News
News Article
Marketing+
Sat
25
Mar 2023
Your PPC strategy shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Our experts share how to leverage your PPC insights to complement other areas of your marketing strategy, boost overall performance and demonstrate real value for your business as a whole.
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, ‘Making PPC Work Harder for your Marketing Strategy’, our experts share the foundations of a healthy PPC strategy, and key ways that you can utilise your investment into existing PPC efforts to support other areas of your marketing – and wider business – strategy. Including, leveraging PPC to support SEO activity, drive stronger customer insights and demonstrate real business value.
Our experts:
View our upcoming events calendar
In this Article:
While PPC can be an effective strategy for generating leads, boosting web traffic, growing online sales and increasing brand awareness, executing a strong Paid Advertising strategy depends on various factors – from defining your goals and target audience to optimising your landing pages. Below Alp shares the foundations of a healthy PPC strategy to build valuable insights from.
Meg highlights, “before getting into the nuts and bolts of a PPC strategy, take a step back to identify what really makes your business unique, because there are so many organisations alike advertising online in what is a quite saturated market, so if you're not the cheapest, and if you've not got something unique to shout about that messaging can get diluted.
PPC is all about putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Therefore, if you haven't got much to say on the messaging front, it can become a real challenge when trying to develop a healthy PPC strategy.”
PPC campaigns are ideal for driving traffic to your website quickly, giving your brand immediate exposure on SERP’s and ultimately delivering early revenue. However, such quick results are not the only benefit of PPC activity for your business. Integrating your PPC insights in your wider marketing - and business - strategy can help improve your overall performance and maximise ROI across various channels – but how do you begin leveraging those insights?
View our Round-up: Investing in Organic Growth – Maximising your Channels in 2023
Laura says, “an extra value add of PPC is how it can complement other channels. You can use content derived from your PPC activity for social or video assets and vice versa.
For example, your PPC team and social team can get together to discuss the message or imagery that they’ve put out that has produced the best results and so this can be used across both channels to maximise the chance of success – PPC should not be looked at in a siloed perspective.”
View our Round-up: How to Execute a Strong Cross-Channel Inbound Campaign
Data-driven attribution can help you gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, improve your ROI, and make more informed decisions about your campaigns.
Turan says “Google is pushing us towards a data driven attribution, whether we like it or not, but it does give us a bigger understanding of ways other media feed into PPC.
If you get your goal tracking set up correctly, then with the use of Google Analytics, for example, you can start to gain an understanding of what does PPC actually pool? Or what has influenced PPC ROI? Because it's not just customers searching for your brand and selecting it, it's much more complicated than that.
Especially with your marketplace, you've got Google and Amazon, so you want to identify where do people go to research? Would they go to buy on Amazon directly, and go to research on Google?”
She adds, you can gain key learnings from PPC data very quickly on what wording or imagery works best, which can be used to adopt other creatives in your branding activity or digital out-of-home campaign, for example.
View our Round-up: 5 Ways to Get More from your Marketing Data
When it comes to digital marketing, PPC and SEO are arguably the two sides of the same coin. Knowing how to use SEO and PPC together is a critical step in expanding your digital strategy to nurture top-of-funnel leads to the bottom-of-the-funnel.
Carl highlights “you can use PPC keyword data to select and test which keywords drive the highest traffic and revenue before committing that to an SEO strategy, in addition you can take up more search engine result page space, if you're running both.”
He adds “on your PPC search term reports, you can identify what audiences are looking at to trigger your ads and therefore use these findings to inform your content marketing strategy or outbound calling strategy. As you have a better understanding of the questions your target audience are asking, so the content you now produce or dialogue on a call will be more relevant to that.
Read our SEO 101 article: Practical Tips to Improve your SEO Strategy with Limited Resource
Ryan states the importance of, “understanding a goal conversion path. Often the journey to someone making a purchase is not as simple as see ad, click ad, and buy – there’s a journey across that process. Through analytics you can see that journey mapped out with all the different touch points that people had to make for a purchase, displaying how the channels are intrinsically working together.
Therefore, when we look at things like assisted conversions and goal paths, if you were to remove PPC, you will notice how much revenue you would potentially lose, because these are the conversions that PPC has had a hand in. That's a way that you can articulate the value of a PPC strategy to clients by using the Analytics interface.
Turan says, “the way PPC drives traffic gives you a lot of indicators of; what works for your customer? What USPs of your business are they responding well to? What was the landing page on the website and what pages do they visit?
You can use those insights to start influencing your product, i.e. if something catches the eye of your customers, which perhaps is not your core offering, you can start to push it and develop it.
Carl highlights the importance of proving the value of PPC leads to CFOs, “for example if a PPC lead that converts stays with your business twice as long as an outbound cold call, then this should be used to demonstrate to Directors or CFOs that PPC leads hold more value than other marketing leads – and therefore should be prioritised when it comes to budget allocation as it drives towards wider business goals.
Read: 7 Way to Get Genuine Stakeholder Buy-in for your Marketing Strategy
Meg says, “most agencies like us are a Google premier partners, which means they have those relationships with Google that they can lean on, likewise with Microsoft advertising. Therefore, you might be as the client just speaking to us, but we can speak to a lot of other people on your behalf to help elevate your strategy.
Ryan says, “one of the biggest benefits of using external agency support is the number of verticals that can be covered as a team. For example, chances are that someone in our team has worked within the vertical that you're in, i.e. luxury goods, food and drink, or automotive. Furthermore, chances are that we've had a client in the same space, and we've already seen what does and what doesn't work within that.
Laura adds, “PPC isn't a one size fits all thing. We don't just say this is what we do for every client. We carry out CSS testing, run dual feeds, performance max testing with assets and no assets to make sure that we're getting the best out of the strategy for each individual client. Like I say, it's not a one size fits all, so it's making sure that the strategy is specific for that particular client.
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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