Tag: google ads

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How Much Should Working with a PPC Agency Cost?

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For How Much Should Working with a PPC Agency Cost?

If you’re in the market for PPC (pay-per-click ads) services, you may be wondering how much you should expect to pay. Pricing can vary widely among PPC advertising companies, so it’s important to know what to look for when choosing one. In this article, we’ll look at the rates that PPC management agencies typically charge as well as some factors that can affect the cost of their services. So, whether you’re just starting out with paid search advertising or looking for a new agency partner, read on to learn more!

What’s the Cost of Hiring a PPC Management Agency?

A quick Google search on how much you should pay for PPC management services will reveal a wide range of articles with conflicting advice about what’s “normal” or “average” when it comes to agency pricing. You’ll find that PPC Agencies will charge anywhere from $250 to $5,000+ per month. When you see numbers at $250 to $300, it’s often too good to be true. On average, that buys you about two hours a month for any agency. Will you be getting the best results possible when someone is looking at your account for roughly half an hour a week? How much can that agency do strategically for you to maximize your ad spend?

What’s a Realistic Expectation for PPC Management Pricing?

If you’re looking for an agency that can actually drive revenue and deliver the best results, you should expect your PPC management costs and ad spend costs to be about the same. If you’re spending $2,000 a month on ad spend and you want to see deliverable results with Google Ads, you can expect to pay an additional $1,000 to $1,500 to a PPC agency.  

That figure may seem like a lot, but realistically, that’s what you’ll need to be looking for when pricing agencies. This number allows an agency to really dive in and spend time with your account. They need to be constantly optimizing and figuring out innovative ideas for improvement. As your ad spend goes up when spending money across multiple campaigns, so should your agency spend.

Why do I have to spend more with a PPC agency just because my ad spend goes up?

You could spend less or go with cheaper agencies while still seeing some results month over month, but in order to scale the results of your ad spend, you need an agency that spends more time in your account for at least 1 to 2 hours per week at a minimum. With more money being spent on Google Ads, the agency will have to keep track of more keywords and run more campaigns. 

Are the Returns Really Worth the Investment?

With the right agency and strategy, 100%.

At Agency Partner Interactive, we have a client that spends roughly $15,000 per month on both ads spend and PPC management fees. They see a return of close to $250,000 on that investment. This is only possible when you properly invest in a dedicated digital marketing agency. This empowers them to spend more time analyzing your audiences, campaign performances, and more. If you’re only buying the agency 30 minutes a week to spend on your account, it’s impossible to achieve that level of return.

How Do I Make Sure I’m Getting the Most Out of the PPC Agency?

The absolute best way to ensure you’re maximizing your ROI (return on investment) is through communication. Constant communication with your PPC agency allows you to discover what is and is not working so that they can adjust their strategy as soon as possible. If you’re not communicating often and clearly with your PPC agency about what qualified leads look like or whether their Google Ad campaigns are actually delivering qualified leads, you’ll be in for a world of trouble.

What sort of trouble?

If your PPC agency partner is driving a ton of leads for you only to find out later that most of those leads are spam, you aren’t giving the PPC agency a chance to fix these issues. The earlier you can provide feedback on the results you’re seeing, the earlier your PPC agency can solve potential problems and save you money.

What Should I Expect When First Starting Out with a PPC Agency?

You should anticipate a learning curve, especially during the beginning of your relationship with your PPC agency. It’s critical to be aligned and vocal about what you are and aren’t seeing. This way, you and your PPC agency will be constantly working toward achieving better results together.

Start with a smaller budget during the preliminary stages. After you’ve proven your concept through testing and refining your audience and campaigns, you will have gathered the data to inform your decisions before you start investing heavily.

Why Agency Partner Interactive?

As Dallas’ top digital marketing agency, we optimize marketing investments in real-time with our PPC bid and budget management services. Our PPC and data science teams can adjust search campaigns in competitive markets up to 48 times in over 24 hours. Our digital marketing experts will help you attract valuable customers, drive sales, increase your leads, build brand awareness, and more. API knows that every penny spent is an investment to produce a return, and our transparent communication and fair pricing will keep you in the loop every step of the way. Ready to optimize your business with an award-winning PPC Agency? Contact us today to get started!

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How to Identify Your Target Audience for Small Businesses

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For How to Identify Your Target Audience for Small Businesses

As a small business owner, you know that one of the keys to success is identifying and targeting your ideal customer. But what if you’re not sure who that is? In this post, we’ll give you some tips for finding and understanding your target audience. By the end of this, you should have a good idea of who your digital marketing is trying to reach with your product or service. Let’s get started!

What Is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a particular group of people that fit certain criteria to mean they most likely will buy your product or hire your service. These are exactly the people you want your ad campaigns to be placed in front of. We’ll get to the specific categories of criteria a little later in the post!

Advantages of Targeting in Marketing

Knowing exactly who your product or service is aimed at reaching can be critical in maximizing your digital marketing budget. Sharpen your marketing strategies, develop deeper customer loyalty and better brand awareness, attract higher quality leads, and focus on who will most likely give you the biggest ROI. Niche targeting has never been more powerful!

What Are the Types of Target Audiences?

Market categorizing or ‘segmenting’ can break down into 6 basic types: demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioral, needs-based, and transactional.

Demographic – The most popular type of segmentation, this type defines the more literal aspects of who the audience is, depending on a B2C (age, gender, ethnicity, profession, education) or B2B (industry, company size, and position, job tenure) context.

Geographic – Sometimes where someone lives can affect their purchasing choices. It probably wouldn’t be very useful to run Google Ads for surfboards in Scandinavia, right? This could be as general as a continent or all the way down to a specific district or zip code.

Psychographic – Interests, values, hobbies, attitudes, lifestyle. Apple is well known for marketing the idea of minimalism and attainable luxury for the modern, forward-thinking consumer. That’s psychographics!

Behavioral – How has your audience previously interacted with your brand? What is their awareness of your brand? Have they made any purchases from your company already? What about their product knowledge?

Needs-based – This one’s pretty straightforward and also breaks down further into 4 sub-categories: problem-solving (low-carb products for diabetics), emotional (anti-aging skincare products), functional (ride-sharing apps), and value-based needs (products for vegans). 

Transactional – You know those offers for free shipping on orders over a certain amount? Or those ‘We miss you – here are 15% off your next order’ emails you get after not shopping at a particular store for a long while? Yep, that’s transactional segmentation.

7 Tips for Identifying Your Target Audience

Now, how to actually figure out who fits into those targeting types…

Audit Your Current Customer Base

Look at who all has already bought your product or service. What do they all have in common, or maybe what’s different among them? Are they all of similar ages or from similar regions? Why did they decide on using your company? Use your social media or send out customer surveys to get started!

Research The Market

Research your market as a whole to find what may be missing. Is there a particular untapped crowd that your company can speak to? Focus there to refine your unique product value messaging.

Study Your Competitors

Who are your competitors targeting? There could be a lot of opportunities to learn from what works and doesn’t work for them. Maybe your competitors are overlooking, again, an untapped crowd or marketing channel.

Dive Into Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a savvy marketer’s secret weapon for all the insights you can gain into your site visitors’ habits and interests, how they’re discovering you, and what they’re engaging with most.

Build Personas

This step is for after you’ve done your initial segmentation work. Take all that great data you gathered and use it to create identities for your customers. Maybe base them around familiarity with your product crossed with the general demographics of your audience to then target how you speak to their more specific needs. We at Agency Partner Interactive recommend crafting 3 to 5 different personas.

Rethink the idea of “Everyone”

It’s impossible to actually appeal to every single person – not even puppies or pizza can do that – but the idea can still lead you to a useful mindset! “Everyone” really can just mean you have multiple audiences and may need to approach each with a different type of marketing. Odds are there will be lots of overlap, too!

Evolve Evolve Evolve

Understand that this is a never-ending process. People change, markets change, needs change, your company will probably also change. Be ready to refine and optimize and re-refine and re-optimize your audience targeting so long as you’re in business. 

