PPC Marketing & Optimization

Pay-per-click Is the highest ROI advertising besides organic SEO.
With properly optimized campaigns, this can be one of your best lead sources. 

Beginning With Google Adwords

Understanding Where Your Profits Lie

To select keywords that can generate an ROI, it is important to understand the price points at which clients can make money on their leads. We need to find the niche where there is profit for them in the adwords auctions system.

Optimizing The Landing Pages

Once qualified traffic is going to your site, all that remains is to turn them from prospects into clients. Making that conversion is integral to success with any paid advertising.

Setting Up Your Campaigns

We begin setting up search only advertising campaigns & start with basic keywords and ads. We look for extensions, such as sitelinks, call, location, reviews, structured data, pricing and other to help increase click through.

Tracking, Analyzing & Adjusting

With Google analytics, you see searches clicked, from where, what you paid, how long they stayed, conversions, mobile vs tablet vs desktop, site speed, what pages they went to, where they dropped off, where they lingered, its utterly amazing.

Local Keywords VS Non Geo Specific

Bidding on keywords can be done in conjunction with geographic areas. This is a great way to get values – you may find people looking for a “gilbert ppc company” convert better than just “ppc company”. You may also find it to be cheaper too! This type of targeting really benefits mobile as well, be sure to have location and click to call extensions enabled for locational based campaigns and ad groups where you have a physical presence.

Action Keywords VS Research Keywords

We often find clients bidding on related keywords, instead of action related keywords. For instance, if you were an AC repair company, you would likely want to spend more bidding for “AC repair company” or “AC repair contractor” and pay less for “AC Repair”. Using this same example, you could bid on “ac repair” broad match, but then make sure you had “how to” and “tutorial” in the negative keywords for this campaign.

Long Tail Keywords

When you enter a market where prices are too high, one strategy is to niche down your keyword selection. For instance, If you cannot get a good price for “mesa PPC consultant” you might try bidding for “east mesa PPC consultant” or “top rated PPC Consultant in Mesa” or other variations. Of course, then you need good relevant content ready to convert, specific to that long tail for best results. You also have to consider for each of these pages you create how to treat them from an SEO perspective.

Negative Keywords And Broad Match

Broad match can be the best way to begin a new campaign. Broad match can get you junk traffic, since it matches many possible variations of the keyword and other words in the search phrase. Done well with negative keywords, it can be the best way to jump start your campaign. So, if you were doing seo for “PPC and SEO” and wanted to broad match that, you would need to do negative keywords for “tutorial” “how to” “books” “articles” “strategies” etc… would filter searches with these terms included.

How Much Does Adwords Management Cost?

We typically manage adwords on a monthly budget. The minimum monthly budget is $300 a month, at $40 an hour.

Many companies charge based on what their clients spend, which we do not do. All our work is hourly. A lot of the success with adwords comes from constantly creating new ads and landing pages, split testing, taking advantage of new formats and mediums, improving ad extensions, etc…

You Pay Google Directly

We charge for time to manage adwords campaigns. You pay all costs for clicks directly to Google, with no markup.

How Much Do I Need To Spend?

You can spend as much or as little as your needs dictate, but during set up we recommend that you spend a minimum of $200 a month, so we have enough data to accurately measure and improve your campaign.

PPC Landing Pages

In PPC and SEO, where traffic is based on searching and keywords, companies must develop landing pages to address their clients needs and discuss their specific product or service. For instance, if you are a bankruptcy lawyer in Mesa, you would need a landing page such as example.com/mesa-bankruptcy-lawyer. Now, you might find yourself bidding way too much for those basic keywords, so you need to look at the long tails. Lets say you target “affordable lawyers mesa for bankruptcy” – then you will need to have a section within your landing page addressing that, or even a separate landing page if the volume justifies it or if your quality score is sticking.

Calls To Action

All landing pages must have calls to actions. These are instructions to the user on how to obtain the object of their search, whether it be a service or product checkout or phone call. We must make it prominent and easy to find, PPC depends on having the ability to convert. The calls to action also do best when they are specific to the landing page, so instead of “call today” if you were a marketing PPC services, you might say “Free PPC Analysis” and “Speak With A PPC Expert” or similar terms.

Pages For Every Keyword

With PPC, pages do not have to be visible to the search engines. So you can create more pages than would be wise for SEO, and you can duplicate content on these pages since they are no indexed, merely changing keywords and calls to action. This also applies to localities, for instance, if you are a dentist or plumber, you could fund your whole business if you were dominant enough in a few zip codes around you, so tailoring landing pages to neighborhoods and cities near you can be good idea.

