and importance of what they could get?

Urgency within PPC Ads

Urgency in PPC ads is easy to spot. All one has to do is look for the call to action – Buy Now, Sign-up Today, etc. Although creating a sense of urgency in a user may lead some to quickly buy, it may also push others away resulting in a loss of a sale. In some cases a sense of urgency already exists, like for repair services. For instance no one wants to wait forever to fix a leaky pipe. So an ad copy that reads “Call Now for a Plumber” creates urgency, but it matches the already urgent situation. Whereas “Buy Shoes Today” is creating urgency just to create urgency. A new pair of shoes is rarely, if ever an urgent matter.

Showing Importance in PPC

Rather than cresting urgency, the Ad Copy could tell the importance of purchasing the product or service. Focusing on the importance tells the user of the benefits of your product/service. Instead of creating urgency in the call to action in the shoe example above, explain that the shoes are the latest style, cheaper, more comfortable, or any other feature and/or benefit. Give the user a reason to click the ad and take a look at your shoes, instead of trying to pressure them into a rushed purchase. Below are examples of urgency vs. importance focused Ad Copy.

The first Ad Copy is very pushy. Focused heavily on price and getting you to buy and buy NOW. The second on the other hand is more tailored to the use of the shoes and the importance/purpose of the purchase of the shoes.

Is Urgent or Important Better for Your PPC Ads

Neither is wrong or right, rather there is a time and place for both types and focuses. And of course they can be a combination of both focuses within the character limits. The question is which focus and tactic is best for your product/service. The only way to know is through continual testing of PPC ad copy.

Here are a few questions to ask to help discover which focus might work best for your Ads:

Is there a natural time crunch with your product/service? (i.e. resolving a leaky pipe for plumbing services.)
Is your ideal customer concerned with features/benefits or speed/timing?
Are impulse sales sustainable for your company?
How long is your sales cycle – does it make sense to try to rush potential customers?

Try focusing ad copy on both urgency and importance, and let us know the results of your testing in comments. Is urgency needed to generate clicks and conversions? Or are people searching for features and benefits of your products/services? Whichever may be the case, remember to stay focused on your customers and give them what they are searching and your PPC will help increase your sales (today – if you are looking for urgency.)

Achieve PPC Success by Working Backward

July 10, 2013 by Justin Miller Leave a Comment

If you are measuring your PPC Campaigns to monitor their success, then you know that there are a lot of metrics to consider. There are the straightforward metrics (Impressions, Clicks, Cost, etc.), the calculated stats (Cost/Click = CPC, Click/Impressions = CTR, etc.), and now there are even assisted metrics (referring to Impressions and/or Clicks that eventually lead to a Conversion.) With so many different ways to measure your PPC, it is not realistic to attempt to be the best (whether that is highest or lowest) in every metric. Instead, you will need to focus on specific metrics and measure your success based upon your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs.) However, with so many metrics, which should be your KPIs? This question can easily be answered by determining your Goal, or purpose, for wanting to run PPC.

What’s Your PPC Goal & Strategy?

Before you start paying for and running your PPC ads, you should have a purpose, or goal that you want the ads to achieve. This purpose can range from increasing brand awareness, to generating leads, or driving more online/in-store sales. The fulfillment of this goal will determine if your PPC is a success or if it needs more work. Once you have chosen your PPC goal or purpose, the next step is to figure out a way (strategy) to accomplish it.

Your PPC strategy is simply a more defined method of how to achieve your PPC goal. For instance, if your goal is brand awareness, then your strategy should be to expand the reach and increase the visibility of your brand. However, if your goal is to drive online sales, then you will want to focus and target your PPC efforts towards people who are ready to purchase your product/service online. And, of course, if your goal is lead generation, then your strategy will broadly target people interested in your product/service, as well as similar, related and connected products/services.

What are Your Key Performance Indicators?

Your goal and strategy are now in place, but you still need metrics to measure to ensure success. The best and easiest way to determine which metrics to monitor for success is to work backward from your goal. Ask yourself, “What does the user have to do or go through to accomplish my goal?” Using increasing online sales as an example, the user would have to:

Purchase online [Conversion]
Browse & Select a product/service
Arrive at your website [Visit]
Click on one of your Ads [Click]
See one of your Ads [Impression]
Conduct a search that would trigger one of your ads

As you read through this list, certain metrics, your KPIs, will begin to stand out. First, an Impression is needed, then a Click which leads to a Visit, and finally a sale (Conversion.) After figuring out the straightforward stats, look into the calculated stats that would help you achieve your goal. In this case, Click Thru Rate (CTR = Impressions/Clicks) would show that quality of your targeting efforts. A low CTR indicates that you are getting Impressions, but either to the wrong people, or your competitors are getting the Clicks rather than you. Another calculated metric (via analytics) that you will want to see is your Bounce Rate, which is the percentage of visits that leave your site after viewing only 1 page. Because online sales require visiting multiple pages, your Bounce Rate will reveal Visits that did not turn into sales.

