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Are You Using the Best PPC Strategy for Your Marketing Goal?

Last Updated: May 18, 2017

What’s your goal for your small business’s online marketing? This is an essential question to ask yourself before you embark on any particular campaign. Why? Because, without establishing what you want out of it, you may end up going with the wrong strategy, and ultimately wasting your money. This is especially true for your PPC strategy, which generally involves a substantial investment.
So, what’s your goal? Is it:

To get lots of calls right now?
To have a steady stream of calls over time?
To capture motivated buyers in the moment?
To plant the seeds for future customers?

In this blog post, we’ll review each goal and explain which PPC strategy (or strategies) is best suited for it. When you match your overall goal with the correct PPC strategy, you’ll be unstoppable. So let’s begin!

Goal: To Get Lots of Calls Right Now

Is your goal to promote a special offer or to fill your schedule for your busy season? If you’re focused on a short, specific period of time, you’ll need an aggressive PPC strategy.
For example, if you run a landscaping business, you probably want to capture all those spring and summer projects every homeowner is undertaking. Therefore, you’ll want to run your AdWords campaign for 3-4 months, starting in April. You’ll target a specific service, like hardscape installation or tree removal. Then, with strategic bidding, you’ll try to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible so you can book as many jobs as you can.
You may also seek short-term lead generation in the wake of a recent event. For example, if you’re a water removal specialist and there’s been a disastrous storm in your area, you may want to run a special campaign for a week or two to help local homeowners with their flooded basements.

Fast Results Don’t Come Cheap

Bear in mind, getting these kinds of instantaneous results is not cheap. If you want to get your ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible in a small time frame, it will cost you. However, the good news is you’re free to stop your campaign whenever you want. In other words, as soon as you’ve reached your goal and booked all the jobs you want, you can shut off your campaign and stop paying for leads you no longer need.

Goal: To Have a Steady Stream of Calls Over Time

If you want to increase your overall call volume and conversion rates indefinitely, rather than for a short period of time, we suggest a much more tempered approach. You’ll need to be modest with your budget. We also strongly encourage you to have an optimized website before you begin any long-term AdWords campaign.
This goal requires investing in both SEO and PPC. By using SEO first, you’ll improve your AdWords Quality Score, which will ultimately keep your PPC costs more affordable while still placing your ads in coveted positions. If you’d like to learn more about how SEO is crucial for long-term PPC, check out our blog post, “Optimize Your Site Before You Bid on AdWords.”

Focus on ROI

While short, seasonal promotions don’t require as much of an investment, given their temporary state, long-term campaigns are different. They demand wise budgeting and an eye on ROI. So don’t shy away from the investment or price tag. If you consistently reach more customers and book more jobs, your ROI will prove to be well worth it.

Goal: To Capture Motivated Buyers in the Moment

Sometimes, a company wants to create brand awareness and simply spread the word about their business in general. Other times, you want to target prospective customers who are searching for your services. In the latter case, your paid advertising campaign should be on search engines like Google, where customer searches are taking place.
You see, PPC ads on search engines target users who have searched for the specific product or service highlighted in your ad. Therefore, you can safely assume these users are motivated buyers who want your service in the near future. PPC ads on search engines increase your chances of converting new customers on the spot.
Here’s a perfect example of how PPC ads can help you find motivated buyers. You’re an appliance repair company, and you run an ad for Whirlpool refrigerator repair. Now, as soon as a local homeowner’s Whirlpool fridge breaks down and they search for a repairman, they’ll see your ad and click on it. In all likelihood, they’ll give you a call because they need a fridge repair ASAP. This is the definition of a motivated buyer.

Are Motivated Buyers on Social Media?

Social media can be a mixed bag when it comes to motivated buyers. Typically, social media users are not motivated buyers because they haven’t searched for your service. This means you could be wasting money on an advertisement that users will largely forget about or ignore.

However, there’s one exception: you can target ads at Facebook users who have demonstrated an interest in your services. For example, let’s say someone’s dishwasher breaks and they turn to their Facebook friends for advice. Once they post about dishwasher repairs, they’ll start seeing your ads. If they see your ads soon enough, before they’ve hired a repairman, they’ll likely feel motivated to click on your ad and call you. It’s not a sure thing, however, so we don’t recommend making this the cornerstone of your quest to capture motivated buyers.

