What to Research For PPC Campaigns & Optimization
Google’s search engine alone accounts for over 3.5 billion searches per day. With that being said, Pay Per Click aka PPC advertising is the easiest way to appear in plenty of search results with in-market audiences. This type of search engine marketing (SEM) is the best way to showcase your business in-front of users actively searching for your product/service. Most people understand how this process works from the consumers side but we are going to teach you how it starts from the marketer’s side. We’ll walk you through some steps on how to prepare and research for PPC campaigns for Google Adwords.
Preparation for your PPC campaign
Consumer Research
Proper research for PPC campaigns can make all the difference of the success of the campaign. When researching for your campaign you should focus on the three main topics. These research topics are who is your target customer, where are they, and how they search for your product/service.
Who is your target customer:
The quicker you uncover who your target customers are, the better your campaigns will perform. Online advertising is all about specific user targeting and if you can drill down your targeting, you’ll experience significantly less wasted ad spend. Over time data analytics will highlight who your target market is and if it is an on-going change or static group. Our online marketing consultants will be able to optimize your campaigns to continuously put your ads in-front of the right customers. Below are some key factors to remember when discovering your targeted customer.
- Age
- Income
- Interests
- Marital Status
- Gender
- Ethnicity
Where are your target customers:
Where your customers live, work, and shop are all very important questions to ask yourself when you’re developing an ad campaign. An amazing feature of online advertising is that you can be everywhere your customers are. Depending on your product/service and target customers, our consultants will optimize your campaign for the right combination of desktop, mobile, and tablet device targeting. Location targeting will also allow campaigns to showcase ads in specific locations. This allows for a more targeted search campaign to drive a higher return on ad spend (ROAS). Knowing where your target customers are is key to proper research for PPC campaigns. Below are some key factors to remember when discovering how to reach your target customers.
- Do your customers search for your product at home or outside the home
- Where do your customers live
- Are your customers tech savvy
- Are there geographic location that you want to avoid
How do your customers search for your product/service:
How your target audience uses search engine like Google plays a role in your ads being discovered. In the marketing world we call what users type in to search a “search term” and the sets of words within the search term we call “keywords”. Our marketing consultants provide extensive research for PPC campaigns to uncover the proper keywords to use to place our clients ads. Keywords are what we bid on, which play a role in where our clients ads appear in the search results. Below are some key factors to remember when discovering quality keywords.
- Do customers has long or short search terms
- Is your product/service included in your company name or competitors
- Do your product/service require complicated search terms
- Are there lots of variants/ phrases to search for your product/service
Campaign Research
Campaign research is mostly completed by our marketing consultants. During campaign research we utilize historical search performances to make future decisions. We have the tools to analyze the last 12 months of searches for specific and generic keywords. From those searches we start developing campaigns, ad groups, keyword strategies, and bidding strategies to deliver a high ROI for our clients. Below is a list of what your online marketing consultant provides for his/her clients during the initial campaign research phase.
- Keyword Research
- Location Research
- Match Type Research
- Competitor Metric Research
- Bidding Strategy Research
- Grouping Research
- Demographic Research
- Ad Schedule Research
Optimization
Campaign Optimization
Optimization is where good marketing consultants separate from the rest. A good marketing consultant will be able to analyze their clients campaign data and use it to make intelligent marketing decisions. Depending on the objectives of a campaign, optimization can have different results. What most marketers look for first when optimizing campaigns is to find ways to eliminate wasted ad spend. Finding and eliminating keywords, demographics, and locations that aren’t producing revenue is the quickest way to create a higher ROAS. Marketing experts are also looking at finding hidden opportunities in the campaign data.
An example:
A very simple example can be, if you sell shoes and t-shirts and you have a higher conversion rate and lower CPC for shoes, you know that you can start optimizing by doing two things. You can shift your marketing budget more into your shoe campaign and you would also want to research why your shoes campaign isn’t performing as well. There are many key factors, metrics, and demographics, that you can evaluate when optimizing ad campaigns. Smart marketing consultants will see the trends quickly and will be able to make those intelligent decisions that will continue to make your campaigns great!
