If you compare long term digital marketing strategies such as organic SEO and social media marketing, PPC holds out the promise of fast and dramatic results. One of the easiest and quickest ways to increase website traffic and develop online sales is through pay per click advertising.
Technically, a pay per click campaign is successful if it attracts a lot of clicks through to your website or landing page. This at least indicates that you have chosen your keywords well and that they are targeted at the right audience.
One can also measure results in terms of increased brand visibility. With PPC you can go from being virtually invisible to being at the top of the search results for important keywords. A lot of potential customers will therefore be seeing your company for the first time, regardless of whether they click on your link or not. This is the soft side of PPC and is difficult to measure tangibly, but the effect is real. Increased brand awareness makes it likelier that someone will click on one of your web links at some point in the future, either through PPC, advertising, social media, digital marketing or organic search results.
Outcomes from PPC
The typical outcomes from PPC depend on the industry you are working within and cost budget. A higher cost budget results in higher success, but each client’s success depends on what their needs and wants are for the campaign and how they want to advertise. Each company’s budget will vary based on size and campaign objectives, therefore there’s no universal budget. If you are a smaller company, PPC can be turned on and off at any time. The process of a new PPC campaign should be planned out and discussed with the agency so the objectives can be conquered in a timely manner.
The Three-month timeline
PPC ad campaigns should always be looked at as a long-term strategy. While pay per click ads can work on a short-term basis when paired with a specific goal such as a seasonal sale or new product launch, the business is best served when running the pay per click ads as part of the overarching strategy. By giving the PPC campaign at least three months to run and be optimized, it allows the platform you’re running it on to get to know the business and advertisements.
A high quality score is essential to a top-performing PPC campaign. To receive a quality score of any level, simple exposure and impressions aren’t enough. Platforms such as Google and Facebook require time to collect enough clicks to understand your click-through rate which forms the basis of the assigned quality score. The ad platforms are looking to assess the relevance of your ads to their users.
Even though your campaign may be visually stunning and offer compelling content, time is required to gather the data that will be used to optimize and strategically deliver your ads. Put simply, the longer your campaign runs, the more data that can be collected, and the more informed each optimization can be; allowing for the delivery of increasingly positive results. Furthermore, seasonality plays a part in the performance of PPC ads, but this is easily overlooked when taking a short-term view and only optimizing based on the results of the first few weeks. Pay per click ads carry the connotation of being a quick delivery, short-term marketing approach; this is patently false. Every campaign contains numerous complex layers upon which it needs to be optimized and refined. Time delivers the best results.
Taking the required time provides not only the platform such as Google or Facebook to optimize your campaigns behind the scenes, but it also allows time to test and adjust the front-end content as well.
What happens in months 1-3?
While your brand new campaign is live and running over the first 3 months, we do a lot of work within the Google Ads interface, with a heavy focus on the following:
- Constant campaign budget management
- Adjusting keyword bids to get a read on engagement, performance, and costs
- Analysing the search terms that trigger your ads and negating irrelevant queries
- Identifying new areas to target and bid on within your account, like devices, locations, and demographics
- Testing new ad copy and ad extensions
- Exploring new keywords to expand your account with
- Researching your competitors for ways to boost your own offerings and performance
- Experimenting within your audiences to reach the most effective converters
- Conducting new strategies based on goals and initial performance
Whether you’re new to PPC or experienced with PPC, by following the three-month strategy one can get the best results from the online ads. It’ll help your company get the best results from PPC, which can help your business earn more leads and sales at an impressive return rate.