Goal: To Plant the Seeds for Future Customers

In a more general sense, though, social media ads are great for when you just want to promote awareness of your company so people remember you in the future.
Advertising on social media platforms, namely Facebook, is what we call “interruption marketing.” The audience doesn’t seek out this type of advertising; rather, it interrupts whatever they were doing. In the context of Facebook, this means ads appear in and around a user’s news feed while they’re scrolling through, forcing them to take notice.
Facebook Ads work the same as television commercials. You’re watching the NBA playoffs when you’re suddenly interrupted by a string of commercials for chain restaurants, cars, beer, and so on. You probably forget them as soon as they’re over, but they actually stay in the back of your mind. Then, the next time you’re craving a burger, you suddenly recall that 2-for-$20 deal you saw a commercial for. This is how you want your Facebook Ads to work.

Also Consider Remarketing

You may also choose to use remarketing, which is a form of interruption marketing that targets interested parties. After someone visits your website, they will start seeing your ads in various places online. Using remarketing ensures they don’t forget about you. This is useful for industries where customers often take their time to consider purchases beforehand. Home renovation and construction are prime examples.

Your Goal Determines Your PPC Strategy

Whatever you do, don’t go into a PPC campaign thinking you just want the cheapest option available. No matter how much you’re paying, if it’s the wrong strategy for your goal, it will be a waste of money. Use the information in this blog post and carefully consider what you want out of your paid advertising. When you do PPC right, the ROI is always worth it!

Harness PPC to Level-Up Your Dumpster Rental Marketing

Last Updated: December 28, 2016

There’s an easy trick to boosting your dumpster company’s online marketing success. Add PPC!
Adding PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to your dumpster service’s SEO campaign can help take it to the next level. SEO and PPC are distinct strategies that work in vastly different ways to promote your dumpster rental service online. Combining them after you’ve already established a healthy web presence via SEO can multiply your online exposure and increase your success.
Read on to find out how PPC can dramatically improve on your SEO results.

Traffic Vs. Conversion

SEO helps increase your website’s overall online visibility. Total traffic to your site should improve with a successful SEO campaign. But not 100% of the people who come to your site are going to be ready to buy.
This is the difference between traffic and conversion. Traffic is getting people to your site; conversion is transforming those site visitors into paying customers. Conversions are what you ultimately want in order to make a profit.
Your site traffic probably includes some motivated searchers who are looking to rent a dumpster right now. However, you also get lots of folks who are researching dumpster rental options for a job six months from now, some people who are price shopping, and some plain-old tire kickers, too.
So while some traffic may turn into actual dumpster rentals, the majority may never result in money in your pocket. That’s where pay-per-click advertising can fit into your overall online marketing plan. Because PPC specifically targets motivated buyers, it can better connect you with searchers who want to rent a dumpster now. This increases your chance of converting searchers into buyers.

Motivated Searchers = More Dumpster Rentals

Essentially, PPC is focused on searchers who need or want the specific service highlighted in the ad. Since your pay-per-click is zeroed in on a motivated audience, you get improved conversion and more dumpsters rented. Your overall conversion rate on PPC traffic is going to be much higher than with organic traffic, simply because of that motivated audience.
In technical speak, PPC is designed to target transactional searches (the searcher is looking to buy something or to find a provider for a specific service). SEO tends to target a mix of transactional searches and informational searches (the searcher is looking for info). In plain English, PPC is aimed at people who plan to buy now; meanwhile, SEO pulls in some people who plan to buy eventually and some people who just want a question answered. So when you add PPC into your online marketing mix, you get more site visitors who are ready to rent a dumpster.
If you want stronger conversion rates today and a long-term web presence tomorrow, add PPC to your SEO campaign. But don’t forget, PPC works better—and costs less—when you have an optimized site, so don’t think you can skip the SEO step and focus all your efforts on PPC.
Interested in learning more about your options for running dumpster rental pay-per-click ads? We’d love to answer any questions you may have. Call now for your free assessment, and our experts can help you decide if PPC is right for you!

