The overlooked steps to mastering PPC conversions
March 14, 2023 | Marketing
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, usually in the form of Google Adwords can be an effective way to reach your target audience.
What we like about PPC is that if someone is searching for something, they are actively showing an intent to buy. By contrast, if you put an offer into someone’s social media feed, or even tell them about your business at a networking event, they may not be an ideal client or they just may not be actively looking for your product or service at the time you communicate with them.
Are you wasting money with your PPC campaigns?
Unfortunately, it’s really easy to waste a lot of money quickly with a poorly managed PPC campaign. There are many steps a prospect will take from viewing your ad to buying from you. Each of these interactions has potential pitfalls and so each step needs to be tested and optimized.
To get someone to convert from a PPC ad, think about their entire journey:
- What are they searching for and what search terms do they use?
- What offer is in the ad to make them click?
- What information and persuasion do they need from you once they are on your website?
- What follow-up will they need before they are ready to buy?
To begin, you’ll need to find and optimize your campaigns for the right keywords. You can also narrow your target by location, demographic details, and more. When you fail to optimize your campaign you may pay for clicks from people who are unlikely to buy from you.
We’ve seen a lot of campaigns that were poorly optimized. Most often this happens when you pay for clicks to your site based on keywords or people that are not really a good fit for what you are selling. You don’t always want a high click-thru rate!
Setting and optimizing different campaigns on the Google platform can easily get confusing. You can have multiple campaigns and every campaign can have multiple ads. As part of an optimization strategy, you may run some A/B tests or try out different ads. It can very quickly become overwhelming to manage. So keep your campaigns well organized and simple, if you can.
The real secret to PPC optimization
It’s easy to see the complexity of setting up Adwords campaigns. And the cost is very visible to you when you see your credit card charges to Google.
But often the real way to optimize your PPC campaigns is outside of the Google platform. The reason you may not see sales or other conversions may have nothing to do with the keywords and demographic settings of the campaign. It may be an issue with the text of your ad. And even more likely the problem is with the web page that you’re sending people to and how you follow up.
On average, people need 8 or more brand touchpoints to buy from you. These interactions with your brand start with learning to recognize who you are, what you’re selling and how you might help them. Then they build familiarity with you and eventually have trust in you. For large ticket items, it might be as many as 15 touchpoints!
Your follow up campaign is as at least as critical as the PPC set up. This is what can turn an unprofitable campaign into one with strong ROI.
The most common way to follow up with a PPC campaign is to use a drip email campaign. Make sure that your initial offer includes some way of enticing them to give their email address, even if they don’t buy yet. Then plan an email sequence with at least five emails.
And don’t just do autoresponder emails, consider retargeting or direct outreach.
Maximize conversions by optimizing the follow through
A poor performing PPC campaign may really mean you have bad follow through. When you aren’t seeing sales or leads, you may think that the problem is at the top of the funnel with the setup of your campaign’s keywords or audience demographics. When you see the traffic come and then bounce away, you assume it’s because they aren’t your ideal customers.
In reality, they may be your perfect client, but you need to improve your messaging, look more professional do a lot more follow up.
