Google paid advertising: Your secret low-cost marketing weapon
Google paid advertising: Your secret low-cost marketing weapon
Wouldn’t you like to place an advertisement in a newspaper and only pay for it, if someone reads it? Let me show you how you can achieve this online.
By Francois Muscat
In this article I will tell you how you can generate instant leads for your franchise business by using the most popular online advertising method, Google AdWords, otherwise known as Pay Per Click (PPC).
With more and more evidence of a spiralling economy and budgets being cut as a consequence, marketers and business owners are searching for ways to do more with less. They are searching for high impact, but cost effective ways to get their message across.
Search advertising is well positioned to sidestep much of the inclement economic weather, by providing you with a means to determine how much you are prepared to spend, when you want to spend it, and who you want to spend it on.
What you need to know
By knowing how to set up and manage a Google PPC campaign you will be able to
· Control your ad spend in-line with your budget;
· Ensure that you get a Return On Investment (ROI);
· With a PPC advertising campaign you can specify the day(s), the time of day and the number of people you want to target.
PPC advertising is the quickest way to send traffic to your website to meet your goals. A PPC advertising campaign is like any other business or marketing decision – you have to start with your intended results in mind. Decide what a “goal” (or conversion) means for your business. Whether it is completing a form on your website, buying a product directly on your site with no further interaction required on your behalf, downloading an e-book or getting somebody to contact you for a meeting.
Regardless of what a conversion means to you, PPC can be set up to meet your goals. PPC can be the most cost effective method of producing consistent results in attracting new clients to your website. By following my guide on PPC advertising campaigns, you will be able to drive valuable traffic right to your online form or landing page.
Wording your ad: Tell your clickers what they can expect
Everyone is exposed to PPC ads on a daily basis. It is the paid search results you see at the top and on the right hand side of Google’s “organic” search results.
PPC ads are small. Consisting of only 95 characters they comprise a heading followed by two short lines. In order to grab attention and draw in traffic they need to be concise, so take care when planning the copy of your PPC ad.
Writing a good PPC ad is almost an art form in the digital marketing world. You need to provide all the necessary information in a limited space, but the most important aspect is writing a good, clear call-to-action. People need to know what is going to happen once they click on your ad. Will they be on a page that lets them buy the product online, fill in a form, get a free trial, download a Whitepaper or receive a discount on a product?
No clear call-to-action, or a lack of follow-through on what was promised, are amongst the main reasons why PPC advertising campaigns fail. Rather than sending them to your website’s Home Page or a page about your company’s history, create a well-designed landing page that takes them through the purchasing process, Whitepaper download, or whatever your particular goal is, and make it easy for them to complete the transaction. It should not be necessary to hunt around for what they are looking for after they clicked on your PPC ad.
Increase conversions with niche ad groups
One-size-fits-all ads don’t work. To target different searchers you need ads that speak directly to their needs. Your ads should be:
· Themed, concise and focused on only one type of keyword phrase;
· Writing ad groups are for organising your ads, not your keywords. A set of ads will have the same theme, but different keywords;
· You need around 15 to 20 keywords for each ad group. These ads will lead clickers to a dedicated landing page that allows them to complete their goal with ease.
The reason small, themed and exclusive ads work well, is because search engine users want to see exactly what they are looking for in search results. Provided you have written an ad that targets searchers based on what they are looking for, clicks happen quickly and easily. When they click on your ad, send them to a landing page that is designed around their specific search criteria. If visitors have to scour your website for information, you will lose conversions.
Why you need long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are very targeted, highly relevant to searchers and are less costly than highly competitive, single or double keywords like “bank loans” or “printers”. While long-tail keywords get fewer clicks and impressions, because they are more specific to the searchers criteria, they are more likely to convert a searcher.
People who type in single keywords are looking for broad information and are not necessarily serious buyers – they might be, but converting them will take more time and effort. A searcher who types in a long-tail keyword, like “second hand printing machines Gauteng”, however, will not only be easier to target, but the ad spend on each conversion would cost less.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion: take the guessing out of PPC
Digital marketers employ varied strategies to choose relevant keywords such as keyword research for example, which shows you statistics for phrases that get typed into Google. But what if you could create an ad that mimics the exact phrase the searcher typed in, without any further effort on your part?