How to Keep the Holidays From Ruining Your Online Marketing

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

It’s no secret that most of us stretch our budgets a little thin over the holiday season. With parties to host and gifts to buy, money disappears quickly. And for many small business owners, the slightly blurred line between personal and business finances means the holidays can impact some of your company’s operations—like online marketing.
If you’re feeling the squeeze of the holidays on your small business’s budget, it’s fine to tighten your belt—but don’t let it affect your online marketing. Canceling your marketing campaign temporarily or skipping a payment may reduce your expenses in the short term, but did you know there can be seriously negative consequences? The fallout will outlast the holiday season and your savings may turn into losses.
How can that be? Keep reading to find out.

Canceling Your Campaign Sets You Back for Months

Canceling an SEO-based campaign, even just for a month, can jeopardize your future profits. To explain how, we’ll use the way Prospect Genius works as an example.
When a client cancels their campaign with us, it’s our policy to immediately take down their website, pull down their listings, and halt all lead generation services. (Most advertisers have a similar cancellation policy.) Your business will stop receiving traffic and leads right away. So canceling your campaign for the holidays will likely cause you to stop getting new customers for at least a month, or however long it takes for you to restart your campaign.
There’s more. Now, whenever you decide to restart your online marketing, you’ll have to wait another few months for your web presence to ramp up again. Why? Because SEO is not something you can drop and pick up where you left off. As soon as you stop SEO, everything goes back to zero.
As Prospect Genius clients may recall, there’s typically a 90-day buildup period after you start a new campaign. This ramp-up window is unavoidable, regardless of how many times you’ve started and stopped your online marketing. So after all is said and done, you lose several months of business even though you only canceled for one month.

Skipping a Payment Is Hard to Bounce Back From

Another thing that some business owners do is let their marketing payments slide for a month. They think it’s the harmless alternative to canceling entirely. While it’s true that making a late payment is better than canceling, it’s far from harmless. For example, when you miss a payment with Prospect Genius, your account is partially disabled until payment is received, causing a dramatic decrease in leads received.
But the real kicker comes later: After delaying one payment, most business owners find it difficult to get back on track with their monthly billing cycle. This is because they now only have a couple of weeks, instead of a full month, to save up for the next payment. Often, this begins an unfortunate pattern of falling behind that’s difficult to stop.

What Can You Do?

We aren’t trying to scare you. We understand there are peaks and valleys in every fiscal year and that the holidays can be especially trying. If money is tight, here are some things you can do that won’t hurt you in the long run:

If you’re doing AdWords or any other PPC campaign, pause it. While you can’t turn SEO off and on again easily, PPC can be started and stopped with ease.
Budget wisely. Plan out all of your income and expenses for the month to see how much money you’ll realistically have for gifts, decorations, food, and, yes, marketing costs.
Pay in advance. If you think there’s a chance you’ll overspend on holiday goods and not have enough money at the end of the month to pay your bill, be safe and pay your bill ahead of time—before your money runs out.

Remember: You’ve invested a lot in your online marketing. Don’t let your web presence come crashing down by canceling your campaign or not paying your bills. You might save a monthly payment, but it will cost you much more down the road.
Questions or concerns? Please don’t hesitate to reach out for help.

The PPC Metrics You SHOULD Be Focusing On

Last Updated: October 13, 2016

If you’re handling your own PPC with AdWords or Bing Ads, hats off to you! It’s not an easy undertaking. However, it’s certainly doable once you become more familiar with industry vocabulary and best practices.
Learning the right terminology and approach can take time, though. One common stumbling block, even for experienced DIYers, has to do with metrics. Oftentimes, business owners are focusing on the wrong PPC metrics and therefore aren’t getting the most out of their campaigns.

Look Beyond Traffic-Based Metrics

At the end of the day, what’s the goal of your PPC campaign? Our guess: profit.
For this reason, our first suggestion is to stop focusing so much on traffic-based metrics. These metrics are all that’s included in the simplified AdWords dashboard, which is why so many business owners don’t look beyond them. These include:

Impressions
Clicks
CTR (click-through rate)
Average CPC (cost per click)

To be clear, it’s not wrong to look at these metrics—it’s just limiting to your overall understanding of your campaign. These traffic-based metrics only tell you how often your ads are being viewed and/or clicked. And while traffic is definitely something you want to pay attention to—after all, you need people to see your ads in order to interact with them—it doesn’t paint a full picture of how well your campaign is actually doing. Maybe you’re not getting a ton of clicks on a certain campaign, but if you’re getting a lot of paying customers out of it, who cares?
That brings us to what you should be focusing on.