It’s clear that knowing your target audience is essential for small businesses. By understanding who your ideal customer is, you can create a more effective marketing strategy that reaches them where they are. You can also tailor your products and services to better meet their needs. If you’re not sure how to identify and segment your target audience or need help reaching them, contact our team of experts at Agency Partner. We’d be happy to help you develop a plan that targets the right customers and helps your business grow!

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10 Clear Reasons Why You Need Digital Marketing

Posted on | by Agency Partner
Expert Tips For 10 Clear Reasons Why You Need Digital Marketing 

It doesn’t matter the industry you’re in; the common goal in all organizations is growth. Not all companies have the marketing budget to do print advertising, radio adverts, or TV advertising. But that doesn’t mean that you have to throw in the towel; digital marketing has become the pioneer in brand building. Here are 10 reasons to prove why:

1. Budget Fit

Of all the sorts of advertisements available, digital marketing is the most affordable option. Even if you outsource to a Top digital marketing agency or an Agency Partner, it will come out cheaper than what other options costs would have accumulated to.

2. Access In the Palm Of Your Hand

62.07% of the world’s population owns a smart and feature phone. That is 4.88 billion consumers who visit social media sites daily, check their emails, and use other apps. Utilizing digital marketing tactics like Email Marketing, Facebook ads, google ads, and text marketing, you build brand awareness subconsciously. At the same time, the magnitude of possible customers browses through their social media and other apps.

3. Adjustable

Because you are not stuck in a medium to a long-term contract on a traditional advertising campaign, changing an ad that performs poorly is instant. There is no need to wait out the agreed-upon expiration period because there is none with digital marketing. You need first to establish the best creative way to market your company digitally.

These can include email marketing, social media posts, and banner ads. Suppose you find a particular digital marketing strategy works better than the rest. In that case, you can pump more resources in that avenue while canning the rest.

4. Brand Awareness

Since lockdown, online shopping trends skyrocket due to the sheer convenience and safety. Using google ads and Facebook ads, you appeal to these customers and build your brand awareness in the process. You can also utilize Affiliate Marketing to help boost sales further.  

 5. Mixed Media

Digital marketing thrives on using mixed media to deliver and promote your product or services. Not just using the standard text and picture, it incorporates more visual material like videos and audio. Youtube, Facebook, and other social media apps’ popularity are all due to their capability to connect its consumers through mixed media.

Using mixed media makes it easier for your customers and potential customers to understand what you want to say and your product. Advertisement using mixed media has a higher success rate than more traditional methods. Using social media marketing with mixed media will make your customer experience memorable and help build your brand awareness in the process.

6. Relations

One of the big misconceptions is that you will lose important input from your customers should you use digital marketing. On the contrary, it’s easier for your customers to interact with you and engage with them continuously, thus building and strengthening your relationship and credibility. Various methods can gather the data and messages, like the comments section, blogs, newsletters, and reviews.

Using these tools can quickly alleviate misconceptions and answer frequently asked questions about your product. Showing your customers your willingness to interact with them will establish trust. And using their suggestions or dislikes in the comments, you can alter your product. Marketing the new, improved product will be more accessible and better accepted by your customers because they feel that you respect what they have to say.

7. Monitor To Evolve

Digital marketing allows you to become a Big Brother, but in the best possible way. The use of cookies will enable you to see which blogs, content, review, and other methods your customers read or watched before purchasing your product or service.

Studying this data, you can make a more conscious decision on which marketing method is the most appealing to your customers and which isn’t. Logically, you will then boost these social media marketing methods and instead remove the ones that don’t work to free up more resources to concentrate on better projects.

8. Be The Expert

Because digital marketing makes it easier for you to communicate with your customers about your product, you can start leaving your mark as the expert on your industry and product or services. Answering questions quickly, writing content and blogs to highlight the pros and cons of your product, and even doing podcasts will grow your trustworthiness with your customers. Your customers will then instead come back to you for further knowledge and before buying your product.  

9. Social Media Influencers

Partnering with a social media influencer has become a fast-growing trend in the digital marketing area. These are individuals who are highly active social media users. They have already established their credibility with their thousands or even millions of followers as one of the experts in their particular industry. Social media influencers include actors, actresses, athletes, musicians, highly successful business people.

But not all of these influencers come from the silver screen or Forbes 100; many influencers are ordinary everyday people who are ambitious and work hard to obtain their credibility. Influencer Marketing is well worth investing in, but you need to ensure that the influencer aligns with your industry and has the same target market.

10. Rank Higher Than Your Competitor

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the digital marketing strategies. It all revolves around where your company’s website ranks when keywords are being searched. Why is this important? Pretty simple, human nature dictates that we usually gravitate to the first 5 options when presented with multiple choices. So if your company’s website doesn’t rank even on the first page of the search engine, then the chances are that there will not be much traffic directed to it.

Therefore, you need to optimize your Off-page SEO, which is external signals and links, as well as your On-Page SEO, which is all about your website and where it ranks. The better your Off- and On-page SEO ranking is, the more traffic it will divert to your website. The more traffic it gets, the more sales you can make. But most importantly, the more credible you will be.

Digital marketing is all about influence and credibility to boost your company’s sales. It’s the new area in advertising which is faster, better and can reach more customers than you can fathom. Suppose you don’t already have a digital marketing team busy increasing your brand awareness and rankings. In that case, you are already losing money and customers to your competitors. So get in the race fast!

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Cumulus Media: Google and Facebook Must Pay For News

Posted on | by devops
New Law Sets Disastrous Precedent: Big Tech Must Pay for News Content in Australia
How This May Impact Online Marketing In The United States

In an effort to curb the dominance of big tech, Australia is the first mover in passing a law that will make Google Search and the Facebook News Feed pay for news content that is featured on their platforms. The Australian Parliament recently passed a law called the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. That’s a long name so… let’s just call it the “News Media Bargaining Code” for purposes of this blog.

Like legislators and small businesses in the United States, Australia has been at odds with Big Tech since last year and beyond. From discussions of online censorship and how these companies compete under century-old antitrust laws, there is wide acceptance of the fact that Big Tech has become too powerful. However, to date, little has been done by regulators and in the courts to make things more competitive for small businesses.

In July of 2020, after a year of investigation, the US House Judiciary Committee called Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple to a salvo of antitrust hearings that teed up lawsuits filed by the DOJ and FTC. Concurrently, Australian lawmakers had been fielding several years’ worth of complaints from news publishers about Facebook and Google’s roles to decimate their abilities to do business effectively.

In a nutshell, the ad platforms that support Facebook and Google and how these companies control clicks and impressions to specific content were crippling to news publishers.

Investigations into the online dominance of these tech firms have been ongoing.

Leading up to the passing of this new law, in Australia, an investigation found that in 2018, for every $100 Australian Dollars (about $78 USD) invested by Australian advertisers, about A$49 of those dollars went to Google and A$24 to Facebook. That’s a huge cut of the overall ad budget — and that’s just data coming in from Australia!

While the passing of this new law is designed to be a remedy to this, the world will now look to Australia as a test case for how similar regulations may be mandated in the United States and beyond.

What is Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code?

This new law, or “code,” fundamentally changes the relationships between news publishers and big tech outlets by ensuring that news companies earn money for use of their content.

This means that big tech outlets must pre-negotiate and agree on payment terms for content that will be featured in Google search results and Facebook shares, among other uses. News content that is not already coming from an approved publisher will not be allowed on the platforms.

In respect of heated debates surrounding Section 230 in the United States, digital marketers have discussed how Facebook and Google adjust their search algorithms to increase or decrease the engagement and visibility that specific publishers enjoy from one day to the next.

It is important to note that big tech companies own the rights to their proprietary search algorithms, and it is within their rights, as private companies, to make unilateral decisions to adjust these algorithms.

At issue is that many of these adjustments have been made in ways that publishers claim are unfair or anti-competitive. With this new law in effect, any major algorithm changes must also include a 28 days notice before the adjustment.

How News Sites Make Money Elsewhere

In most countries, such as in the United States, news publishers earn revenue by displaying ads within their news content, from sponsorships and subscriptions, and from clicks to their website where banner ads are shown.

A high volume of clicks and organic traffic originates from Google and Facebook. This happens when users share links, make comments on original posts, and when advertising dollars are invested into boosting the number of impressions that a particular story can gain.

