SEO and PPC are both excellent choices for Internet marketing, and they also work very well in tandem. Nevertheless, running both SEO and PPC campaigns isn’t always practical. In some cases, issues specific to your business make PPC a much better choice for lead generation and/or revenue generation. Here are seven telltale signs PPC is the right choice for you.

1. Your business is seasonal. SEO requires steady effort year after year, and your organic visibility can’t be turned on and off. With PPC, you can invest heavily in advertising during busy seasons, and scale back or shut down completely when business is slow.



2. Big companies dominate SEO. In some niches, a handful of mega-corporations with six- or even seven-figure SEO budgets price all the smaller companies out of the market. An SEO campaign to get you from page 10 to page 8 on Google probably won’t yield much, if any, ROI; whereas with PPC, you can appear prominently on Google right away.
3. Your business model will change. If your business is likely to change due to an aggressive acquisition strategy, product development or a similar reason, PPC enables you to adjust or overhaul ad content, offers and landing pages quickly. SEO, on the other hand, requires months of work to optimize for new keywords, and may not be fast enough to keep up with you.
4. Your specialized business has low keyword volume. Companies in highly specialized businesses get lazy sometimes because there is little competition for organic keywords, and they show up in organic results with minimal effort. However, if such a company ran a PPC campaign with knockout offers, it may catch the competition off guard and generate lots of leads and orders.
5. You have a knockout offer. If your business runs on terrific offers — lifetime guarantees, massive discounts/sales, etc. — PPC ads will convey your value proposition with far more impact than an SEO campaign that may or may not explain your offer in the organic link that displays on Google.
6. You want instant gratification. SEO takes time to bear fruit, and many organizations are hungry for immediate results. If you are looking for a fast (and perhaps more precisely measurable) return on investment, PPC is the way to go.
7. You have a local business serving a local market. Local SEO is a popular and effective approach, but it does require time, quite a bit of effort, and a great deal of expertise. Many, if not most, local businesses serving local markets have found PPC to be easier to implement and highly effective.

Needless to say, before diving into PPC, SEO or both, it makes sense to take a careful look at all the variables. If you’re not sure which option is best for you, please contact us. We analyze PPC versus SEO situations multiple times, every day.

There’s a good business case to be made for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. It’s quite popular (as we will see momentarily), and is effective for most businesses provided they implement a well-conceived and properly funded campaign.

1. PPC Gives You an Edge — Google

Google is one of the largest companies on the planet. Why? Because of advertising. In 2003, Google’s advertising revenue was $1.42 billion; in 2016 — $79.38 billion. Advertising revenue accounts for more than 90 percent of Google’s total revenue, which means Google treats its PPC advertisers well on its search engine. Over the years, Google has given more and more prime SERP (search engine results page) real estate to PPC ads, driving organic results farther down. More recently, Google has begun to make PPC ads look more like organic results, another way the company is setting the table for higher click-through rates. In short, when you invest in PPC, you have Google in your corner. As time goes on, it’s highly likely Google will continue to modify its search engine appearance and functionality to favor advertisers.

2. PPC Makes Your Marketing Nimble

Most forms of online and traditional marketing require long-term commitments and consistently big budgets. Branding campaigns, SEO, drip marketing campaigns and social media campaigns lose most of their effectiveness if they become on-again, off-again affairs. Not so with PPC — the PPC switch can be turned on or off at a moment’s notice. A company with little or no organic search engine presence will go to the top of the SERP immediately, as long as it has an adequate budget. And, if the campaign is not meeting expectations, it can be shut down immediately, enabling the company to divert funds to better-performing options, or simply pause the PPC campaign in order to devise more promising keyword and/or bidding strategies.

3. PPC Makes Your Other Marketing Better

PPC campaigns involve lots and lots of testing. Savvy campaigners continually change it to arrive at the best offers, landing page content, keywords and a host of other marketing variables. The data derived from these tests can be applied to other marketing campaigns to bring about substantial improvement. For instance, if an email campaign continually repeats Offer A, but a PPC test reveals Offer B produces twice the sales leads, the email campaign may well achieve the same results by switching. Multiply this example several times a month over the course of a year, and a company will make great strides in its overall lead generation that it never would have made without PPC in the mix.

Looking for help setting up or managing your PPC campaign? We can help! Please contact us now to discuss your objectives.

