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News Article
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Fri
02
Jun 2023
Your PPC strategy shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Our experts share how to utilise the latest PPC trends to complement other areas of your marketing strategy, boost overall performance and demonstrate real value for your business.
With PPC activity generating an average ROI of 200%, the challenge many marketers are facing this year is not so much in ‘doing it right’, but rather in squeezing the most value out of what they do.
In our latest workshop, ‘101 Ways to Get More from your PPC Strategy in 2023’, our experts share the foundations of a healthy PPC strategy, including the overlooked ‘value adds’ available with Paid advertising right now, common misconceptions to avoid, and ways to leverage PPC insights to support your wider marketing strategy.
Our experts:
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While PPC can be an effective strategy for boosting web traffic, generating leads, and increasing brand awareness, in today’s evolving digital landscape, utilising the latest Paid advertising trends can help your business stay ahead of the competition.
From Google’s rapid transition to AI and Machine Learning to the rising use of data-driven attribution models - below our experts share the overlooked ‘value adds’ available with PPC right now:
Ellen highlights, “as more users shift across to Bing, we've successfully trialled a few campaigns on the platform to gain more of that impression share.”
Carl adds, “PPC isn’t just Google Ads, there’s so many other platforms, such as Bing, LinkedIn, and Facebook – it’s about finding what works well for your strategy.”
View our Round-up: How to Execute a Strong Cross-Channel Inbound Campaign
Ellen says, “we used to work off lots of macro and micro audiences with targeted ad sets, but in the last six to twelve months, Facebook has moved away from that.
Now you set your campaigns with broad targeting and let the Facebook algorithms put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time.
We’ve found from implementing broad targeting on clients’ accounts, the average click-through-rate has increased by 40% in comparison to macro and micro audiences that were previously targeted and cost-per-click has reduced by 34%.”
Ellen says, “we’ve found from being live on P-Max is that you’re going to optimise your campaigns for lower funnel KPIs. So, having YouTube and Display ads live in conjunction with P-Max, means the impressions and reach are always much higher.”
With a growing concern that P-Max will impact the performance of search campaigns. Ellen adds, “Google is still very much prioritising search as a channel, but they can all work alongside each other for a more of a multi-funnel, multi-channel approach.”
View: House Digital’s overview of PMAX
Ellen says, “we all know users are very visually impacted and want to see information as neatly as possible – Discovery can do that through the use of automation, images, headlines and descriptions.”
Ellen highlights, “people have an idea that TikTok is for a younger audience, whereas we can very much see the shift in users to an older demographic. Also, we know users are searching in a more conversational way now, and TikTok encourages this through the use of visual content.”
Read: The Ultimate Guide to Updating your Video Content Strategy
Ahmed says, “so many times we see clients are targeting the wrong country, or they might be targeting the whole world as opposed to just the UK, or they’ve set their campaigns to the wrong language – these are things that tend to be obvious but are often overlooked.”
Ahmed highlights, “the way people search today has changed – it’s search, search again, maybe in a week or a month search again, or depending on the type of product, maybe again in a year. Therefore, all this data needs to be taken into consideration when it comes to PPC to avoid making reactive changes.”
View our Round-up: 5 Ways to Get More from your Marketing Data
Ahmed says, “something that works well for someone else, or something that Google recommends doing, may not work for your business – you must test to discover what is best practise for achieving your end goal.
For example, Google often recommends an automated bidding strategy, yet manual bidding can work better in some cases.
Best practise will differ from client to client, from account to account and from platform to platform – what works on Google may not perform so well on Bing or Facebook.”
Carl reiterates, “think about what your goal is on a particular channel:
Then look at what data you’re currently tracking to measure those goals as well as the data you don’t have but want to know – 90% of the time, you can track a lot of this through Google Analytics.”
Read: 7 Way to Get Genuine Stakeholder Buy-in for your Marketing Strategy
Lee says, “I would challenge everyone to embrace, if not AI, the different bidding methodologies that Google offers.
Think about which is most relevant to you – I’ve seen businesses, using a maximise conversions bidding methodology for a brand campaign, yet they should be targeting impression share to ensure its as visible as possible for their brand terms.
If you're looking at a more generic upper-funnel type campaign, maybe it's not ‘maximise conversions’ that you should be triggering, ‘maximise clicks’ might make more sense as you want as much of that traffic at the top of the funnel for as little of your budget as possible.”
Leveraging your PPC insights to support your wider marketing – and business – strategy can help improve your overall performance and maximise ROI across various channels.
Ellen adds, “where a multi-channel agency and we look at fitting everything in the wider scheme of things. For instance, SEO is great for building up traffic and sessions but it’s a longer-term plan, with Paid you can bridge that gap and double your exposure on SERPs.”
View our Round-up: How to Leverage PPC Insights to support your Wider Marketing Strategy
Lee says, “audits is something that we specialise in and there are ways to get advice without overly committing to something early on – land grab for as much technical advice as you can before you commit to make any kind of financial commitment.”
Carl adds, “before you look to bring in some support, identify where it is you really need help with. It could be that you need help with an audit, it could be that you need help with a strategy, it could be that you need help in housing or actual campaign execution.
If you can figure out where the gaps are, you can immediately narrow the number of choices you have and start to go after the agencies or freelancers that fit in that space.”
If you're investing in your PPC strategy this year, make sure you're getting the most from your time. GO! offer cost-free agency recommendations, pitch management, and more - get in touch to get started.
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