Publishers with greater visibility attract more site traffic, which equates to greater advertising revenue. In practice, this means that Facebook and Google can unilaterally make decisions that strongly impact the ability of publishers, such as news organizations, to maintain a feasible business model centered around ad revenue.

Claims of bias as to which sites are given preference and which are not is fuel to the fire that Australia is working to extinguish.

What Facebook Has To Say About This

At first, Facebook fought against the imposition of this law by blocking all news content from its platform across all Australian users.

You (publisher) need us more than we (Facebook) need you.

Facebook measures that news content equates to just about 4% of the total content that users are exposed to within its News Feeds.

In large, this is because Facebook’s algorithm deemphasized the importance of news posts and added favor to activity from friends and family. For early Facebook users, this probably felt a bit like a throwback to the mid-2000s when the platform was truly designed to amplify conversations between friends and not 3rd-degree connections.

Facebook argued that social media allows publishers to gain the attention of users that are on their platforms for a purpose other than a news update. In 2020, publishers gained over 5 billion free referral clicks to their websites.

Because of this, there is an argument that Facebook, as is, helps small news publishers more than it hurts them. After significant negotiations with Australian regulators, the company ultimately agreed to work according to the new law.

How This Impacts Small Businesses and News Publishers

Did we mention that this new law requires big tech outlets to pre-negotiate payment terms with their news publishers? News Corp already has a multi-year agreement in place with Google and they’re extremely happy about it. We should be asking ourselves: “why are they so happy about it?”

…the new law will shrink the market by reducing the number of publishers that are able to compete for user engagement.

There is a chance that other big media companies will be strongly in favor of this because the new law will shrink the market by reducing the number of publishers that are able to compete for user engagement.

A law like the News Media Bargaining Code means that big tech can now pick and choose who to do business with.

Prior to the law’s passing, complaints were that big tech was already making decisions about which publishers to censor and boost via changes to their algorithm.

With this new law in effect, this takes control over publishers a step further and requires that news companies jump through additional hurdles to gain visibility. Leadership at big tech companies is now able to decide who is and is not on the “approved publisher” list and the public should be extremely wary of this.

The Presumed Impact On Free Press and Potential Impacts In The US

On one hand, action by Australian regulators validates a strong, global desire to curb big tech’s power. On the other, it points to a lack of understanding of how lawmakers should remedy concerns related to online censorship and competition.

As well-intended as this new mandate may be, the implications of a less diverse, less numerous source of news content may equate to a less free press and diminished free speech. A 2019 Pew survey found that 43% of Americans get their news from Facebook. Considering that Facebook has over 223 million US users, this issue is critical to the future of public access to a free press.

Business and political leaders in the US have to recognize that a shortcoming to this law is that it does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content. So in practice, who will make that decision before approaching the negotiating table? Big tech has already indicated that it will take a broad definition to respect the law as drafted, but how will this actually play out? As is, un-elected leaders within big tech companies and/or politically motivated decision-makers will be tasked with oversight. This is not a pathway toward a free and vibrant press.

The Remedy Is In The Future of Section 230 and Antitrust Reform

Today, there is bipartisan support for antitrust reform from politicians such as Senators Klobuchar and Hawley, elected leaders who typically disagree with one another.

instead of testing Australia’s attempt to curb giants like Google and Facebook, the US should look to the Aussies as a test case while furthering the discussions related to Section 230 reform and updates to outdated antitrust regulations. The world will observe Australia as the first mover.

However, the expectation is that this new law will inevitably harm small publishers, and it will shrink the market, reducing competition and limiting the diversity of news sources that online users were able to access in 2020.

Agency Partner watches Google’s algorithm and the online market every day. As a digital agency, we know how much value these companies offer the market, but we also respect that with great power comes greater responsibility. If your business is looking to utilize the powers of big tech in an ethical, aggressive way, then the digital marketing team at Agency Partner should be your next call.

Author: S. Adam Rizzieri
Co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer // Agency Partner Interactive

 

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Google Ads Decreases Search Terms Report Visibility

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For Google Ads Pay Per Click Marketing


Leverage is the sweetest word in the language of business. With a 92% share of search engine traffic worldwide, Google certainly has traffic. And leverage.

Google’s primary source of income is advertising. And most of that advertising is based on pay-per-click or PPC ads based on keywords that advertiser bids on to secure traffic to their website.

If you search a term on Google, you get both organic results and paid results. The paid results are at the top of the page with “Ad” preceding the search result. The organic results follow based on SEO and Google rankings.

This discussion will focus on PPC ads on Google and a recent change by Google that has impacted the cost and effectiveness of PPC ads on Google.

On September 1, 2020, Google announced that the search terms report within Google Ads would show only search terms that reach a volume threshold. This reduced visibility into ad campaigns has caused immediate concern among advertisers and agencies, who rely on the report’s insights to optimize their Google Ads performance.

In simpler words, advertisers will have reduced visibility into which search queries trigger their ads, even if they incur a click or conversion. What gives?

Per Search Engine Land, Google is citing that this change is related to privacy, stating that with this update they are trying to, “maintain our standards of privacy & strengthen protections around user data.”

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But what does “significant” mean? This measure is subjective and Google’s definition of “significant” may vary greatly from how an advertiser may measure that word. This ambiguity is one of those Google rules that advertisers have to live by and try to figure out. This change to Google search trends and Google keywords could mean a lot to marketers that depend on Google ads.

The search terms report is a feature within your Google Ads account that allows you to see precisely which search terms triggered your ads to appear, as well as how closely those terms relate to the keywords your ad is targeting.

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This means you will no longer be able to use this report to see all of the search terms triggering your ads. In particular, you will not see the search terms that have lower volume. So, what’s the big deal about not being able to see lower volume Google search keywords? What it means is that your Google Ads can be significantly less targeted based on Google keywords!

Here’s how that seemingly small change has impacted Google search trends for PPC ads.

Before the update:

  • For every $100K you spent on Google search, you got search term data for $98,700 of it.
  • You got on your ads for every 100K clicks; you saw search term data for 98,300 of those clicks.

After the update:

  • For every $100K you spend on Google search, you get search term data for $71,000 of it.
  • For every 100K clicks you get to your ads, and you see search term data for 77,900 of those clicks.

Less visibility for advertisers means that Google can create a new market for lower volume search terms. Advertisers must re-evaluate their keyword strategy for PPC ads on Google. If they can’t find a way around the new rule, they may need to spend more to attain the same click volume before the change.

The resulting reduced visibility into search queries has many advertisers disconcerted, as this report was paramount to Google Ads optimization.

  • It inhibits small, proactive tweaks that can be made to plug what will amount to big leaks in spending.
  • It makes keyword mining more difficult and renders broad matches unusable.
  • It leads to lower bidding and reduced conversion rates.
  • It hinders the ability to create single keyword ad groups.

What does this mean for websites that depend on Google Ads for traffic?

Here are the keys to success that Agency Partner recommends to its clients.

  • Continue optimizing
  • Don’t lose sight of the value that all of your work to date has produced. Stay on strategy for the highest volume keywords.
  • Use the Bing search query report.
  • Even though Bing is a fraction of the size of Google in terms of the search share, Google and Bing use very similar technology. Test and explore Bing search trends and see if there is anything you can learn to improve Google results.
  • Launch Dynamic Search Ads to find new keywords
  • Dynamic Search Ads on Google could maximize your current landing pages and help consumers find you even if your original PPC keywords didn’t cover the keywords that helped your consumer find your site.
  • Use Smart Bidding to optimize for “hidden” search terms.
  • This is what Google wants, and it’s a way around this new policy.
  • Dynamic search ads are great at targeting your ads based on your landing pages’ context and can ultimately help reach audiences for search terms that you didn’t cover with your keywords.

Agency Partner has technologists that deal everyday with Google and its algorithms, rules, and policies. Our job is to help clients find ways to spend their advertising dollars most efficiently to maximize Google search visibility. Whether it is SEO on Google or Google Ads, we pride ourselves on knowing the latest trends on Google.

There will be more subtle Google changes in the future. They are rarely announced. The key is to be aware of the changes as soon as possible and respond to Google search trends as quickly as possible.