PPC is a terrific form of Internet marketing — but not for every business and not without a solid game plan. Before we take on a new PPC client, we conduct a thorough audit to gauge two critical things: whether the cost-benefit equation of a campaign makes sense, and whether a current campaign can be improved upon or needs to be completely replaced.

Here are the specific items we review in our PPC qualifying audit:

1. Exploratory Keyword Research

1. Conducting exploratory keyword research using the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool helps us understand:
1. The potential size of the prospect’s market
2. Estimated monthly search volume
3. The most relevant keywords with the highest search volume
4. The competitiveness of the keyword market
2. We also look at the below projected monthly metrics for each keyword:
1. Clicks — The estimated number of times a user would click on an ad on the search results page
2. Impressions — The estimated number of times a user would view an ad on the search results page
3. Cost — The estimated cost of each keyword
4. CTR — The estimated click-through rate (clicks/impressions) of each keyword
5. Average CPC — The estimated cost-per-click from Google AdWords, which provides insight into the value and competition level of the keyword
6. Average Position — The estimated position for an ad on the search results page

2. Existing Account Audit (If applicable. We only do this if the client has an existing campaign it is currently running.)

We analyze the account to determine:

• If we can take over the existing campaign and just make some slight modifications and start managing the campaigns from there
• If we need to set up a new account and create all new campaigns from scratch

I. Account Level

1. Adequate initial spend
2. Proper campaign/ad group structure (for budget control purposes, based on services and/or website structure)
3. AdWords conversion tracking
4. Dynamic phone tracking
5. Google Analytics tagging

II. Campaign Level

1. Sitelink extensions
2. Location extensions
3. Callout extensions
4. Call extension
5. Review extension
6. Snippet extension
7. Customized ad schedule
8. Customized device targeting
9. Search and display separated into individual campaigns
10. Remarketing lists on search ads (RLSA)

III. Ad Level

1. Ads
1. Ad group level customization
2. Proper grammar
3. Call to action in ad text
4. Proper A/B ad split testing
2. Landing pages
1. Ad group level customization
2. Messaging consistent with keywords and ads
3. Offer/CTA
4. Prominent phone number placement
5. Prominent form placement
6. Responsive/mobile-friendly
7. Modern design

IV. Keyword Level

1. Adequate number of keywords
2. Active bid management
3. Average or above average quality score
4. Not using broad match (non-modified)
5. Utilizing multiple match types
6. Frequent negative keyword management

We look at all of these, but the main factors that usually determine whether we can take over a campaign or not are:

• Proper campaign/ad group structure
• Adequate number of keywords

If these two aren’t done correctly, fixing them is more time-consuming and the results are less effective than just starting over. The other audit items provide great insight about the inner workings of the existing campaign, which enable us to take advantage of or enhance the good campaign elements, and rework the less effective ones.

3. Media Budget Recommendations

After completing the exploratory keyword research and existing account audit (if applicable), we recommend a monthly media budget for the prospect. We provide the prospect with a minimum required monthly budget and a maximum potential monthly budget.

The minimum required monthly budget is the amount required to be competitive and gather enough data to properly optimize the campaign.

The maximum monthly budget takes into account the maximum projected number of clicks the prospect could receive with an unlimited budget.

The Two Big Benefits of a PPC Audit

This audit procedure has helped us in two very important ways:

First, even though we hate to turn down business, we do exactly that when the numbers don’t add up — there’s no sense getting started on a PPC campaign that’s doomed from the start; we’ll only end up getting fired. What’s more, prospects appreciate our frankness and this often leads them to explore other, better marketing options with us.

Second, when the audit proves favorable for PPC, which it does most of the time, we can hit the ground running with a solid strategy and tactical plan. This makes the ramp-up faster and far more efficient, so we can start delivering results more quickly while staying well within the budget.

If you’re not running a PPC audit along these lines now, give it some thought! It may help you land the right type of client and increase your odds of a highly successful outcome.

Google Shopping can be scary if you’ve spent most of your AdWords life in Search and Display campaigns. It’s easy to start a Shopping campaign with a huge product catalog at your disposal, not see results in the first month, and get scared off. If that’s the case, humor me and consider a few questions before you conclude Google Shopping just isn’t right for your online store.

