The 5 Pillars of PPC Success
PPC is a big investment, so you want to get the most out of every valuable dollar you spend. You’re paying for every person who clicks on your ads, whether or not they convert, so there are a lot of different variables that come into play and influence your ROI. Here’s a look at the six pillars of PPC success.
1. Hours
It is impossible to implement a pay per click campaign without some planning. You need to at least give some thought to your target keywords, bid rates, and daily spend. You have to decide which landing page to direct your traffic to and you have to write attention-grabbing ad copy. You have to choose whether to use ad extensions and whether they are worth paying for. If you’re even thinking of participating in something that complicated without planning everything beforehand, you’re crazy.
Beyond this though, you also need to set goals for your campaigns. A positive ROI (return on investment) is always a good thing, but you also need to consider your cost per acquisition: How much investment does it take to win each new customer? When it comes to PPC, you don’t just have to plan; You have to plan to plan. That means you need to set up regular review and analysis and refine and revamp your campaign to continually improve results.
2. Competitive analysis
Competitive analysis is another essential pillar of PPC success. Competition plays an important role in all aspects of pay-per-click, including your cost per click, the feasibility of bidding on competitive brands, whether the competition is leveraging your own brand, whether your bids are comparable (ideally, better) than your competition, and if your landing pages far outperform those of your competitors or seem shoddy in comparison.
For this reason, in-depth competitive analysis and ongoing competitive analysis should be a staple for PPC advertisers. Because advertisers are constantly changing their creative and campaign focus, continuous monitoring is the only way to stay ahead of the pack.
3. Persons of the buyer
Who will click on your ads? If you can’t answer this question, you have a lot of work to do. You can’t create an effective, targeted ad campaign if you can’t describe your target customer. What makes your ideal consumer tick? What drives you? What keeps you up at night? What are your interests? The more you define your ideal customer, the more specific your campaigns will be.
One important thing to keep in mind: It’s all too easy for a company to say that its ideal customer is “anyone” and that its products and services are useful to “everyone.” Create five or 10 different buyer personas if you like, but create buyer personas with a clear and defined personality and profile. But remember that for each buyer person you must have a personalized campaign.
4. Orientation
Now that you have buyer personas, you can effectively target your PPC campaigns. Again, each target consumer should have a personalized campaign. These buyer segments can have different groups of keywords. Think of the variety of shoppers who shop at Hallmark from time to time. A daughter looking for a Father’s Day card isn’t looking for “anniversary gifts” or “teacher cards.”
However, targeting goes much further than this. You need to target your landing pages to relevant search terms, target your ads to relevant keywords, and also target your bids to specific groups. You can also target campaigns based on whether your target consumer is a repeat buyer or a new visitor. Targeting, like the other pillars of PPC success, is an ongoing process.
5. Analysis
So how do you keep on top of all these ongoing processes? With analysis, of course. Analytics are like report cards for your digital marketing campaigns. The AdWords Dashboard provides robust performance metrics for PPC campaigns, and Google Analytics can be used to target and monitor your consumers across multiple marketing channels to gain deeper insights into where your business is being presented and what Touchpoints are most successful as the last push to convert the visitor.
There are easily thousands of analytics apps and tools out there, so it’s up to you to find the ones that work best for your business. Heat map analysis, for example, creates a visualization of the path of the visitor’s eyes when viewing a landing page or website. This provides valuable insight into whether your call-to-action buttons are placed prominently enough, whether visitors are paying enough attention to key selling points, and other details that can help you refine your marketing efforts. Once you master the many scanning options, continuous scanning isn’t a chore, it’s a nice habit.