Agency Partner watches Google trends every day. It’s our reason for being. If we can’t bring value to our clients in “playing the game” with Google, we have no reason to be.

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Google Ads Decreases Search Terms Visibility” instead. Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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How to Improve Your PPC Landing Pages

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For How to Improve Your PPC Landing Pages

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is now more proliferate, and more relevant, than ever before. Whether you’re advertising on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, or another platform, you want to make sure you’re doing everything possible to make your PPC landing pages provide your leads with the right information and the best user experience that’s possible.

As a digital marketing agency that works with a variety of brands on PPC advertising, we help companies in several different industries with landing page creation and landing page optimization. Keep reading for our best tips for optimizing your PPC landing pages, including things you can do right now to improve these important aspects of your PPC campaigns on Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads.

1- PPC Landing Page Speed Matters – A Lot

According to the latest Google statistics, 50% of all search queries happen on a mobile device. Do you know what else Google is reporting? Mobile searches completely abandon a website – including several PPC landing pages – if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Just 3 seconds? That means losing your potential next customer can happen extremely quickly.

To make sure your page speed is fast enough for today’s mobile web searcher, consider the following landing page optimization tricks:

  • Don’t overload your PPC landing pages with images. Focus on one clear image – that loads quickly, of course – that conveys your message to viewers.
  • Test your mobile speed score before you finalize a PPC landing page. It’s better to learn now than later that you need to go back to the drawing board.
  • Keep your designs simple and easy to load. Don’t waste valuable page speed on loading an intricate web design for PPC landing pages.

2- Design First For Mobile, Next for Desktop

Even though half of all Google searches still happen on desktops, you really should be designed with the mobile viewer in mind first. And this is whether you’re performing landing page optimization for Google Ads, Bing Ads, or Facebook Ads.

Think about it this way. Your PPC landing pages are being designed by digital marketing professionals who have large screens for their laptops or desktop computers. That means, when they’re designing and testing PPC landing pages, they’re getting the full view. But how often do you test your PPC landing pages on your iPhone or Android phone before you publish them? Be honest, it’s okay. We’re here to help, not to judge.

You see, responsive design is so important, it should be the first thing you test for today and most likely in the future.

If you’re not considering how your pages view on mobile devices when you’re performing landing page optimization, you’re leaving out 50% of your viewers. Make sure your hero image, key message, and any CTA are easily viewed above the fold on multiple different mobile devices before you push a PPC landing page to go live.

3- Focus on Quality, not Quantity

Some PPC advertisers are all about conversions. They want to increase their conversion ratio as much as possible.
However, if you only focus on conversion, you’re forgetting about what’s even more important – converting qualified leads.

Think about it. Which would you rather have your sales team follow up on – 100 leads that found you but aren’t necessarily interested in your product or service, or 10 leads who were pre-qualified through your detailed lead capture form? The answer is obviously the latter.

This is why we never recommend you deploy certain landing page optimization techniques that other digital marketing agencies might suggest, such as slimming down your lead capture form to be as small as possible and still fit into your company’s sales funnel.

Trust us, qualified leads who are truly interested in your products will take the time to provide the additional information you request. And by filling your sales pipeline with qualified leads, you’re best utilizing your internal sales resources.

4- Simplicity is Key

Minimalism is in, and definitely far more than keeping your home easy to organize.

One of the best landing page optimization tips we can offer you is to keep your landing pages simple. Too much information is overkill and can overwhelm viewers. Your landing page sweet spot is when you give viewers just enough information to entice them to either keep searching your website or fill out a lead capture form so they can be put into your sales funnel. Never list all your product details on your landing pages – that’s far too much information for a PPC ad clicker to see upfront.

5- Use Personalization Wisely

Personalization is changing PPC advertising. But you don’t want to go overboard with personalization in a way that makes viewers have data privacy concerns.

Some ways that we recommend you use personalization on your landing pages include:

  • Display different images for male and female viewers that A/B testing has proven to be effective.
  • Use localized images based on the searcher’s geolocation.
  • Constantly be A/B testing your personalization options to see what choices are best.

6- Don’t Forget The Little (and Tried and True) Aspects That Have Been Helping for Years

Because aspects like personalization are new and exciting, it’s easy to think that older landing page optimization tips are no longer relevant. Think again. You should be taking advantage of:

  • Metadata and title tags.
  • A/B testing of forms.
  • A/B testing of content style and length, including paragraphs, bullets, and more.
  • A/B testing of different taglines.

Additionally, all PPC landing pages should have an easy way to get to the rest of your website. In fact, Google will ding you if your landing pages don’t have this “escape hatch.”

Do You Need Landing Page Optimization Help?

As a digital marketing agency, we help a wide variety of brands with their PPC advertising, including landing page optimization. Whether you want to be working with PPC experts like us, or you simply don’t have the internal resources to perform this task on your own, we’re here to help. Call us to get a conversation started at (214) 295-5845.

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Should I Use Broad Match or Phrase Match on Google Ads?

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For Use Broad Match or Phrase Match on Google Ads

While it’s very easy to add keywords to your pay per click (PPC) campaigns – you simply type them in – it’s important that you are properly keyword targeting on Google Ads. As a pay per click agency who has helped several brands create and manage Google Ads campaigns, we’re here to give you some tips and tricks on how to best create your list of keywords for your PPC ads.

The Importance of Keyword Targeting on Google Ads

You likely already know the basics of Google Ads. Your PPC campaigns include a series of keywords related to your products and services that you bid on. When you win a bid, your PPC ad is displayed in the bid position it has won when a Google user types in a search query that includes your keywords. If the user is intrigued by your ad, he or she may click it to be directed to your landing page. And of course, you’re charged for every click your Google Ads generate.

However, there is an important aspect about keyword targeting on Google ads that will not only help you generate more qualified clicks who hopefully turn into leads but also save you money by preventing your ads from appearing on searches that aren’t likely to generate leads. This aspect of Google Ads is making sure you have the best match selected for your keywords. Below we will discuss the top three match options for keywords: broad match keywords, phrase match keywords, and exact match keywords.

What are Broad Match Keywords?

Did you know that by default, Google sets all its PPC keywords to broad match keywords? Broad match increases your number of impressions, but as you’ll see below, that’s not necessarily a good thing. 

You see, broad match keywords ensure that your keywords trigger lots of ad traffic, which means your ads are likely to get more clicks. However, these ads aren’t necessarily as targeted as you want your keywords to be.

For example, let’s say you’re a professional roofing company and you enter the keyword “roof repair” into your Google Ads campaign. Obviously, your intention is for this keyword to trigger ads for people searching for professional roof repair. 

However, with Google’s broad match keywords function turned on by default, your ad about your professional roof repair services may be seen by anyone whose search query includes “roof repair” or a search term close to that keyword including:

  • Tips to repairing roofs yourself
  • Does my roof need to be repaired professionally?
  • How to repair the roof of the mouth

As you can see, the top two search queries aren’t likely being performed by people actively searching for – or even remotely interested in – your professional roof repair services. And in some cases, like with the last potential search term, the broad match keyword isn’t at all even related to your product or service!

Because of this, we recommend that you turn off broad match keywords and instead select phrase match for most of your keywords. As a pay per click agency, we ourselves typically only use broad match keywords for our clients’ PPC campaigns if we’re starting out by creating a campaign that has a very limited list of keywords (in which case broad match may help you identify additional keywords to add). When we use broad match keywords, we always set a low budget so we don’t spend a lot of our clients’ money on ads in which the ad clicker has no intent on purchasing our clients’ products or services. Our goal is to provide you with the best quality clicks who are likely to turn into leads or customers, not the highest quantity of clicks.

What are Phrase Match Keywords?

We generally set our clients’ PPC campaigns to use phrase match. The reason – this PPC option typically provides our clients with the most qualified clicks who are more likely to become leads or customers.

In Google Ads, phrase match changes your keywords from broadly matching remotely related search terms to making sure that your keywords are only displayed if they match the phrase that a searcher entered into Google. Still, Phrase match allows for some variants in keywords, including:

  • Misspellings
  • Singular or plural forms
  • Stemming
  • Abbreviations
  • Accents

Phrase match is a great way to ensure your Google Ads show up for searchers who are intending to find content like your landing pages, which of course, require you to pay for a click in order for a Google user to discover. 

