As a digital marketing strategist, I help small businesses find the most effective ways to attract customers through online platforms. While businesses can gain significant traffic through organic searches and SEO, I know of even more strategies just as important for gaining leads. Today, I’ll share some tips about a specific one that quickly and significantly boosts online traffic… basically from the moment it’s implemented.
In your digital marketing endeavors, have you come across PPC? It’s pay-per-click advertising, a marketing method where a business identifies websites that attract customers who they predict will also have an interest in their products. Then, the business places strategic ads on those sites and pay a cost-per-click fee whenever someone clicks on it.
Say you want to draw in tourists for your vacation rental property. You place an eye-catching ad catered to tourists on a travel agency webpage or on popular tourist location websites. Every time someone clicks that ad, they go directly to your landing page, and you pay the ad fee. You can also advertise on Google, which will often put your ads onto relevant websites, and social media platforms like Facebook.
PPC ads basically function as detour signs that usher visitors right into the ad owner’s website or online store. Through this type of advertisement, you have the ability to reach customers who might not organically find your business.
Also Read: How Hawaii Businesses Can Optimize Their Google Ad Budget
What’s the Point of PPC?
With all of the options for advertisements on the internet, why add PPC to the mix? How do you decide whether you want to go the route of PPC, or instead use CPM (cost per impression)?
While a CPM functions like a paid, digital billboard that gets pushed to a certain number of users, whether they click on it or not, PPC lets you find interested users through related sites. These potential customers might not necessarily think about searching for your product, but they will realize they need it when they see your ad! You can target your PPC ads based on criteria you choose, including keywords, location, interests, demographics, and device type.
Getting your ad in front of your choice of potential customers limits any sense of wasting your advertising budget. Since you only pay for the clicks, not the views of the people who scroll past the ad, you have a cost-effective marketing strategy. Who can argue with saving money?
Improving your website’s SEO and gaining traction with results often takes time. PPC gives you the opportunity to see fast results for your stats, and you have the potential to quickly boost your sales. For example, PPC ads on Google show up at the top of the search results, before the organic results, which gets you a high chance of attention. And with those immediate stats, you can see how your paid ads help you work toward specific business goals.
If you don’t already use PPC as part of your marketing strategy, consider adding it as you think about your ad budget and business growth potential in the next year. I think you’ll find PPC gives you cost-effective benefits. Let me share three ways a PPC strategy can work with your current practices to get more efficient results for your business.
Also Read: The Definitive Guide to Pay Per Click Advertising
3 Tips for Running an Effective PPC Ad Campaign
To have success with PPC, follow these tips:
- Measure Your Goals
What do you want to see happen in your business as a result of your ad campaigns? What business goals do you have for the upcoming year? How many new customers do you want to reach? What type of demographics do you think would find your products and services compelling?
Answering questions like these will help you narrow your focus and make the best decisions about where to market.
When you run your ads, analytics help you keep track of conversions like transactions, contact forms, and information requests. As you evaluate the success, cater your PPC ads to those goals and see how they make a difference. Where you don’t see statistics you want, adjust. Then analyze the results and reevaluate any changes you need to make.
- Perform Ad Copy Maintenance
As you check your analytics, you need to constantly evaluate your ad copy and keywords. If you use Google Business, they offer a service that gives recommendations about where you may need to add more keywords or improve copy.
Wherever you find your copy has ineffective results, figure out what changes you need to make your ads more attractive. Maybe you haven’t included enough relevant information or your wording causes confusion.
Ideally, you should have a group of people to consult and get feedback on your ads, so ask them what they think.
- Test Out New Online Platforms
While you consider new avenues for your ad campaigns, try running ads on websites you already interact with.
You probably have social media accounts for your business. Since you already have a presence on those platforms and manage those accounts, go ahead and run paid ads there, too. But don’t stop at the ones you already have. If you only use Facebook and Instagram, sign up for others like LinkedIn to reach professionals and SnapChat to gain traction with a younger customer base.
I recommend keeping a dedicated social media manager on your team. That way, your valuable time and attention don’t get stopped up trying to handle too many avenues. You can have the social media manager keep an eye on ad performance, analytics, and customer interactions.
These tips just give a very basic overview of where to start if you haven’t thought much about PPC or how to integrate it into your marketing strategy. We help small businesses establish highly effective PPC campaigns all the time. If you want to know more or need help expanding the work you already do, reach out to us today!
Further Reading: How Hawaii Businesses Can Excel at Cost-Per-Click Ads… Without Using Google
Photos Courtesy of Mediamodifier, Joshua Earle, and Afif Kusuma