Related: The Four Most Commonly Misunderstood PPC Metrics

Track Your Ads’ Conversion Rates

When you want to measure how well your ads are performing, look at the conversion rate. This is the only way to tell whether your campaigns are actually helping your business make money. It’s one thing for people to click on them, but that’s not enough: you also need to be converting those clicks into leads. Clicks alone aren’t going to help your business grow (unless, of course, your only goal is to create brand awareness).
You can set up conversion tracking on Google AdWords and Bing Ads yourself. Then, just sit back and check the reports as they develop.
Conversion tracking will show you the following metrics:

Cost per conversion: How much each conversion costs (on average).
Conversion rate: How often a click leads to a conversion.
Value per conversion: How much each conversion is potentially worth (you fill this out yourself).
Total conversion value: The total value of all conversions.
Conversion value per cost: How much each conversion is worth compared to how much they cost.
Conversion value per click: Total conversion value divided by total number of clicks.

And don’t forget to track phone leads in addition to online leads (newsletter signups, form submissions, purchases, etc.). For many businesses that provide local services like accounting, massage therapy, HVAC, and so on, the phone is the primary way customers contact them.
If you’re banking on phone calls, then you definitely need to incorporate phone tracking into your conversion monitoring. Assign a unique call-tracking number to each campaign so you can identify which ad generated which lead.

Go a Step Further and Calculate ROI

If you really want to be a PPC rock star, then you can calculate the ROI of your campaigns. Doing so will tell you which ads are actually generating money for your business (as opposed to just traffic or leads).
Calculating ROI is rather complicated, and there are several different methods you can use. One helpful tool is a customer relationship management (CRM) software that tracks all of your leads and sales data. A CRM will prevent you from having to record everything manually.
Regardless of where or how your sales data is stored, you can calculate your ROI by comparing how much you spent on each campaign (including cost per click and cost per conversion) and how many sales dollars it generated. The result is a concrete number that tells you which PPC campaigns are most contributing to your bottom line.

All Metrics Fit Together

There’s no single metric that tells the whole story on its own. Likewise, there’s no metric that you should just flat-out ignore, either. Look at all of the metrics together like pieces of a puzzle.
For example, you can tell if something is wrong with your landing page content if you have a high CTR (meaning lots of people are clicking on your ads) but a surprisingly low conversion rate. Clearly, people are interested in your ad but are then turned off by your landing page. Now you know it’s time to make that content more compelling so your visitors will feel motivated to fill out a form, contact you, or take whatever action is your goal.
When you put all of the above information into practice, you’ll be in a much better position to maximize your conversions and get more bang for your PPC buck.
Still unsure of the best strategy for weighing your PPC metrics? Would you feel more comfortable in the hands of a professional? The team at Prospect Genius offers effective pay-per-click marketing management and transparent pricing. Call now to find out how we can help.

Get Ready for Bing's Expanded Text Ads

Last Updated: August 25, 2016

Remember a few weeks ago when we reported on Google’s new Expanded Text Ads?
Well, Microsoft very quickly jumped on the bandwagon: On August 23, Bing started testing its own version of Expanded Text Ads. Right now, Bing’s Expanded Text Ads are only available as a pilot test for advertisers. However, you can assume Bing will follow Google’s lead on this, as it often does. That means Bing will start implementing these longer ads to a wider user-base relatively soon. As we noted previously, Google will likely phase out traditional ads and replace them with Expanded Text Ads later this year.
Will Bing make similar sweeping changes that soon? It’s unlikely, considering Bing is only in the testing stages right now. But it’s a matter of when, not if.
What should you take away from this? The writing’s on the wall: The future of paid advertising is Expanded Text Ads. If you’re a PPC user, you better start getting used to this new format.
Read more about Bing’s Expanded Text Ads on Search Engine Land: “Bing Ads Opens Pilot Access for Expanded Text Ads.”

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