Business

A Successful PPC Campaign Takes Time to Build

Pay-per-click campaigns on platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads take time to build. This contradicts many sales pitches that agencies make when selling their services. The common argument goes that since search engine optimisation (SEO) takes time to ramp up, companies looking to get a more immediate impact should use search engine marketing (SEM).

In fact, many agencies pitch that by just setting up a PPC campaign, putting out an ad and tracking conversions, revenue will come rolling in through the door. This pitch severely undermines the process of creating successful PPC campaigns and thus misleads clueless business owners.

In this article, we shed light on the reality that is the work required to create a successful PPC campaign.

Selecting the Right Keywords

Picking the right keywords to target in your SEM marketing campaign can be a highly complex task. Between the researching, refining and narrowing, marketeers will find that more time is needed than what is commonly advertised. Common considerations include the search volume of a keyword, industry competitiveness for the keyword, compatibility with your business value proposition and user intent when searching for their needs.

Even after selecting and implementing the first set of keywords, constant refinement of the bidding strategies and keyword variation creation is needed. As such, you should not be expecting over night success with PPC marketing.

Ad Messages & Creative

Your keywords play a part in getting your ads in front of users, but it is the content of the ad messages and creative that will get them to click. In other words, poor ad messages at best result in no clicks meaning no cost but also no returns for your efforts. At worst, it would mislead users to click on your ad, incurring a click cost, while they immediately bounce from the website when they judge the website’s content to be irrelevant to their needs.

Effective ad messages require an understanding of the customer persona – demographics, motivations, goals, pains, interests and other related characteristics. Without prior research into the target audience, your messaging has little to base its direction and goals on. Consequently, they do not effectively speak to the users and thus may experience a poor click-through rate.

Conversion Tracking Implementation

Tracking conversions for your ads is simple enough if you only have a single funnel with a single end point that acts as the goal for all of your users. Yet, many users do not purchase or enquire about a service on their first visit to your website. Instead, they take a multitude of other actions on your website. Without setting up individual conversion tracking metrics for these actions, you will be left scratching your head at data that suggests that your website is performing poorly.

Just like keywords and copy, conversion tracking can be set up fast but in a very limited fashion. While it may be tempting to say that since you have a basic website and business, then a similarly simple ad campaign should be enough. However, this would be a dangerously misleading thought. Data that is incomplete will lead you to take ineffective actions and thus lead your business’s marketing strategy further astray.

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