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The reason that so many businesses use PPC advertising is fairly simple, it’s a flexible direct marketing tool that can be used to target relevant audiences at the right time. As long as you have a clearly defined goal and strategy, a business can increase revenue, aggressively compete and use paid search to grow profits.
The strategies below provide an insight into short and long term goals that can be achieved by using effective PPC campaigns. Long term and short term strategies should be combined to achieve a specific goal.
If a PPC campaign is set up and implemented properly it will almost certainly increase the number of sales that your website receives very quickly. The campaign will be directly targeting people who are already interested in your product and service and this audience has the highest chance of buying from your website.
The strategy to enable this boost in sales is to ensure that the keywords being targeted are focused on those that convert effectively and exclude keywords such as free, description, pictures and cost. A high converting keyword that costs slightly more is likely to provide more sales than a lower costing generic term. If this is the primary goal, don’t forget to optimise your sites for conversions/sales!
Aggressively chasing an increase in sales does not necessarily mean that you will see profits grow in the short term especially with a new account and little to no previous data with which to optimise the account.
Increasing the number of users who visit your site can be a good way to use your website to persuade and engage your audience and eventually lead to becoming a authority in your industry. This tactic should focus around the use of low cost broader but still relevant keywords whilst ensuring that irrelevant terms are excluded. It is also important to ensure your site is easy to use and full of useful content to maximise the return from this strategy.
Apart from the global search market, most industries have a healthy level of competition. Pay per click advertising allows you to bid on your competitor’s branded keywords from users searches. This means that when a potential customer searches for your competitor, you get a chance to persuade the user that you offer a better product at a lower price.
This method essentially skims revenue from the offline marketing activities of your competitor and gives an opportunity to promote your company at the right time whilst potentially costing your competitor a sale.
TIP: Beware, although you can bid on your competitors brand terms, you can’t feature a Trademark within the Ad text without permission (unlikely from a competitor) and this may lower the quality score of your ads and therefore increase the Cost per Click. The campaign may not also have the greatest conversion rate.
The most common and desirable long term goal for any marketing campaign is to make a profit. This goal can be achieved by combining the short term strategies above and tailoring these to your specific market and available budget.
Profit growth should be seen as a long term goal as there is no certainty that you will instantly make a profit when using any new marketing platform with no historical data. It may take time to optimise the campaign and review keywords don’t perform as you would have expected.
How many times has it been said that it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer. PPC can be used a retention strategy by using display network remarketing to target users who have already visited your website. These customers have either already shown that they are interested in your products by visiting your website or have bought something before and have good chance of buying again if you provide a decent service.
Make sure to turn on Frequency capping to avoid a user from seeing your advert hundreds of times and giving the impression that you are following them around the web.
Similar to the way major brands such as Coca-Cola sponsor and have their logo appear all over the World Cup, Display Network Advertising allows brands to show ads on selected websites to help drive traffic and increase brand recognition. This can help a brand develop strong brand associations on popular websites that are relevant to the target audience comparable to sponsoring events albeit on a smaller scale, but at a much lower cost.
This not only provides an opportunity to directly increase visits to the site from your Ads but also helps establish a brand by featuring your logo and brand dynamics with a new audience which can increase trust in your website.
The key as always to a successful PPC campaign is to regularly review and optimise based on the figures that are important to your goals.
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