Is ROAS (return on ad spend) the main issue? In other words, do you have substantial spend and conversion volume, but CPCs (cost-per-clicks) are just too expensive to rationalize continuing with the campaign?

I wanted to share an example of some basic segmentation that really paid off for a retail client. The Shopping campaign initially was paused due to poor ROAS. See initial stats over the first 10-month run:

Sales: 203

ROAS: 1.79 (goal is 3.00)

The Pitch: For Shopping, the volume was never an issue. If we could harness areas of the campaign that were working and exclude the others, there was really an opportunity here. We believe we’ve found the proper segmentation to exploit this opportunity. Additionally, our team is more experienced in Shopping segmentation at this point, so our management process for these campaigns has more concrete structure.

Strategy: Use granular segmentation to strategically increase revenue in the most effective pockets of the campaign, while decreasing costs in pockets of lower revenue.

Tactics

1. Segment products by brand, then by product type.
2. Starting at product-type level, note Conv/Click (average value per click) and determine new “Goal CPC,” which would allow for ROAS of 3.
3. Implement projected bid to best meet “Goal CPC,” and then monitor.
4. If Conv/Click is too low (say under 0.30) to realistically gain any impression share, EXCLUDE the product type to eliminate any wasted spend.
5. If there is minimal data at the product-type level, apply 1 to 4, but at the brand level.

Not only did this allow us to eliminate wasteful spending for ineffective products/brands, but also we increased and scaled in areas with an already high ROAS (likely less competitive brands).

Tip: Notice the “Click Share” and “Search Impr Share” columns, and the low numbers in areas of higher ROAS. This indicates we can raise bids in these areas to gain more traffic.

If a pocket already has an ROAS of 5+, we may wish to push up bids even further here, to increase volume and still stay within our target ROAS.

Today, I will run through some newer and lesser-utilized ad extensions that have potential to add big value to your PPC campaigns in both Google AdWords and Bing Ads.

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Adding the extensions below almost always result in, at the very least, a small improvement in CTR:

• Sitelink extensions
• Callout extensions
• Call extensions

You’re likely familiar with these. If you don’t use them in every single account, get them in there now. They’re easy to produce using content from a client’s site and can be easily added at the account level (although you will likely want to go more granular at some point).

Extension: Structured Snippet

Engine: Google and Bing

Who Should Use It: Everyone

Description: Similar in theory to callout extensions, these offer another layer of content and information underneath the main lines of your text ads. When creating, you are asked to choose a category relevant to your business. For example, an HVAC company may choose the category “Service Catalog” and add “Heating”, “AC” and “Plumbing” as the snippets. Snippets are not clickable, and serve to give advertisers another level of differentiation from competitors.

If you do not select snippets yourself, AdWords can also create dynamic snippets based on landing page content.

Extension: Price

Engine: Google

Who Should Use It: E-Commerce

Description: Price extensions allow advertisers to display relevant information about specific products underneath text ads. This allows users to more easily compare pricing between advertisers. It can be helpful in weeding out potentially high-cost clicks from users with no interest in a given price range. Furthermore, it can improve CTR in the most relevant potential customers. Interested users can click on a price extension and be directed to that specific product.

Extension: Review

Engine: Google and Bing

Who Should Use It: Everyone with relevant third-party reviews

Description: Review extensions display positive accolades, testimonials and third-party rankings with users. This can be anything from a quote to an award acknowledgement. It’s simple and criminally underutilized. In my experience, these tend to improve both CTR and conversion rate more than any other extension, especially if your client has relevant awards to display.

In general, I recommend at least testing most, if not all, available ad extensions. As Google continues to add these (and Bing continues to mimic Google), advertisers can further differentiate themselves from the field, and become more relevant to the right users.

Some ad extensions may work better than others, so test them like you would ad copy — adding new ones and pausing “losers” to ensure the user’s overall ad experience is always improving. Don’t settle for just the classics (sitelinks, callouts, call). Mix it up and get better!

Clients can be unreasonable. We all know that. But most issues usually stem from a lack of understanding, unclear goals or just unrealistic expectations that are never articulated. The PPC management team can avoid at least some of the above with candid, ongoing dialogue and transparent reporting with detailed explanations.

Cost per lead/cost per acquisition (CPA) is a common metric used when determining client goals and meeting these goals with ongoing improvements, so let’s focus on that as our main example.