What are Exact Match Keywords?

Exact match is the most restrictive match option you can choose when keyword targeting on Google Ads. With exact match turned on, your ads will only display if a Google user enters in the exact keyword you have in your PPC campaign, in the order those words appear. 

While the exact match is restrictive, it can be a useful option for brands who have a keyword that typically generates a lot of impressions – so many so that the brand’s campaign budget is eaten up in the first few days of the month.

How Negative Match Impacts your Google Ads Campaigns

Sometimes, brands want to make sure that their ads never appear in searches that contain negative words. Google Ads calls this negative match. One of the most popular negative match keywords that PPC advertisers use is free. For example, if you sell anti-malware software, you likely want to make sure your ad doesn’t display – and isn’t clicked – if someone searched “free anti-malware software.”

There is one downside to Google’s negative match option that you will want to consider if you are running Display Ads. Because Google Ads wants to follow your wishes, your Display ad is less likely to run on a website that includes your negative keywords.

Call Us for Google Ads and PPC Campaign Creation and Management Help

Whether you don’t have the internal resources to manage PPC campaigns on your own or you want to work with a pay per click agency to ensure you’re getting the most out of Google Ads, we can help. If you need help creating or managing PPC campaigns, call us today at (214) 295-5845. 

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How the 2020 Election Season Affect PPC Campaigns

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For 2020 Election Season

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is one of the best ways to attract new leads to your brand, especially with Google Ads and Facebook Ads. But with the 2020 election quickly approaching this November 3rd, you may be wondering, “how does the election affect PPC advertising?” After all, the 2016 presidential election put Facebook Ads under scrutiny with a scandal of Russian influence on the platform. Given that recent history, are your PPC campaigns going to be affected due to the upcoming 2020 election?

The answer is most likely yes, and that exactly how the election will affect your PPC advertising is going to depend on the geolocations you’ll be advertising too. As a leading digital marketing agency that specializes in being a PPC agency, here is a discussion of four ways we expect PPC campaigns to be affected in the coming weeks leading up to the 2020 election.

  • Getting Your Ads Approved Will Likely Be Harder as Google Ads and Facebook Ads Want to Ensure Ad Legitimacy

PPC campaign platforms like Facebook have come under the microscope for allowing fake or misleading ads on its platform both politically related and not. As such, both Facebook ads and Google ads are expected to be harder to get approved in the weeks before the 2020 election and to take a longer time to get approved too.

The reason – Google Ads and Facebook Ads want to make sure they are approving PPC campaigns that are legitimate and true. Since many different organizations run political ads outside of official candidates’ campaigns, you can expect there to be an influx in new Google Ads and Facebook Ads getting in line to be approved.

As a PPC agency, we encourage you to be proactive about getting your PPC campaigns, especially any that you have specifically created for the fall or the holiday season, created and submitted for approval in advance. By creating content now, even for ads you want to run for Halloween or Thanksgiving, you’ll be one step closer to getting them approved more quickly given the expected PPC campaign approval bottleneck thanks to the 2020 election.

  • Facebook Ads and Google Ads Won’t Run Local 2020 Election Ads in Washington State and Canada

If you’re planning to run political PPC campaigns for the 2020 election, you should know they’re not allowed everywhere. Both Washington state and Canada have, through the threat of litigation, caused Facebook and Google to make the decision to not run any local election ads in these geolocations.

If you’re looking to create PPC campaigns on Facebook Ads or Google Ads that will be political in nature, you’ll need to look for an alternative advertising channel to get your message across to your intended audiences.

  • There’s The Potential for Consumer Distrust in Pay Per Click Ads As the 2020 Election Approaches

As the 2020 election gets closer and closer, you can expect more pay per click ads to appear online on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. These PPC campaigns will be run by candidates, major parties, lobbyists, PACs, and Super Pacs, and more.

While some people love getting involved in elections and the political process, others don’t. This latter group is especially likely to have a growing distrust of political PPC campaigns, and potentially all PPC campaigns, the closer we get to the 2020 election.

As a digital marketing agency, we have a few suggestions to help maintain trust amongst Facebook Ads and Google Ads viewers. First, if your brand is apolitical and your company doesn’t support any political party, don’t mention politics or the 2020 election in your ads. This will help keep those who are tired of hearing about politics from avoiding clicking on your ads. However, if your ads will be political in nature, or have a political slant, make your political leaning very clear. This will help you better pinpoint your target audience and get a better response to your ads’ call to action, too.

  • PPC Ads Are Expected to Spike in the Swing States

Our final thought in answering the question, “How does the election affect PPC advertising?” is that there’s an anticipated influx of PPC ads coming to American swing states in the coming weeks. This can mean a few things if you advertise in a swing state.

First, with the expected increase in Facebook Ads and Google Ads in swing states, there’s also the anticipation for ad fatigue until the 2020 election season is over. This means you may see a temporary drop in clicks to your PPC campaigns in these geolocations as Internet users simply get tired of seeing so many pay per click ads.

Second, if your product or service is discussed in politics, keywords that you commonly use may be in higher demand, thus driving up their cost per click (CPC). For example, if you work in the healthcare industry, you can expect related keywords to become more frequently bid on in the next few weeks, thus driving up your CPC on them.

Finally, just as we mentioned earlier that ads are going to start taking longer to get approved, these delays may be even more pronounced in swing states. So if you’re planning on running a geo-targeted PPC campaign in Ohio, for example, get started on it now.

As a PPC Agency, We Can Help You with Your Pay Per Click Campaigns

While we are a full-service digital marketing agency, many of our clients know us for our PPC agency specialities. We help brands throughout the US create, optimize, and manage a variety of PPC campaigns on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other pay per click platforms.

Whether you want to pay per click advertising help for the short term because of the upcoming 2020 election, or you’re ready to engage with a PPC agency to take over your PPC campaign efforts, we can help. Simply contact us today to express your needs by calling (214) 295-5845, emailing sales@agencypartner.com, or filling out our online contact form.

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How to Calculate your Google Ads Budget in 2020

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips on Google Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) is one of the most effective means of generating qualified leads and maximizing online revenue opportunities. Businesses across the world spent a lot of money on PPC campaigns.

Unlike SEO, PPC generates leads almost immediately. It’s an ideal revenue stream while you are building your online presence. Though, understanding how much you should spend on your Google ads is often tricky. 

There are a lot of factors that go into calculating and adjusting your Google ads budget. Let’s go over the basics of calculating your Google ads budget in 2020. 

Study Your Finances

PPC is an investment. Before you can determine your Google ads budget, you should ideally understand:

  • How much you have available to spend.
  • How much you are comfortable spending.
  • How much you can reasonably afford to spend.

With this said, marketers must work in cohesion with business leaders to gain a deep understanding of organizational finances. Furthermore, here is how each step should go. Marketers should ideally consult with business leaders on the total amount they can spend on a campaign.

Then, marketers should receive guidance from business leaders on how much marketing dollars they are willing to experiment with. Lastly, marketers can decide on their own at what’s reasonable to spend based on their expertise.

Let’s break this down even further. Marketers aren’t normally qualified or allowed to sign off on major investments on their own. Therefore, they should seek the counsel of their senior officials to streamline this process.

Keep in mind that the total amount you have to spend isn’t a budget by any means. If you have any sort of experience with setting up PPC campaigns, you should use this amount in conjunction with your senior officials to decide what you’re willing to spend.

Finally, you can make a decision on your own on a ballpark amount that you want to allocate to your Google ads. These are the most basic steps of setting up your Google ads campaign. 

Setting up your budget is contingent on what you’re trying to achieve. The following section will explain how you can analyze your business goals to make a great decision. 

Know Your PPC Goals

Here’s a question? What are you trying to achieve with your PPC campaign? Oftentimes, marketers take to online guides and videos to learn how they can better optimize their campaigns.

Though, does it make sense to follow the PPC advice of a multi-million dollar company when you have completely different customers and goals? There are a lot of PPC experts online, but you are responsible for understanding how you can adjust your budget based on your goals.