Trust Builders Needed

Reviews excerpted from third party review sites like Google, Yelp, BBB, including numbers of reviews, star ratings, badges from local directories, chamber of commerce badges, links for terms of service and privacy, SSL, a badge for SSL, unique and real pictures of people and equipment, virtual tours, pictures of customers, high quality design, fast load times, good user interface, good grammar and spelling, branding for the company selling, both on the landing page and across the web.

Can They Convert?

A contact form at the bottom of the page is not an opportunity to convert. It is not enough to Call To Action – you must present opportunities to convert. We see this all the time. On mobile, many clients may have a line that says “contact us for a free quote” but then not have links to contact, or give a phone number, or an email address. Perhaps on desktop the header was more prominent, but on mobile there needs to be a plan for how people convert, a specific funnel, it is important and very overlooked.

Setting Up A New Adwords Campaigns

Now that we know what we want to target, we can begin creating the campaigns, which funnel the users who are searching those keywords to our paid ads, which then lead to landing pages we create on our clients sites.

We have a number of different campaign types to choose from, depending on the client’s goals. We can do typical search, call only, display ads, remarketing, video ads, etc…

We also choose any demographic restrictions, time of day, adjust bids according to device, locations and a number of other factors to target our campaigns, besides the basic keyword targeting.

Optimizing New & Existing Adwords Campaigns

Have you checked search queries and applied negative keywords? Have you adjusted bids for devices? Have you used analytics to track underperforming pages? Have you paused your under performing ads? Have you removed your low search volume keywords? Have you set a bid schedule that works? Do you have too many keywords? Not enough ad groups?

Have all your ad extensions been done, your callouts and sitelinks tailored for each ad group, your reviews extension enabled and approved, is click to call serving? Are your maps extensions enabled and getting clicks? Are you utilizing video adwords? Are you utilizing remarketing?

These and many more questions exist when approaching SEO for new and existing clients. By utilizing all that Adwords has to offer, you will be able to stay ahead of your competition who is less technically inclined.

Ad Extensions

There are many ad extensions, including sitelinks, callouts, phone call, reviews, SMS message, price, apps and more. See a list here at Adwords support.

Enabling ad extension typically does not cost anything additionally, and can greatly increase click through. Click through is a key determinant of quality score, so in essence having your extensions enabled can lower your costs by increasing your quality score.

Ad extensions can be tailored for every ad group, so it is rare to see a large PPC campaign that has taken full advantage of all their extensions. This can make the difference between a campaign that underperforms and one that really converts highly and has great ROI.

Good Keyword Decisions

A common scenario for clients is to go after too many keywords at first, or too many non converting keywords. For instance, if I were to bid on the keyword “web design” by itself, that is not the best, as it will also be searched by a lot of people not looking for my service, just doing research.

All campaigns have better and worse converting keywords, so you need to understand what is converting, and how much those conversions cost. Once you have a good cost per conversion, then you can expand your budget in those areas. But if you do not understand you cost per conversion, only your cost per click, then you will not be able to appropriately make those decisions.

Schedule, Device, Location

Why pay the same for every device? For instance, many b to b purchases occur on desktop. On the other hand, food and services PPC may be more effective with mobile users.

Locations have different values. You might need an affluent demographic to purchase a high end product, so targeting your ads by zip code is a must. You also get a boost near any location in which you have a verified office.

Schedule can be really important. Are you paying for calls when no one is answering your phone? Do your clients purchase your product during work hours, or during home hours? Do you pay the same for late night surf-a-holics as you do for normal daytime browsers?

The Most Accurate ROI Tracking In The Marketing World

Adwords is a powerhouse when it comes to tracking. It integrates into Google analytics perfectly, we can set goals, track form fills, time on site, pages visited, demographics and tons of other terrific pieces of actionable, useful data. 

In days of old, conversion tracking was an entirely different beast. For instance, if a large corporation had 6 ad campaigns going, it could only track conversion through the use of multiple tracking numbers to determine from which campaign a call came. This really is way too little data. It makes it really hard to know which ads are most effective, from what channels your sales come, it does not tell you how to adjust nearly as much as you would like. 

Examples Of Using This Data Productively

Lets say we run a display ad campaign, selling golf clubs. Lets say we run it so it shows on 20 different publications related to golf in some way. Now, of course we can determine how many clicks, and what percentage go to a sale or contact. But we can do so much more now. We can run 20 different display ads, and clearly see which produces best. We can discover good sales, for instance, with young people, and target ads on the publication which drives those to those young people. We can find that sales are happening best on mobile, and make mobile improvements to reinforce that.

