If your paid advertisements aren’t acquiring the results you want, you might as well throw your money in the garbage.
That might sound brutal, but it’s a fact. Continuing to pay for clicks that aren’t going anywhere – or wasting time creating ads that nobody’s clicking on – is like throwing away your time and money.
Your audience is patiently waiting – but they’ll find someone else if they can’t find you.
Unsure of how to transform those paid ads into the lead generators you imagine them to be? Never fear, we’re here to assist. We’re about inform you on how to revamp your methods and start turning clicks into profits.
Are you misinterpreting tactics for strategy? A lot of people make this mistake – so let’s begin by defining strategy.
A strategy is the path you take to achieve a goal. It’s not specific. It’s broad and always has its eyes on the prize.
For instance, if you want to boost your sales by 50% with PPC advertising, that’s a strategy. Choosing new keywords to go after? That’s a tactic – one step of many that you use to reach your goal.
You must understand what you want to achieve with your PPC campaigns before you get things going… because knowing helps you map out the road ahead of you.
Before you get excited and start reworking your ads, take a back seat. You may have defined a goal – but is it reachable?
Boosting your sales by a certain percent – or generating a determined number of leads – might be very achievable. Or it might not. If your current campaign is generating ten leads per week, you might not be able to get to a thousand a week in one campaign.
Be realistic. Assess your current position and pick a goal that you can achieve. It might be an obstacle, but it must be within the realm of possibility to be helpful.
You’re already running PPC advertisements… that aren’t functioning… but do you know why they aren’t? That’s the following step – and proceeding beyond this point without identifying those gaps is a blunder.
Perhaps your ads aren’t worded persuasively enough. Maybe you’re targeting the incorrect keywords – or you haven’t researched your competition – or you’re not retargeting properly.
Whatever they are, those gaps exist. You can’t transform your strategy if you don’t acknowledge them.
For many companies and entrepreneurs, that means heading back to the drawing board:
This initial tip is one you can you utilize if you already have a high SERP placement, and it can help you to dominate the search results if you do it correctly.
Let’s say you have a page – or a snippet of content – that’s already ranked near the top on Google. That’s awesome – but you can double down and grab even more PPC traffic for yourself. Here’s how.
Make note of the pages or content with the highest SERP rankings – and the keywords they’re ranking for
Create compelling PPC ads that use the same keywords
Now, your page will appear near the top of the SERP – as it always did. However, you’ll also have the advantage of having your ad appear at the top of the page too.
That’s a one-two punch that can make your company and content stand out and give you a distinct advantage over the competition.
Re-doing (or doing for the first time) keyword research
Identifying competitors (and the keywords they use)
Assessing the wording and images in your ads
Looking at the rest of your sales funnel and testing it for weaknesses
Reworking your retargeting strategy
That’s a ton of things to do – but it’s going to be time well spent. You can’t hope to get more pleasing results from your PPC campaigns if you’re not willing to get a little dirty in the process.
Now, let’s examine three things you can do to ramp up the clicks you acquire from your campaigns – and the profits your business accumulates.
Gmail ads might not be in your marketing mix currently – but they should be. Why? Check out this statistic:
Gmail has 1 billion active monthly users as of 2016!
That number’s no joke – and attention must be paid.
Gmail ads are affordable and quick to set up – and there are two great ways you can target your competitors’ customers. For instance:
1. You can target keywords used in emails – and that means you can focus on keywords used by your competitors. Google is stopping the practice of mining emails for keywords at the end of the year, but for the next few months you can take advantage of their current targeting methods.
2. Another tactic to give a shot is adding your competitors’ URLs to your targeted keywords. This is a sly way to reach their customers. However, you do need to bear in mind that Gmail will treat the URL you add as a keyword.
Gmail ads let you reach a large audience in return for a relatively low expenditure – and that will ensure that every click counts.
You’ve most likely heard the old phrase that a customer must be “touched” by a brand between 7 and 10 times before they’ll bite and buy something.
It would be simple if you could trust customers to visit and revisit your website until they reached their comfort level – but that’s not the way it works.
The solution is artful retargeting. By artful, we imply that you need to brainstorm which actions you’re going to retarget and how you’re going to retarget those customers.
Here are some examples:
1. If people bounce away from your landing page, you might retarget them with an advertsiment with a fresh message and a different value proposition.
2. People who start to fill out your opt-in form but don’t complete it might respond to an ad reminding them of the benefits of signing up with you.
3. For those who have opted all the way in but not made a purchase, targeting with a coupon or discount can help seal the deal.
Note that all these options use a similar tactic by offering customers something that’s the same, but different.
In other terms, your ads shouldn’t reuse the same exact copy that’s on your site. Users have already seen that and it didn’t function, so make sure your retargeting ads give them something new to imagine.
Making Every Click Count…
PPC ads aren’t doing you any justice if nobody’s clicking. If you’re going to pay for a click, you want it to mean something – and these ideas can help you get the targeted, pre-qualified traffic you need to be successful.