Searchers are more likely to click on an ad with the exact same search phrase they typed into a search engine. Dynamic Keyword Insertion, a sophisticated and refined PPC strategy, works by substituting a variable keyword phrase in your ad copy with the keyword the searcher typed in. When your ad comes up on Google, the keyword the searcher typed in will be bolded within your ad copy, making it an extremely effective and appealing paid search strategy.
How to do it:
Say you’re selling printing machines online. Write your first line in this format:
{Keyword: Printing Machines}
For this to work, your ad must be linked to a specific ad group. Forget about broad match phrases, if your ads are too vague and far reaching, you run the risk of creating nonsensical ads. If somebody searched for “second hand print machine” and your ad is served, the first line of your ad will look like this:
Second Hand Print Machine
If your search term is too long (more than 25 characters including spaces), the default from your original ad will appear:
Printing Machines
Tweaking and perfecting your campaign
If you’re looking for a marketing strategy that allows you to generate data quickly, test ideas and promotions while simultaneously giving you the opportunity to continue tweaking your campaign and learn from results, then paid search is for you. The trick to optimising your PPC budget and conversions is continually updating and refining your campaign.
A common mistake people make is launching a paid search ad campaign and then neglecting it. A few days of neglect could easily cause you to lose ad position, drop below your competitors’ position and, most alarmingly, lose conversions.
I often advise marketers to start by writing three or four ads per ad group and let the ads run for ten to 14 days. Google Analytics and AdWords can track your ads’ success rate and show you which two ads had the highest conversions. After two weeks, keep your two top performing ads and rewrite the remaining ads. Repeat. Everyone, from experienced digital marketers to people running their own campaigns, should use this method. It achieves the best results for your PPC campaign because it forces you to continue testing, tweaking and optimising. You will be surprised at how quickly you learn what works and what doesn’t.
When should you outsource your PPC campaign?
By following this guide along with the PPC management table at the end of this article, you will be able to set up a PPC campaign for your franchise. There are, however, certain indicators that will let you know when you should consider outsourcing your PPC campaign to a professional marketer. Outsourcing your campaign to a digital marketing expert ensures that you have experienced people monitoring, tweaking and optimising your clicks and conversions, and it also pays for itself.
Here are some triggers to look out for:
1. You are not able to spend your PPC budget
In traditional marketing, coming in under budget is a good thing. With PPC it is a sure sign of underexposure. A professional digital marketer can take your campaign to the next level and maximise your results by advertising in more places and spreading your advertising more effectively.
2. You have depleted your budget before the end of the month
There are a few culprits that need to be investigated if you are blowing your entire monthly PPC campaign budget in a few weeks. Are your landing pages converting clicks into conversions? This is a common problem – don’t fool yourself into thinking you don’t need to create specific landing pages for your ads. Are your ads descriptive enough to send quality leads to your site?
3. You don’t have time to manage and tweak your campaign on a daily basis
Many of the PPC campaigns we manage are not the first attempts at paid search advertising. More often than not, marketers set up a PPC campaign to “see what happens”. While they get clicks, hits and leads, they fail to convert these into clients and soon the PPC campaign becomes a big black hole of ad spend, with nobody tracking the goals and conversions. A professional can help you establish predefined metrics and identify PPC trends, patterns and opportunities that you can capitalise on.
4. Reviewing your creative elements every week is too time-consuming
Most business owners are too busy to tweak character-restricted ad copy, search for new keywords and group ads every week as is necessary for a successful PPC campaign. Digital marketers will know how to test and change headlines, ads and the design and wording of your landing page to keep testing and optimising your campaign. Even so, weekly maintenance is necessary and if you don’t have the time to attend to this, it is time to consider outsourcing.
5. Your campaign isn’t adapting to your business
As explained in the previous article, your digital marketing campaign should be a perfect reflection of your real-world business. If your PPC campaign is not advertising the promotions your business is running, if you’re still offering a Christmas sale even though it’s February, or if your new products aren’t being broadcasted in your campaign, you are doing it wrong. You don’t want to pay for clicks and website traffic generated based on an out of stock or discontinued product. Working with a professional lets you carry on with your marketing while someone else makes sure your PPC advertising is in sync with your business needs and goals.
In the next issue we discuss how to use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to draw your target market to your website.
WSI Online Marketing Specialists
+ 27 11 468 3138
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