We can even use solid data to know for sure what changes are effective, and which are not. We can find time of day that it is best to serve. We can identify locations where those conversion happen at a higher rate, and serve more ads there. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination of your marketing team.

Call Tracking

Adwords has built in, the ability to dynamically swap out the phone number on your website for visitors who arrive there via PPC, so we can call track without messing with the consistency of the Name, Address and Phone Number. Most people do not realize, but publicly listing multiple phone numbers destroys the consistency of your local listings, and has a hugely detrimental impact on your map rank. While this may not matter for national businesses as much, for smaller local businesses, this is an unacceptable sacrifice, which will be felt in that company’s bottom line.

Contact Form Tracking

We can track all submissions from persons who enter via PPC to your contact form, and all organic. We can compare them, to see the better cost per conversion. We can track traffic from different sources, see which sources are most likely to go to a form, and optimize for those successful demos. We can identify not only the most successful channels, but the most successful ads and demos and locations, and adjust bids so we pay more for the right clicks, and less for the speculative or low performing clicks.

Conversion Optimization

Once you have visitors to your website, where do they convert? What stops them from converting? Do they click off your site after viewing incomprehensible terms and conditions? Do they not like how many questions are in your contact form? Is your site loading slowly, and the flashy banner on your product page is actually slowing the sale of your product? Having hard data on the funnel allows marketers to adjust, and even more importantly allows marketers to present hard data to decision makers, so they can make better, more informed, more accurate decisions.

The Different Types Of Remarketing

When we discuss remarketing with clients, they often say “oh, the creepy ads that follow you around the internet?”. This is a bit of an oversimplification of the remarketing process. It is important, when you think of remarketing, that we acknowledge that remarketing often converts at more than double the rate of many other regular paid ads.

So, how does remarketing work? Its actually fairly simple. Remarketing identifies visitors to your site, so that people who express interest in a product or service can then be preferentially targeted with future advertising. Google, for privacy reasons, does not identify the person specifically for the adwords advertiser. In fact, to further protect privacy, Google does not allow remarketing to be done on too narrow a list, since that would result in identifying specific persons interests.

Remarketing For Search

Also known as RLSA’s – Remarketing Lists For Search Advertising. These lists are comprised of the visitors whom come to your website and many other web properties. You can place your tracking pixel on your youtube, your FB, your instagram and many other properties, so all the visitors go into a list. We never get the names, but google has that data, and is able to do the tracking. Search remarketing is our favorite – since many decisions are big, and require multiple searches before people make decisions. With search remarketing, your product is being searched when the ad is displayed, and you have the option of paying more for your ad to show prominently.

Display Remarketing

Display remarketing allow your ads, which would typically be image based, to show on websites who are partnering with Google to show ads, and getting paid for it. Display ads are a great way to promote brand awareness among target audiences, as well as driving traffic and sales. Display remarketing can be used in conjunction with display ads, to preferentially promote your product to persons who have visited other properties of yours on the web. You can even upload lists of clients emails with whom you have had contact, to do display remarketing targeted at those people.

Dynamic Remarketing

Many clients have multiple products and services they want to remarket. For instance, we have web design, SEO, PPC management and other services. We can place a dynamic remarketing tag on different pages, so that we remarket the service which the website visitor was most interested in. A lot of this type of remarketing is assisted by AI. The AI determines, based on the device which is being used to browse, and the user’s past conversion, what type of ad would be most likely to convert for this person. It then serves the specific ad for the product in the most desirable formats for producing the sale, a devastatingly effective technique.

What Is Involved In The Management & Optimization Of Adwords Campaigns?

All the metrics in the world will not help, if you do not understand how to use those metrics to improve your marketing approach. Moreover, a savvy company, which does SEO and web design, can use the results gathered from adwords to make improvements to the website and related marketing material that will significantly benefit the user experience and search appeal of any sites.

Optimizing Your Ads

For any given adgroup, it is recommended that you create three distinct, well thought out ads. Over time, the Google AI will determine the best producing ads, based on click through rate and relevance, and will serve the best ads the most often. As ads become ruled weak, those variants will cease to display very often, with the AI favoring the better performing ad. At that point, you should remove under performers, and try new variations.

Adding New Keywords

As you move forward with marketing a particular product or service, you often come to realize other aspects of that service that you could emphasize to encourage more clientele. While we can promote adwords management, eventually we can have campaigns targeting other more inventive keywords, area that might have a lower cost per click and a lower cost per conversion. For instance, we can create pages and groups focused on remarketing, display ads, conversion rate optimization and more.