To do this, make sure you answer the following questions:

  • Do I have other marketing initiatives in play or am I focusing solely on PPC?
  • What is my target audience?
  • What is my unique selling proposition (USP)?
  • What keywords are relevant to your business?

Answering these questions and understanding your goals will make you ready to take part in the next phase of calculating your Google ads budget in 2020.

Use Google Keyword Planner to Optimize Your Budget

By now, you should have a great idea of how much you want to spend and your goals for your PPC campaign. Now, it’s time to adjust your budget based on actual data. Before we begin, you should understand one important term: cost-per-click (CPC).

CPC is a rate that Google charges you every time one of your ads is clicked. Now you may be wondering, “I’m paying good money for my PPC ads, so why is Google charging me for when someone clicks on my ads (even if they don’t convert)?”

The answer is simple. High-performance ads can more than makeup losses from a CPC. In fact, if you increase your ad score, your ads will rank higher while maintaining the same CPC.

With that said, Google Keyword Planner is a tool you can use to browse potential keywords you can use as well as the corresponding CPCs. 

Calculate_Your_Google_Ads
Let’s say that you want to use the keyword, “Google ads budget”. 

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This is a glimpse of what using Google Keyword Planner looks like. Receiving CPCs from this tool will help you take your planned budget and modify it accordingly with real-life data. 

Keep This in Mind

Before you get ready to start your PPC campaign, you should keep this in mind: all campaigns must endure a phase of experimentation. It’s unlikely that you will begin your campaign and produce desirable results immediately.

Performing A/B split tests, trying different keywords, and various ad formats are essential to understanding the precise techniques that can be used to drive increased revenue. Once you’ve found out what works, you can increase your spending and do whatever you want to improve your results.

So, What’s Next?

You shouldn’t rush to spend your entire monthly budget when starting your campaign. Otherwise, you could waste your time, money, and other valuable resources. Understand that losses in your campaign will happen.

Though, hiring an experienced PPC agency will help you avoid the learning curve and rookie mistakes that are sure to come if you aren’t sure how to navigate your campaign. The quicker you realize what works, the better.

The best way to calculate what you’re going to spend on Google ads is by hiring a PPC agency to provide you with a quote.

Give Us a Call Today!

There are a lot of PPC calculators available online. However, many of these tools only provide preliminary information that won’t help you as you move forward throughout your campaign.

Instead, you should contact Agency Partner Interactive to provide a quote for your business. We specialize in creating high-performance Google ads on behalf of our clients. 

We can lead you on selecting the right budget based on your goals and available resources. Therefore, if you want to learn more about our services, give us a call at (214) 295-5845 or click here to receive a free quote. 

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How to Calculate your Google Ads Budget in 2020” instead.

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5 Ways Gun Brands Can Advertise Online Without Google Ads or Facebook Ads in 2020

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For Online Advertisement

Advertising is an essential business practice. Without it, businesses wouldn’t have a way to promote their products or services. However, many advertising platforms have conditions that prevent many businesses from working with them.

Popular advertisers, like Facebook, Google, and YouTube, all prohibit businesses in the firearm industry from using their services. This can make it difficult for gun brands to promote their products.

Fortunately, there is a way to bypass this restriction. By leveraging other effective forms of marketing, gun brands can successfully reach out to their target audience. Here are five ways that can happen.

1. Thoroughly Invest in Both On-Page and Off-Page SEO

Although advertising is an essential practice, it’s not the only one you should be focusing on. Search engine optimization is a marketing process that entails building your online ranking to the top spot of major search engines.

Since many consumers use the internet to shop, being seen as the first website can help tremendously in improving your conversion rate. Particularly, on-page SEO is how you can optimize your website to rank high online. 

Off-page SEO is the factors that contribute to your website’s ranking away from your website. By focusing on creating excellently written articles, improving your site speed, and leveraging keyword to rank for popular gun keywords, you’ll be putting your brand in a superb position to reach your target audience. 

2. Create Personalized Emails

Email marketing is still, by extension, a marketer’s most powerful resource. By building an email list, you’ll have an audience ready to listen to your correspondences. The problem that many rookie marketers make is sending an email blast to their entire email list.

Such a one-size-fits-all strategy doesn’t work. Instead, personalized emails get the job done. Granted, it takes much less time and effort to compose one email and send it to your entire email list.

Still, personalized emails achieve 6x higher transaction rates according to HubSpot. With that said, strive to segment your email list into specific categories and send emails that will be relevant to each prospective customer.

3. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has been a popular topic in recent years. Mainly, influencer marketing can be used by businesses of all sizes. You don’t need a big budget to hire an influencer to market your brand.

By using Instagram, you can find micro-influencers to introduce your products to a wider audience. Influencer marketing is an effective way to grow your marketing strategy because social media has created a broad atmosphere of individuals focused on building their own audience.

There are several influencers you can reach out you, and many of these people may share the same ideals as your brand. With that said, conduct an experiment where you partner with a prospective influencer.

Make sure you place your influencer on a trial period to monitor the progress of your strategy. If you like your progress, you’re free to move forward with your influencer and make them your brand ambassador. Otherwise, you can cut them loose and start over your search. 

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a great way to reach your target audience at an affordable price. Unlike traditional digital advertising models, affiliate marketing is a cost-effective strategy in which you only pay content publishers for their success in selling your products.

Shareasale and Commission Junction are two affiliate marketing platforms you can try to have your products promoted by popular content and video creators online. One of the best things about affiliate marketing is that publishers are only rewarded if they sell a decent percentage of your products.

This means you’ll be partnered with popular content publishers who will have an incentive to take your products seriously. 

5. Social Media Marketing

Even though social media sites like Facebook and Instagram prohibit ads from businesses in the firearms industry, you can still reach your target audience by posting eye-catching social media posts.

With billions of users using social media platforms every day, you should strive to create effective social media content that will achieve engagements. If you want to receive more in-depth information on how to perform any of these tasks, we’ve got the perfect proposition for you.

Promote Your Gun Brand Today!

Do you want more assistance in promoting your brand? If so, give us a call at (214) 295-5845 to speak to a member of our team for more information. We’d be glad to transform your marketing strategy today!

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The Definitive Guide To Maximizing Your PPC Campaign

Posted on | by devops
The Guide For Boosting ROI from PPC
Tips From Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Experts

If you’re investing significant resources in your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, the worst thing to do is get complacent or gullibly believe that results will always come eventually no matter what you try.

This could lead to you wasting time and money on PPC strategies that just don’t work. Of course, effective PPC strategies take time to develop and produce results (both positive and negative), especially during experimentation.

However, if you aren’t cognizant of using fundamental PPC strategies and building off of them, your campaigns won’t be effective.

To help you maximize your PPC campaign, this guide will outline fundamental PPC strategies and innovative ways you can alter them to obtain steadfast results.

Understand your audience

I know.

Every PPC-related article on the internet will likely tell you that you need to understand your audience for your PPC campaigns to perform better.

However, in Digital Marketing knowing your audience goes beyond demographics. You’ll need to intrinsically understand their shopping patterns, motivations, and reservations before purchasing to craft the perfect PPC strategy.

Depending on your consumer base, whether they’re B2B or B2C, these values will differ tremendously. To give you more context, here is a marketing funnel for both B2B and B2B audiences from TrackMaven.
PPC marketing funnel
You’re probably wondering what’s the difference between B2B and B2C consumer bases. After all, the funnel between the two consumers doesn’t seem all that different.

Let’s start with B2B consumers. These clients go through a much longer sales funnel because purchasing decisions typically go through a host of executives, who then rationalize the decisions instead of an emotional trigger that results more commonly in consumer purchases.

With that being said, average consumers vary. Some might conduct extensive research before buying a product or service. Some may just purchase from you based on a whim.

Nonetheless, the difference between these two consumer bases should reflect on how you structure your PPC campaign.

For example, since B2B consumers go through an elongated journey to make a purchase, you should provide top-of-the-funnel marketing resources to give them all of the information they need to confer and eventually make a purchasing decision.

