Business leaders across all industries know that ROI, or return on investment, is the lifeblood of any operation seeking to generate revenue and perform cost-effectively. In the often-complicated world of digital marketing, ROI (as well as, ROAS – return on ad spend) is an essential gauge of marketing success.
It’s well understood that two essential elements of digital marketing, SEO and PPC, dominate online advertising, but they yield ROI in slightly different ways. SEO involves making tweaks and adjustments to create optimal conditions for ongoing payoff. It’s a digital form of environment-creation and refinement.
On the other hand, PPC (pay per click) is more immediate; after investing in paid ads, marketers can expect to see results fairly rapidly.
PPC ROI is judged on speed and consistency; but that doesn’t mean ROI necessarily follows PPC in a quid pro quo fashion. Paying by the click means you don’t spend your budget on mere impressions, but real return on investment only comes with optimised, well-engineered PPC campaigns.
In this article, we’ve pulled together the expertise and experience of a leading PPC department to provide you with 3 tips to squeeze extra revenue out of your strategy.
Craft a diverse and efficient keyword targeting strategy
One oversight many PPC marketers make is to draw keywords from too-shallow a pool, often owing to over-dependence on Google Keyword Planner. Whilst this isn’t necessarily a mistake, it isn’t optimal.
It means campaigns won’t be equipped to generate as many clicks as they might have and, perhaps more worryingly, ads may appear when they’re tangentially relevant but not particularly useful. Some users might click on the occasional ad out of curiosity, but this is highly unlikely to result in a conversion.
The first step here is to ensure Google isn’t pushing ads into overly-competitive or unachievable keyword environments. If you don’t offer services in the UK, for instance, you should prevent ads from appearing when people search ‘keyword + UK.’ Utilise the negative keyword functionality to combat this pitfall.
Sharpen your end-to-end UX
Pay per click ads are an excellent way to get people in the door, so to speak – but after that, it’s over to the vendor. Good PPC will bring leads to a site, and from there, it’s the seller’s responsibility to ensure that they have a positive experience.
This is what’s known as UX (user experience). Businesses must provide a polished, enjoyable, inherently-valuable journey from start to finish. No longer a nice-to-have, a top-quality UX has become an essential offering and represents a competitive advantage – demonstrably, 96% of buyers report that the purchasing experience is a difference-maker in their choices regarding brand loyalty (Microsoft).
Once PPC ads are optimised with an effective keyword strategy and compelling ad copy, look beyond user searches and work on delivering a positive UX. For the most part, that means improving landing pages so that they’re of the highest possible standard. It’s vital for marketing messages to match; aim to ensure that when users arrive on the landing page, they can easily find what they were initially searching for.
Commit yourself to continued improvements
A large part of why so many PPC campaigns don’t deliver peak ROI is that, after marketers spend time and energy setting them up, they take a hands-off approach; leaving the campaign running in the background without any supervision, expecting it to deliver optimal results. Whilst this is technically possible, it’s extremely unlikely.
Moreover, even a fully-optimised PPC campaign won’t last forever. Market forces happen. Purchasing habits change. Trends vary. Sooner or later, the relevance of PPC ads will expire, and that’s something marketers should proactively anticipate and respond to.
Rather than be discouraged by this, look at it as an ongoing marketing challenge; it’s like tending a garden, in that it’s not something you ‘complete.’ You take steps to facilitate the best results, harvest the fruits, and refine the process, with a view to cultivating more success in the future.
In other words, optimal PPC takes work. Analyse results on a monthly basis, as a minimum, to see what is and what isn’t representing positive ROI – from there, you’ll have a good idea of which weeds need pulling.
PPC & ROI: the Reality
Hopefully, you’ll come away from this article with an improved understanding of how to extract optimal ROI from your PPC strategy. In brief, the secret lies in this three-pronged formula: be strategic with keywords. Deliver an excellent UX. Perform regular analyses and updates. Train these habits, and you’ll soon see your PPC strategy yielding ROI at the top end of your projections and expectations.
Of course, in reality, this is easier said than done. Business leaders are invariably faced with multitudinous other tasks, and there is a significant amount of technical knowledge involved in PPC. But it is possible to expedite the ROI-boosting process by investing in professional and results-backed PPC services. Doing so can supercharge your PPC strategy and take your online marketing to new levels.
Reach out to The Brains today to discuss how you can optimise your PPC strategy for peak ROI.