After looking at those that did not make a purchase, look into your Conversion Rate (Conversions/Clicks.) This metric will, again, validate your targeting efforts and give you a success rate. Additionally, do not forget to watch your Cost. Keep track of Cost per Click (CPC) as well as Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – this is the same as Cost per Conversion, but CPC was already used. Lastly, you should also be tracking the value of your Conversions to compare it to your Cost and make sure that you are obtaining a positive ROI. This process will be different for each of your PPC goals, but is a crucial step to ensure that you are measuring the correct metrics towards your PPC success.

PPC Success – Backward is the Way Forward

Success is no accident. It requires goals, strategy and KPIs measurements. For PPC, this requires starting with your goal and working backward through a user’s process to accomplish it. The important metrics, or your KPIs, will be clear once you determine the steps people have to go through to achieve your Goal. This process may seem tedious, but is absolutely mandatory to achieve success. Of course measuring is not the final step. If something isn’t working, adjustments need to be made, but without measuring (and measuring the correct metrics) you will never know why you did, or did not, achieve your goal.

Making a Smooth Transition to Mobile PPC

April 11, 2013 by Justin Miller Leave a Comment

If you are running Pay per Click ads using Google AdWords, you’ll need to be ready for your ads to start showing up on smartphones. Once yourLegacy Campaigns are upgraded to the Enhanced Campaigns, your ads will begin showing on mobile. Before this happens though, there are a few things that you can do to prepare.

Targeting Devices (or not)

First off, if you absolutely do not want to be advertising on mobile at all, there is a way to do so within Enhanced Campaigns. The Bid Adjustment feature allows you to target specific devices. By setting your bid adjustment to -100% for mobile devices, you will prevent your ads from being shown on phones. But with the noticeable rise in smartphone use, are you sure that is the best marketing decision?

Mobile-Optimized Ads

Another option is to prepare our ads accordingly. A great way to do this is to utilize the Call Extension. Although this extension can be used to target all devices, it is best suited for targeting mobile users. This extension will allow searchers on mobile devices to not only find you, but connect with you via a phone call with a single click. Another additional feature that comes with this Enhanced Campaigns extension is day parting. This means that the call functionality can be set to coincide with your business’s operating hours. On top of all that functionality, Google has also dropped the additional charge that formerly came with using a Google forwarding number.

Using the steps above, you can make sure that your PPC account is ready for the Enhanced Campaigns upgrade. These new features and extensions allow you to reach new customers no matter what device they’re using!

We’d love to hear which aspects of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns you’re using to improve your PPC ads. Let us know in the comments below!

Enhanced AdWords Campaigns – Helpful or Not?

March 6, 2013 by Justin Miller Leave a Comment

Some Background

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of Google’s new enhanced campaigns. These will “simplify” your PPC accounts by allowing you to combine similar Campaigns in to one Campaign without losing any unique settings from the various Campaigns.

Enhanced Campaign Features

From the Campaign view, your account will look simpler (less Campaigns), but at the Ad Group level or deeper (i.e. site links & ad extensions) things could get messy and more complicated. Being able to target different devices and locations at different times and bids is very useful. Having all these settings at the same level can even make them more powerful, but probably not simpler.

The Burning Question

So the question remains–are these enhanced campaigns truly helpful? Will having these various optional settings at one location aid the effectiveness of PPC advertising, or in other words increase Clicks and/or CTRs? Or at least will being able to move easily using these setting in conjunction with one another enable better testing and ultimately improved optimization of PPC Campaigns? Although it may take some time before we discover the answers to these questions, one thing is certain, which is that data collection is invaluable to us as marketers. Google AdWords must make sure that we have a method of easily slicing the data into categories (i.e. mobile devices, specific promotions, geographic locations, etc.) in order for these enhanced campaigns to be helpful and in the long run make our lives simpler.

PPC Just Makes “Cents”

February 20, 2013 by Dabrian Marketing Group 1 Comment

Pay-Per Click (PPC) advertising is an effective way to market your company that also brings measurable value to you. PPC advertising creates a great amount of exposure and visibility. This makes it an efficient and cost effective way to increase leads, generate sales, and maximize your return on investment. Search engines like Google and Bing allow businesses and individuals to buy listings in their search results. These listings appear along with the natural, non-paid search results. These ads are then sold in an auction. You will be able to control your bid and what you want to pay for a click on the ad. The higher your bid, the better chance you have at ranking number 1 in the sponsored results. But, what exactly can you do to increase sales by using PPC advertising? Let’s take a look at a few basic steps that will help you do just that.