First off, it’s important that you help the client understand CPA in a more detailed perspective. Most clients will inherently view CPA from the following simple formula:

CPA = Cost/Leads

How can we explain optimization using the equation above? Reduce costs and increase leads? Obviously, if everything works perfectly and the client’s market is relatively straightforward, this explanation can be satisfactory. But taking this a step further can pay dividends and help the client understand additional factors at play.

CPA = CPC/Conversion Rate

The change seems simple, but this version of the equation lends itself to more dialogue and a deeper understanding of the levers we can pull to see improvement.

Actions to Reduce Cost Per Click

• Keyword Bid Adjustments
• Device Bid Adjustments
• Landing Page Improvements focused on Quality Score
• A/B Ad split testing (CTR focus)
• Targeting adjustments
• Negative keyword additions to avoid erroneous traffic and wasted spend
• Ad Extension testing to improve Quality Score

Actions to Improve Conversion Rate

• Landing page design testing
• A/B Ad split testing (Conversion focus)
• CTA/Offer testing

Now the client immediately has a better understanding of what actually goes into decreasing the CPA over time.

Additionally, recognizing the latter version of the formula can also help shed some light on realistic expectations in the client’s eyes.

For example, let’s say the client has a monthly budget of $1,000 and a CPA goal of $20/lead. However, you note that CPCs (cost per clicks) are nearly $10/click and Conversion Rate averages 25 percent. You can easily explain to the client how this goal is not immediately feasible, as it assumes 50 percent Conversion Rate given our CPA equation. Subsequently, you can lay out a plan for Quality Score improvement to reduce CPCs, and a landing page testing plan to improve the Conversion Rate over the next several months.

Now the client has a better understanding of how all of those tactics it sees actually apply to its bottom line, and what to watch for in addition to straightforward CPA numbers month over month.

The big point here is that communication is key. If you believe in your plan (even if results aren’t as immediate as the client would like), explain the ins and outs, and don’t be afraid to take the discussion another step down the rabbit hole. In most instances, this will only benefit you and the client.

Let’s talk easy-win PPC initiatives for a minute. How often does a client expect PPC professionals to have that perfect gold-mine solution? You know, that secret button you can push in Google AdWords that immediately improves cost per acquisition/return on investment (CPA/ROI)? Well, that button might not exist, but remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) are the next best thing.

RLSA is a feature that lets you customize your search ads campaign for people who previously have visited your site, and tailor your bids and ads to these visitors when they’re searching on Google.

When people leave your site without converting, for example, RLSA helps you connect with these potential customers when they continue looking for what they need on Google Search (as opposed to just on the Google Display Network as with normal remarketing). You can set your bids, create ads or select keywords, keeping in mind that these customers previously have visited your website.

RLSAs are especially valuable for clients with longer sales cycles or a B2B focus. Think about one user doing his/her research looking for the best solution: The user clicks one ad after another, one organic link after another, and doesn’t end up actually contacting any advertiser. RLSA allows you — the advertiser — to ensure you stand out to this very valuable user the next time, when the user is a step further into the buying cycle. With RLSA, advertisers can offer unique incentives for returning users or ensure their ad is in top positioning for returning users.

Here are some of my favorite strategies for utilizing RLSA:

1. Bid on keywords that you don’t normally bid on just for people who recently have visited your site, or have converted on your site in the past. For example, you may wish to continue bidding on broad match keywords, but only targeting previous visitors, as they are more qualified.

2. Optimize bids for your existing keywords for visitors on your remarketing lists. For example, you can increase your bid by 25 percent for those who viewed your website in the last 30 days.

3. Duplicate all campaigns, excluding remarketing audiences from your original campaign and using the ‘Target and bid” option for new RLSA-focused campaigns. This allows for budget prioritization based on whether or not a user has visited your website.

The terms ROAS and ROI are often thrown around interchangeably in the PPC world. Aside from the ongoing misuse and ambiguity of the terms “bi-monthly” and “bi-weekly,” this is my largest grammatical pet peeve.

However, it’s vital to clarify the distinction, especially when a client sets goals completely based on one of the aforementioned concepts.

ROAS = Revenue/Cost

In Google AdWords, this can be viewed by adding the “Conversion Value/Cost” column. It should be noted that AdWords actually calls this metric “return on investment” — which is incorrect.