Negative Keywords

An interesting thing about adwords is the targeting of keywords. You cannot really just use any long tail keyword, it will come back low search volume, and will not trigger for your ads. On the flip side, if we use words that are too broad, we end up with unwanted clicks, paying for search terms we did not truly intend to target. Initially, we want some of the broad words, so we can trigger impressions, and build a quality score. We can use negative keywords to cull out unwanted searches. An example is the key term web design. If put that term, on broad match, into my campaign, it will return my ads when people search my competitors by name, which may not be an ideal use of my budget. So, I can use negatives to exclude competitors and other terms which do not suit the ads in the adgroup. This is a double benefit, because doing so will increase click through, and therefore the quality score of the adwords account. The quality score is integral to getting good cost per click and search impression share, so we need to consider with any changes we make to an adwords account.

Adwords Campaigns Designed For Every Device

From optimizing your website for mobile and tablet to bidding on the devices your clients use to buy.

Pay-Per-Click analysis and optimization on desktop, mobile and tablet

Pay Per CLick And Other Paid Advertising Options

My Favorite Web Designs offers pay per click advertising and other paid marketing options for their Gilbert web design clients. There is a vast technology that encompasses pay per click and we strive to assist our clients and understanding their options and maximizing their budgets when paying for visits to their website.

Lets talk about how PPC operates. Most systems allow you to pay for impressions, or for visits. To determine the cost of each click, companies use their own algorithm to asses costs. The typical model uses an auction system for each keyword. Example: Summer hits, temperatures go above 100 degrees. All the AC contractors in town activate their PPC campaigns simultaneously, and costs begin to spiral up and up as the contractors jack the price up on each other by bidding more and more for the keywords which pay them back the best. In this way, the profit margins are diminished in PPC as new areas are exploited and bids go up.

There is law of diminishing returns from being in the same paid advertising space as too many other people. When there exists extra profit in places like Google PPC, where there are more paid advertisers than all the other networks combined, then much of the low hanging fruit is gone. So where to go for the extra normal profits every business owner craves? Into the new, less explored advertising territories, where high ROI still lurks waiting to be discovered.

Paid Advertising and Pay Per Click Ad Options in AZ

How To Make Money From PPC

Pay Per Click Advertising, such as on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other valuable social media sites, is much more than simply entering keywords and Ads, and a valuable addition to any AZ SEO campaign. Here are some of the techniques smart hardworking admen can bring to the table.

You Need Great Landing Pages And A Solid Website

At the end of the day, all that PPC is doing is to bring targeted traffic to your website. It is still very much incumbent upon each company to have a web presence compelling enough to establish brand trust and generate conversions.

Drill Down Your Keywords And Content

Google asses a quality score for every PPC ad, comprised of the relevance of the Ad to the keyword, the relevance of the content to the keyword, and bid amount. This is done to improve the relevance of the ads for the individual users. For example, perhaps someone is looking for a bankruptcy lawyer who specializes in tax issues. They would be best served by arriving at a page discussing both of these things, and not just one or the other. So, you will needs lots of very specific ads paired with very specific landing pages.

Only Use Keywords With An ROI

It seems simple, but there are a ton of businesses out there who are paying more per conversion than the product or service could possibly generate. Only use adwords on services that can pay back the ad budget, and keep an eye on the cost of conversion, especially for high competition or high dollar bid keywords.

Pick And Choose Keywords

“It is OK to have more money on less keywords, if those words are all proven performers.”

Look for keywords that are costing money but not converting to sales. A good example might be a real estate agent, who bids on the keyword “homes for sales 85207” – this keyword might draw so many window shoppers that it is not a viable keyword for the paid mix, and you might find yourself paying close to the same as “real estate agent 85207” which as keywords go is much more likely to conclude in a sale to a customer who is ready to buy. It is OK to have more money on less keywords, if those words are all proven performers.

AZ Web Design & PPC

It is important to have a company that can handle your pay per click as well as your web design. PPC ties into site design, from landing pages, A/B testing and conversion optimization, to creation of clean user interfaces that are easy for clients to use. Your company’s first impression on clients is tied to your design, it is the most important aspect of converting a sale, and having a professional arizona web designer is an advantage to any business that intends to gain new customers through traffic to their website.

Some Useful PPC Links:
1. Google Adwords – https://www.google.com/adwords/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click
3. Bing PPC – http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/home