Conversely, B2C consumers are attracted to a more straightforward marketing approach. They mainly want to know how your product or service will immediately benefit them. If your campaign reflects this, they’ll usually decide without extensive time and research.

Now that you understand this fundamental tip, here are some actionable ways you can incorporate new PPC methods to give your campaign a boost.

  • B2B Audience – Market any helpful e-books that will convince your audience that your service will be beneficial to them. Don’t promote anything. These e-books should only highlight the problem your audience has and provide a solution.
  • B2C Audience – Keep PPC ad copy extremely enticing. Don’t advertise the features of your product or service. Instead, promote the benefits and people will click.

In summary, B2B PPC strategies require you to know much more about your consumer base, while B2C strategies are essentially more product-focused.

Craft the perfect offer

Let’s take a moment to paint a relatable scenario.

An employee of a large consulting firm, Mandy has been tasked with finding the best available lead management software available. Knowing nothing about lead management software, she does a Google search for “best lead management software”, and she immediately sees numerous ads on the results page.

She may click the first ads she sees or some that catch her attention. Ultimately, most of these ads will offer free trials and one will offer a free buyer’s guide.

Which form do you think Mandy will fill out first?

With a buyer’s guide, not only are you more likely to capture a high-quality lead, but you are also providing Mandy with exactly what she needs, a helpful guide to help her navigate through a complicated app.

For this reason, crafting the perfect offer is paramount to the success of your PPC campaigns. Using outdated offers, such as live demos and free trials, will ultimately lead to your offer being rejected, ignored, or skipped over.

This is because there is profound evidence that proves that the alternatives are much more effective. What’re the alternatives, you may ask?

The answer is anything that will provide value to your audience without them being forced to commit.

PPC Hero recently experimented with their B2B audience by using demo videos in their ads. They found that demo videos have much less friction than live demos and free trials, because people may be hesitant to commit or spend time talking to a sales rep.

By adding a “watch demo video” call-to-action (CTA) to one of their core website pages, they received a 122.45% increase in conversions.
Google Ads PPC marketing

Furthermore, if you have prospects landing on your website directly through a search engine, chances are that they’ve never heard of you.

This means that you have a small chance of convincing a potential customer to sign up for a free trial on search terms that most ads are using, such as “best” or “top”.

Because of this, your offer has to break through the reservations a potential customer may have about working with you. The only way this can happen is by creating an offer that your audience can’t resist and won’t immediately commit to.

Doing so will allow them to see what you’re all about and make a decision for themselves.

Calibrate Search and Social Messages

You should never treat social media users the same as search engine users. Although your PPC campaign may exist on both platforms, using the same message will be counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve.

Also, user behavior is vastly different across your marketing channels, so why craft the same message?

Let’s dig a little deeper into the concept.

People go on social media networks to consume content. These people aren’t looking for any salesly or consumer-related. They just want content, whether it’s informational or entertainment-based.

However, those that arrive at your website via search engine are looking for something. They have a need or want, and they believe you can help.

Again, why use the same message on both platforms? The reason this question is being asked twice is that many businesses and marketers fall into this trap in an attempt to streamline their PPC campaign.

Just like how you shouldn’t create the same social media posts on your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you definitely shouldn’t make this mistake.

For social media PPC campaigns, you’re targeting users based on their demographics, such as their job title in the case of LinkedIn. For Paid Search Ad Campaigns, your ads’ visibility is based on keywords.

Therefore, people who search for these keywords are actively looking for a product or service, whereas, a social media user is minding their own business looking for engaging Content.

It should now be apparent why offering an educational resource is better on social media, rather than search. Ultimately, your PPC ads on social media should strive to build awareness, through e-books and reports.

Anything that stirs an emotional response will do well on social media.

Meanwhile, paid search ads should get to the point and make an offer. Demos and interactive content are great for these ads because people who click them are looking for a solution to a need or want they have anyway.

If you’re still lost in how you can calibrate your messages across social media and search platforms, just remember this fundamental question.

“Why are my prospects using this platform?”

And, there you have it. You should instantly surmise that Facebook users didn’t log on to be advised to sign up for a free trial of anything. Therefore, create a campaign that centers on driving emotional responses from your target audience.

For example, this video ad from Sephora works because it showcases multiple promotions and piques the curiosity of their target audience.

retail mobile marketing

That’s why the ad was able to achieve a 41% higher click-through rate (CTR) than the brand’s previous ads.

Do you want to emulate the same success through all of your marketing channels? If so, take a look at this infographic from Orbit Media that details how you should structure both social media and paid search ads.

Google Ads PPC Management Search v Social Ads

Prioritize Remarketing

Finally, we’ve arrived at one of the most popular PPC strategies, known as “remarketing”.

Once you’ve got someone to land on your website and they leave without converting, you’d want to bring them back to your site for a second chance, right?

This sounds very much like the concept of dating. However, what if this same person doesn’t convert after a third or fourth time?

What’s going on?

The answer is that you’re probably using the same offer every time. Obviously, if that person didn’t bite on the offer you originally introduced, they won’t budge if you do the same again.

Now, let’s present a solution. First, cut off any leads that just aren’t in your market. Not everyone who visits your website through an ad is interested in working with you.

They may just be curious, found another solution, etc. Therefore, only begin the remarketing stage for leads that have visited your landing page at least twice.

Similarly, you can do the same for leads who left your website in the middle of filling out a form.

Next, segment your leads based on where they are in the buyer’s journey. For example, for leads that haven’t watched your demo video, retarget them with a demo ad.

For leads that have watched the demo video, follow-up and re-target them with a free trial ad. The goal here is to be very specific with your segmentations so you can convert leads throughout your marketing funnel.

In Social Media Marketing, the strategy is the same. If you have received PPC insights from social media users who haven’t converted, you’ll have to understand the proven social behaviors for these users.

This is: social media users are constantly scrolling on their feed and may not want to commit to you just yet.
Why?

Because they’re still busy scrolling on their feeds.

With an accurate remarketing strategy, you can send a gentle reminder at an appropriate time to re-engage social media users who have left your site.

Realize Your SERP Potential

There was a promising study conducted by Advanced Web Rankings where they studied the differenced in CTR between ad placements on the search engine result pages (SERP).
Google-Ads-PPC-optimization
It’s important to realize right now that PPC success doesn’t solely depend on placement, but rather a myriad of other factors, such as conversion value, budget, competition, industry, geotarget, LTV, and more.

For certain industries, it may be beneficial to bid higher to rank high for productive keywords. However, in competitive markets, your ROI will begin to decline at a certain point using this strategy,

Ideally, it’s up to you to find the right balance for your particular market.

For example, paying a high price for a competitive market like auto insurance may not be profitable, considering how people normally shop for auto insurance.

Similar to B2B Marketing, consumers will readily shop around for auto insurance until they can find an affordable deal for the right type of coverage they’re looking for.

Because of this, a Search Engine user may click on your ad, no matter if it’s first, second, third, or fourth on the SERP.

Regardless of this fact, humans make most purchasing decisions based on trust, and nothing screams trust more than high-ranking websites.

So, the moral of this section is to realize that ad placement isn’t everything for a successful PPC Campaign. Nonetheless, your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Strategy should work together to maximize your CTR and create the perception that you’re a leader in your industry.

Final Words

Now that you realize the fundamental strategies of building a solid PPC campaign, it’s up to you to conduct your own experiments and use your data to create PPC Ad Campaigns that work for you.

Understanding these fundamental strategies and the unique characteristics of your business will help you to achieve long-lasting results, instead of relying too much on online advice and your gut to design your campaigns.

Search marketing is a very competitive game of Marketer vs. Marketer. We know that Google and Bing are continually adjusting their Search Engine Algorithms and the best way to ensure that you are not wasting your time and money is to hire Agency Partner to do it for you. API has experience in managing big Budget PPC accounts so whether you are managing a budget of $5,000 or $50,000 per month, contact Agency Partner Interactive today and let us help you maximize your ROI.