ROI = (Revenue - Cost)/ Cost

In AdWords, this must be created via a Custom Column using the following:

(Total Conversion Value - Cost)/Cost

While ROAS has been the preferred form on the advertiser side in recent years, this is changing (for the better). More often than not, clients want to see improving margins, as it gives a clearer picture of how ads actually impact their business. This transition reflects the ongoing collapse of the wall between “what the advertiser wants” and “what the client wants,” and realizing these are one and the same.

When formulating initial campaign strategy, confirm what the client means when it says “ROAS” or “ROI.” There’s nothing worse than sliding too far down the proverbial rabbit hole with a misguided idea of a client’s end goal, except maybe the conversation when both sides realize the discrepancy.

As the advertiser, make sure you’re always on the same page as the client with its advertising goals.

1. Product Listing Ads/Google Shopping

Product listing ads allow advertisers to pull specific products from a data feed and display in front of relevant users based on their search. There is no better way to show the most specific product possible to your targeted audience. Specific advantages include:

• Cheaper CPCs
• Unique way to get specific products in front of customers immediately without normal website funnel
• Pulls specific product data from feed, which can be set up to auto update as often as you prefer
• Available across Google AdWords and Bing Ads

2. RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads)

Are you already using remarketing lists for a display remarketing campaign? If so, there is no reason not to layer these audiences onto your search campaigns. Start using the “Bid Only” option, which will allow you to see the differences in performance between returning visitors and new users. If you notice the RLSA audience performs better, you might consider bidding up on these users (or even break them out into a unique campaign to really improve ROAS). Advantages of RLSA include:

• Use remarketing audiences in search
• Determine performance differences between new and returning users
• Option to adjust bids on returning users
• Easy way to learn more about converters and improve efficiency

3. Dynamic Remarketing

In nearly every instance, I find dynamic ads outperform non-dynamic static (or even HTML5 ads). Sure, you can segment audiences, but creating ads for five (or however many) segments wastes bandwidth. Dynamic remarketing utilizes the data feed we discussed above to show dynamically created ads to users based on which pages they previously visited on your website. All you have to do is ensure your product feed is up to date, the tracking code is updated according to Google (I recommend having a tech rep walk you through this), and you choose messaging for your dynamic ads. Advantages include:

• Show ads to previous website visitors on the Google Display Network based on user’s history on your website
• Dynamically generated ads (no creation needed!)
• Easy, cheap way to remind previous site visitors of your value
• Tends to outperform normal retargeting

4. Ad Extensions

This one really isn’t e-comm specific, but it can be especially helpful here. Ad extensions are perhaps the simplest way to quickly improve CTR, Quality Score and overall quality of traffic. The above will reduce costs in the long run and improve your ROAS. Advantages include:

• Improve click-through rate
• Improve Quality Score
• Expand upon content of ad copy, gain more ad space on SERPs (callouts)
• Give users additional click options other than main URL (sitelinks)
• Show phone number (call extension) right next to ads (free, no click call on desktops!)
• Show specific address based on location (location extensions), great for local advertisers
• New extensions coming out all the time

The importance of conversion rate optimization (CRO) cannot be overrated in the current PPC landscape. In fact, there may be no faster method to have a positive impact in a campaign, especially if you already have sound, proven targeting and A/B ad split testing in place.

Explain this to a client: If cost-per-lead equals cost-per-click divided by conversion rate, then to ignore CRO is to ignore substantial improvement potential.

Microsites and/or custom PPC Web pages offer a unique flexibility. While the exact setup for these pages may differ across agencies and by client, there are some distinct advantages that apply universally:

1. Highly customizable content at the campaign or ad group level.
2. No need to worry about screwing up your SEO game plan.
3. Pages built specifically to generate leads often use a simple format that can be used as a template across multiple campaigns and ad groups, or even across multiple clients (obviously style and content will be unique).
4. Don’t worry about cramming forms into every page of your site. Redesigning is a hassle.
5. Eliminate distractions. Keep users on your landing page with limited or no navigation back to the main site, emphasizing conversion as the primary action.

In my experience (which is mostly business-to-business lead generation campaigns), custom microsites outperform the most applicable website pages 75 percent of the time, although starting with a test is always smart.