Pay-Per-Click marketing, PPC, is a great way to generate traffic to your website and achieve valuable new users through targeting search interests and appearing when your potential customers most need to see you. However, PPC isn’t always the place to start when it comes to kicking off your digital marketing efforts.
A key element of marketing in the realms of digital media is ensuring you know your goals, understand who your ideal customer is, and what tools you already have in place to connect with them. Within PPC, we can target audiences through multiple media forms, be it search, display, video or shopping stores. But having a well created and best-practice campaign isn’t the be-all and end-all to generate the best leads, sales, or visits. Here’s why…
PPC ads are ranked by search engines to make sure that users have the best, most relevant interactions on their site. Because the likes of Google want to ensure people go to them for their search queries, they rank advertisers based on the quality of ads, the relevance of ads, and importantly, the landing page the ads takes a click to. So if a landing page doesn’t include the keywords you’re bidding on, your score will go down and you will ultimately lose traffic as this irrelevant content will increase the bounce rate.
If a mobile version of your website is not responsive to commands (e.g. the contact form button won’t work) or has a slow site speed, clicks – and importantly – spend will be wasted to mobile users.
63% of all searches are completed on mobile devices!
When we manage campaigns, the best option for performance and budget pacing would be to turn off the targeting from appearing on mobile and tablet searches. This means we would be missing out on 63% of all searches that are completed on mobile devices.
Not all advertisers will have videos that allow them to gain awareness and reach from video campaigns. But it’s important that those who want to target the 2 billion users on YouTube have a coined video ad to use, rather than the top video on their existing channel. Video ads should be bright, snappy, and clear so that users are able to remember you and are enticed by the faces, big tests and snippets of content they get to see.
Where PPC focuses on how you appear to the public away from your website, Search Engine Optimisations (SEO) focuses on everything on it! Alongside making sure the content on the site is up to scratch, technical SEO works on ensuring the foundations of the site are stable, including the crawlability of a site.
Many campaigns now require the site to be crawlable in order for the ads to show
Over the years, the importance of SEO has become more apparent from a Google Ads perspective. Many campaigns now require the site to be crawlable in order for the ads to show, and in fact (as mentioned in number 1) whether the website quality is good will affect how an ad is ranked which may see competitors appearing higher up the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This is why ensuring that marketing efforts intertwine SEO and PPC is so important, as both help each other to get the traffic, and hold onto it!
You heard it right! Search isn’t always the answer when it comes to advertising. Paid search works well to find users, drive traffic, and generate leads – but, that’s in the right market. We can get paid campaigns to target all areas of search, however, the environment of a market will impact the outcome of the campaign’s performance.
Paid search works well to find users, drive traffic, and generate leads – but, that’s in the right market
A key thing we start with is keyword research. If this shows that search volumes are low and there are not many relevant terms being historically entered into the engine, there’s likely to be a really low pick up of traffic from our search campaigns. In these cases, generating awareness and demand should be the leading strategy, followed by a search campaign to pick up all the follow-up search queries generated.
In other cases, paid search may be considered the answer to get traffic when your website isn’t appearing very high on the search results page for a key service or product – it’s not.
If you aren’t showing highly on the results page for something you offer, you need to look at organic rankings and thus SEO. SEO is an incremental part of getting your website seen for the relevant user and generates a whopping average click rate of 29% when appearing at the top of Google. We recommend a ‘double attack’ strategy for combating this, starting with organic search, followed by paid when demand in the market leads to more competitors fighting for space on the SERP. This is sure to get you seen and get the incremental user engagement you need to hit your targets!
Get in touch today and see why we are specialists when it comes to digital marketing for financial services and how we can optimise your PPC campaigns or create one from scratch.