Choosing High Quality, Relevant Keywords

Choosing the right keywords is vital to your PPC campaigns. If you don’t have relevant keywords that are going to resonate with your target audience, then your ad rank, quality score, and your overall PPC campaign will be affected. It is important to develop an extensive keyword list. Keyword research is what is going to enable you to define the keywords used by your target audience to find your products or services. This also allows you to cover numerous possibilities without utilizing the “broad match” function, which is likely to prove more expensive due to the poor audience targeting of this method. Negative keywords are also important to ensure you are not paying for traffic which is of no value to you. Negative keywords are the keywords you specify that shouldn’t be included in the search engine results pages which show your ad. Using multiple match types is also beneficial to a successful PPC campaign. Google AdWords offers “Broad Match”, “Phrase Match”, and exact match for the keywords selected for your ads. Using the proper match type is critical to achieving the targeted traffic you are looking for. Although broad match may deliver high traffic volumes, this choice should be avoided in favor of “phrase match” and “exact match,” which are more precise and will bring more targeted traffic to your website.

Create Relevant Ad Copy with a Clear Call-To-Action

Most PPC advertising platforms require that you write a couple short descriptive phrases about your product or service. It is extremely important that you make sure your grammar, spelling, and overall language is correct and appropriate for your audience. You must also verify that your language adheres to the rules enforced by the Pay per Click service. Get specific! Entice the reader and tell them why they should click on your ad. The better your ad copy, the better your quality score will be. The better your quality score, the less you will pay per click and the higher your ad rank will be. The higher your ad rank, the better chance you will generate more conversions and increase sales.

Improve Landing Page Experience

The landing page associated with your keyword advertisement is just as important as your advertisement itself. The web page associated with your keyword advertisement has to be 100% relevant to the ads offered if you are going to obtain reasonable conversion rates. In general, the typical business web page is often too generic to offer high relevancy to the specific ad. Also, general web pages often have too many distractions to achieve reasonable success at converting PPC advertisements. The objective of the landing page, ideally, is to convert the visitor on the page. However, at times in the sales process, additional information is required. If this is the case, developing a multiple page sales funnel to obtain the desired conversion should be considered. A well constructed and relevant landing page is often the deciding factor as to whether or not a user converts.

Summing It Up

In summary, PPC advertising is an efficient and cost effective way to monitor performance and stay ahead of the competition. It will also help you gain greater exposure and visibility to generate leads and increase sales. Adhering to the three basic steps listed above will put you that much closer to developing and maintaining a successful PPC campaign. Thus, it will help you to drive more traffic, generate more conversions, and increase sales.

If you would like to learn more about how PPC Advertising can help your business drive sales, please comment below or call us at 610-743-5602.

Bidding is More than Just How You Pay

December 12, 2012 by Justin Miller Leave a Comment

CPA or CPC? Which is best for your Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising Campaigns? To answer that, first let’s look at how these two strategies differ from each other.

CPA – Cost per Acquisition (Conversions): You set a target CPA and Google will automatically adjust your CPC bid to keep you relatively close to your target. From my experience, Google has been getting CPA just under the target CPA.

CPC – Cost per Click: This is the more common bidding strategy and allows you to manually or automatically (enhanced) set maximum CPC bids per keyword.

The Case for CPA

Obviously, the first requirement for using CPA is the necessity of Conversion tracking (which should be a priority anyway). But assuming you are tracking Conversions, is CPA your best option? From personal experience, a good campaign for CPA bidding is one that is well established and in a stable market. While implementing CPA strategic bidding, we witnessed a decrease in CPA, which increased profit margins.

The Turning Point

However, once there were changes within the market, such as new advertisers and increased competitors’ bids, the overall performance of campaigns using CPA dropped. Despite using some automatic tools to maintain average position, Google’s CPA bidding style was not able to remain competitive. The Campaign began decreasing in Clicks and Conversions. As a result of the decrease in Conversions, the CPA strategy automatically lowered the max CPC causing the ads positioning to drop, which further impacted the Conversion Rate. The CPA bidding strategy began a steep drop in performance.

The Case for CPC

Once the bidding strategy was changed back to manual CPC, the Campaign regained its positioning in the market, and the Clicks and Conversions increased back to normal levels as well. Although this required an increase in CPC, we were able to maintain the overall CPA at a very close level to the original target CPA.

Conclusions

The end result was no relative change to the calculated CPA, but an increase in overall Conversions. The conclusion is this: Google’s automatic CPA bidding strategy is great to use once your PPC campaign is up and running, but be sure to keep a close eye on it. Increased competition in your market could send your PPC spiraling downward quickly.