Do you understand your Google Ads conversion journey?
As Ralph Waldo Emerson supposedly said, ‘Life is a journey, not a destination.’ When it comes to arriving at the right revenue destination for your paid media campaigns, the journey can mean everything. All your creative needs to be focused on your Google Ads conversion journey, and the associated ad copy must be clear and actionable. Otherwise, you’ll waste a good portion of your precious marketing budget.
In this post, I’ll first share an example of a typical paid ad conversion journey that misses the mark. Then I’ll share the steps you should follow to make sure your ad messaging and associated landing page have a more ‘nirvana’ flow - not edgy like the grunge rock band, but smooth like messages and calls to action (CTAs) that seem to read your mind every step along the…
Stay on top of the latest advancements in paid search by taking a look at the big PPC trends for 2020 that are set to take the digital marketing industry by storm.
As the world of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) becomes increasingly competitive, it has never been more important to ensure you are spending your budget efficiently and maximizing your Return On Investment (ROI). But with new PPC strategies and opportunities emerging all the time, which ones should you pay attention to?
Take a look at what we at Smart Insights and industry experts believe are the top PPC trends to pay attention to, as we cut through the noise and give our top five trends you definitely need to add to your PPC strategy for 2020.
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Did you notice a disconnect between your click-through rate and conversion rate? It’s time to check the issues and optimize your website
Generating customers through digital marketing is now one of the most popular tactics for promoting your brand. Popular, but not easy.
As a site owner, you want your website to drive traffic and engage prospects. But it takes time and experience to hit organic search results and you have lots of other issues to solve at the moment. So, you launch a PPC campaign for your e-commerce website, hoping for fast results… but nothing has happened.
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Perhaps, not exactly nothing. Your traffic levels and click-through rate (CTR) were probably both quite promising in the…
Search Query data can help you create a PPC campaign that gets great results.
Search query data isn’t just handy for identifying negative keywords, it’s the secret to unlocking the hidden potential within your pay-per-click search or shopping campaigns.
Search queries are the words people actually type into a search engine, not the keywords you initially target them with. Let’s look at the different ways they can be used for PPC and beyond.
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Finding negative and positive keywords with search query data
Ad platforms allow you to use negative keywords in order to stop an ad from showing if a certain word or phrase is used. Obvious examples of these include words such as “free”, “used”…
A scientific approach to writing paid search ads can be beneficial to creating effective ads
The ever-changing parameters of search engine marketing are no secret. It can be time-consuming to keep up with the latest trends in the industry, making it important to be efficient while writing quality and catchy ads. A scientific approach to writing paid search ads can be beneficial to creating effective ads for yours or your client's site. Below I explain the steps to take to follow a scientific approach for PPC.
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Use science when in a situation of uncertainty
Conversion optimization is what inspires advertisers. Before creating a PPC ad that brings your target…
Machine learning + PPC = boosted results
Pay-per-click (PPC) bidding has changed a lot over the years. Manual bidding still definitely holds its place in some circumstances, however, any proficient PPC specialist will be well aware of the more advanced options available and how they can give you significantly boosted results without the need to increase your budget.
Google offers a variety of automated bidding options all tailored to hit different goals. The main strategies available are:
Target CPA
Target ROAS
Target Impression Share
Maximize Conversions
Below are a few examples of when they should and shouldn’t be used, with some small use cases and examples of performance changes.
The technical stuff
All bidding strategies are affected by two important date ranges, the first being the learning period, which is the amount of time the machine learning algorithm needs to find the bidding sweet spot. The second is the conversion lag. This is the average…
Optimize your PPC campaigns for technical industries, target markets and order size
When anyone talks about e-commerce, the focus is often on B2C. They use examples of fast fashion or basketball shoes. However, there is a whole industry out there dedicated to selling businesses’ materials that they need to do their job. Whether it’s scissor lifts, aluminum sheeting or palisade fences, there are companies selling them and companies buying them. Marketing a B2B store in these industries often comes with several unique challenges.
Challenge - extremely technical industries
Do you know whether mirror polished or circle polished sheet metal is the same thing? I didn’t until I had to market it and work out whether our products qualified for either activity. As a marketer, we need to know the products we market as well as the people we’re trying to market them to. That means research - a lot of it.
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There is a pool of great PPC tools that can help you see how your competitors rank, how many PPC ads they are running, how much they are spending and where they are being shown
The online space is getting highly competitive with every passing month, especially when it comes to e-commerce. Even though a good way to attract traffic is pay-per-click advertising, it’s very budget-demanding, which means you have to be very creative and careful when creating your Google Ads campaigns.
Fortunately, you don’t need to rack your brain over new creative ideas to make your advertising campaign successful. With enough competitive intelligence, you can use your competitors’ experience to give yourself the upper hand. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to find powerful optimization ideas, improve your ads’ performance and keep up with the latest marketing changes.
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Selling Apparel Products? Get more from your Google or Bing Shopping campaigns
With apparel products predicted to exceed $500billion in sales this year, the online fashion industry continues to thrive, resulting in all-time high levels of competition.
E-commerce fashion websites now depend on the performance of paid advertising campaigns more than ever, and ad performance has the power to make or break an entire brand.
With online shopping platforms such as Google Shopping being the preferred way to shop for clothing and accessories online, it’s currently the most important platform to optimize for profitability.
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Paid advertising challenges for online fashion brands
When it comes to selling fashion online or offline, there are a few variables which can influence user behaviour and conversion rates such…
A three-step approach to check for paid search campaign mistakes
In an ideal world, enterprising entrepreneurs would only need to set up shop, open their virtual doors, and find customers lining up to buy their products. Of course, it’s never that easy. Digital marketers have to actually go out looking for them. And once you find them, you need to convert them.
While conversion methods vary, many digital marketers arrive on a seemingly perfect solution when looking to invest to boost their visits: pay-per-click campaigns.
PPC campaigns can work, and some work quite well. But they can be minefields for mistakes, and the most common is the marketing equivalent of 'keeping up with the Joneses.' Many digital marketers think they should run a PPC campaign because everyone else is doing it.
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