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Kick That Conversion – Score Big With Your Website’s Visitor-To-Lead Conversion Rate Using SEO and Other Essential Strategies

Posted on | by devops
Website’s Visitor-To-Lead Conversion Rate Using SEO and Other Essential Strategies
Tips from Digital Marketing Experts

Focusing your attention on the type of visitors you want to attract to your website is a major part of increasing your visitor-to-lead conversion rate.  Making your site a haven for warm leads is essential to your success. Concerns regarding the quality of your leads should be just as high up your list of site goals as the focus on the foot traffic. Quality and quantity are a non-negotiable, interconnected, dynamic duo.

User Experience (UX)

Your site needs to be stylish, approachable and trustworthy–just like your favorite leading lady or leading man in that iconic role you love. A clear and uncluttered website, with a focused call-to-action, interactive content, aligned branding, and intuitive design principles, will make your site visitor more likely to achieve conversion. 

Removal of all friction between the customer and your goal action for them is equally important. While it is tempting to add in lots of additional products and ideas, as they cruise down the home straight to take your desired action, it can create unexpected hurdles and the last thing anyone wants is a disqualification as your ‘near conversion’ flounces off the pitch in disgust and frustration from what should have been a simple process. 

Value Proposition

Here we are, down to the nitty-gritty of the sales pitch. However, this isn’t any old school sales patter. Give them absolute clarity of vision. This is the real deal of why your customer should invest their financial and social resources on your product or service. You are sure to be the savvy and practical answer to their specific problem, because they found their way to you, and because you are investing the best of yourself in what you offer. So tell them that. Offer valid reasons, a solid value proposition, why they need you and your brand.

Improved SEO

Where is a discussion about web marketing without a reference SEO? It is truly the roadmap for all serious entrepreneurs and businesses. Without it, you have little-to-no direction, and no-one can find you. Yet with it in hand, the landscape opens up and opportunities abound. Make sure all of your SEO keyword opportunities are maximized and updated regularly. Without this essential box ticked, all those lovely organic searches with strong purchase intent will breeze past you from the half-way line.

Multiple Personas 

Facebook has the data, you have the creativity and vision, and so, with a decent dollop of analytics, you have a pretty solid team. Focus on the capacity to visualize the personas of the people you want to turn from cold visitors to warm leads and conversions. These personas will be able to show you how best to interact with your real-life site visitors.

They will also show you who the real visitors are. Not the expected, not the projected, but the real. You might find that a different, broader version of a non-traditional demographic than expected, is engaging with your brand. Rather than trying to corral the people you think ‘should’ be there, you are then in the enviable position of being able to tailor your style to suit them, encouraging an ever-rising conversion rate.

Website Experiments

As the saying goes, there are so many different ways to skin the proverbial cat that you won’t be able to please all of the people, all of the time. But with a keen eye on your analytics and a bit of experimentation, you will be able to find out what the majority want and tailor your sales plan and web site to fit those expectations. You are also best placed to utilize chatbots when you have deduced your best visitor personas and are in experimentation mode, ready to gain and utilise even more analytics. Try different marketing channels, and audit different aspects of your sales conversion funnel, especially if your analytics look rough in one area. Test what works in reality, not just in theory.

And keep testing!

Climbing Conversion Rates 

It’s what we all strive for, and with a few adjustments to your processes, you will see that your time poring over statistics and analyzing data has been well spent. This is something that will need to be done regularly to keep the flow of savvy, focused-on-the-next-big -thing customers engaging with your site. After all, this is a process, a journey.

It is never static, and it is never done! Keep kicking those conversions!

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Score Big With Your Website’s Visitor-To-Lead Conversion Rate Using SEO and Other Essential Strategies” instead.

Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!

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Firm Foundations For Your Facebook Ads Strategy: How To Build A Solid Base, One Brick At A Time

Posted on | by devops
Tips from Digital Marketing Experts

Just when you think that Facebook has been toppled from its social media top spot, a review of the actual reach and capacity of this mammoth of the social media world has everyone sitting up and considering how to maximize their ad strategies. 

Facebook has one of the world’s largest user base with 1.62 billion subscribers and 2.41 Billion Active Users in the second quarter of 2019. It is one of the most engaged, so why take a page from its playbook? After all with numbers this big, it is all about making the best use of them.

Statistic: Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 2nd quarter 2019 (in millions) | Statista

So take notes, get your ducks in a row, and your game plan sorted, because this juggernaut is here to stay, and you need to be on board. But don’t worry, we have all the tips to help get you sorted out with a solid Facebook Ads Strategy, so you can sit back, and watch your conversions soar.

Duo, Trio, Quad

The first consideration, and it’s a major one, is to keep Facebook and Instagram working in tandem because they are one-and-the-same behind-the-scenes–a fact is often forgotten–so keep this pair collaborating to your benefit.

Think, ‘integrated ads strategy’ with Instagram, Facebook, and all the other platforms out there. An omnichannel experience is what both you and your customer need. This is a bottom line, non-negotiable. Your marketing plan must be seamless and holistic.

Experiment with ‘Bots’

With Ad Bots becoming more sophisticated and normalized, now is the perfect time to experiment with computer-generated marketing. The tech itself is nothing to be afraid of, how it’s employed and with what tone, is the issue. ‘Engagement Baiting’ by fishing for swipes, taps, and reposts is right out in 2019. Instead, you want to develop long-term engagement–life-long customers who are much more likely to convert.

While you are in experimental mode, get creative, and then test everything. Send out an engaging, and meaningful post or blog to assess the interest. It’s much more cost-effective than a full-blown analytics campaign.

Video is King

Long Live Video. Businesses love Facebook Video Ads. Use it to drive conversions but ensure the focus is to empower your customer with a side order of Brand Integrity, and the development of trust. People are likely to buy from companies they have positively encountered on social media, so consider creating or developing your brand identity from an anchor or hero Video for maximum impact. 

Retargeting from long-form ad engagement video followed up with a ‘call-to-action’ via short video ad, post, email, tweet, etc, is much more likely to get a new convert. It is also easier to then expand the information to ‘lookalike’ audiences, speeding up the turnaround process and reducing costs.

Nano, Niche, and Micro

We are in the time of the nano- or micro-influencer. There has been a shift from celebrities delivering information to niche experts whom we can trust, people with whom we can identify. They are less distant, more relevant, and certainly more approachable. Align with one of them, and it is a short skip, and a jump, to getting the conversions.

Are You Responsive?

To say that you have a ‘Responsive Website’ which is not enough. You have to prove it. Multiple devices are here to stay, and your site must show all the fancy whistles and bells on each and every one. Ensure that every type of media will run efficiently on desktop, tablet, mobile, Android, and IOS. The last thing you want is a block to your customers’ conversion where they throw their hands up in disgust, and leave the site, never to return. 

Multiple Persona

Facebook can link you up with any demographic or niche you can imagine because it has so much info on all its users and the algorithms to sift it. Forget about an ‘app for that’, Facebook can help you find your niche group and target them through its persona-driven data. Think about maintaining diversified and comprehensive ads which target different personas, but don’t just make assumptions on who they are, get the stats and work from that.

Contextual Content (and lots of it)

Get creative with ‘life events targeting’. Facebook knows when the wedding is, or was. So consider how the market can drive itself by targeting upcoming anniversaries and events. Being narrow in focus can mean increased costs (CPMs) but being specific, relevant, and targeted means being able to tailor the marketing, increasing the chances of conversion. Staying broad offers a lower cost, a more ‘vanilla’ approach, and a reduced, individual appeal.

Looking For Love

Consider yourself to be looking for the customer that represents the real deal, full-blown, lifetime love–not some fly-by-night fling or disposable fad. Developing this relationship will increase their Lifetime Customer Value (LCV), and you’ll likely to get repeat conversions. You will also get the power of ‘word-of mouth’–if one friend has a good experience, then all the friends know about it–hey presto, warm leads.

Remember, 55 percent of people bought something Online After seeing it on social media, with Facebook and Instagram taking up the top spots for driving product discovery. You just cannot afford to ignore this duo. 

If you need help navigating the FB-IG building blocks to build, a solid, long-lasting plan for your business, contact us at Agency Partner Interactive and talk with a Professional Digital Marketing Strategist to get your ad empire growing so you too can tower over the marketplace!

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How To Build A Solid Base, One Brick At A Time” instead.

Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!