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bestppc1 · 6 years

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PPC Marketing in 2018

Google AdWords first launch was back in year 2000 with just 350 advertisers utilizing the platform. Today, there are millions of advertisers competing with each other, and, essentially driving up the CPCs for each other. It makes Google happy, just look at it –

It’s year 2018. Google performed over 9,800+ live traffic tests in 2017. Do you still believe that the AdWords account you built in 2015 is performing at its maximum capacity?

So what’s the name of the game for “Keeping up with Google” in 2018?

Google’s Semi-Automatic Bidding

From the dead beginning of Google AdWords, every major player in the PPC industry have followed the nail-and-hammer approach where they want to fix it all themselves. Today, that might not be the case anymore. Google has access to incredible amounts of information that reach much past the activity on SERPs. Think about your own website. Let me guess – how’s that GOOGLE Analytics tag treating you? Well, I sure hope that answered your question of how google can track user experience based on industries, verticals, niche markets, single websites, and so on. They can get pretty granular, if you ask me.

Now that we know that they have the intel, does that still mean we want to trust them with our CPCs, and, potential CPAs?

Google bidding wars happen every 3 minutes. Manual bidding adjustments, in most cases, are made every 1-3 days on MAJOR accounts; while it can be done as little as every 2-6 weeks for minor, local accounts. Considering those numbers, there are 480 auctions in a single day – that means that even accounts of $100k/mo spend can only be so competitive.

Ok, ok – to all the PPC Experts mumbling under their chins that there are ad schedules, bid modifiers for days, hours, genders, even weather conditions… Ask yourself – when was the last time you updated all these settings the last time?

So, now, are you wonder how can your account become more competitive?

Give Google’s AI some credit, and run an experiment for semi-automatic bidding options. I am only an ambassador of eCPC (Enhanced Cost Per Click), CPA (Cost Per Acquisition – best for lead gen) & ROAS (Return on Ad Spend – best for ecomm) strategies, as those are, in my opinion, the only feasible bidding options.

CPA and ROAS automatic bidding settings work based on obtained data, but it reaches much past much beloved “if this, then that” automatic rules.

For each auction, these bidding methods consider following factors:

Your selected CPA, or, ROAS

The key phrases you are going after

The search queries you receive

Ad schedule

Geographic locations

Genders

Position on SERPs

Placements (for GDN)

User intent

Pro Tip: Even if you’ve found that your account’s most profitable avg. position is 3.5; sometime your best customers don’t get past position 2 & you, again, are left out. Semi-automatic bidding takes care of those situations.

With that being said, your account should never be static ever again!

If you haven’t tested one of the two mentioned types of bidding – you’re definitely behind. To get ahead of game, I’d suggest doing the following things:

Make sure your account has received 50+ conversions in past 30 days (the more the better)

Run an experiment for CPA bidding with however much traffic you feel confident with. Depending on how much traffic you get, I’d suggest testing with anywhere between 25-50% of the traffic. If you do get your fair share of traffic, you can test less – but for the most part, I’d stick in the range mentioned initially.

Give Google Display Network One Last Chance

I already heard multiple “yuck” and “why” within the 3 seconds it took me to write that headline.

Well, “Yuck & why” all you want – Google Display Network WORKS!

And I’m not talking about simple, or even super advanced remarketing. I’m talking about other targeting methods & how to make them work.

Rule #1 – You can’t get straight to the point with these users, or, offer value!

Just like dating – you can’t walk up to a complete stranger and ask them to marry you, right? You have to get to know them, nurture the relationship, and only THEN you might have a chance of landing a conversion… I mean, marriage!

What I mean by that? If you are advertising for a SaaS company, offer a free ebook on how-to do something your client base might be interested in reading about. If you’re a mortgage brokerage, offer users a free mortgage questionnaire / calculator. If you’re WordStream, offer a free account grader!

Do not make the mistake of trying to get people to register for a free trial, or even worse – try to make them buy directly! These people have no idea of who you are, and considering that you’re doing PPC with Google – there’s almost no chance you’re such an impulse buy that people can’t resist going away from what they’re doing to land on your site to purchase your product / sign up for your service.

Rule #2 – Pick the right audiences!

You have that free, but valuable offer down. Well, who should you advertise it to now? The answer can be quite simple. Or it can be extremely complicated – again, based on what kind of company are we doing advertising for.

Couple of tips on how to pick the right audience for your account:

Similar to Converted Audience:

Go to Shared Library > Audiences > and if you had created remarketing audiences, you should be able to find a handful of audiences that you didn’t even know existed. I’d suggest considering “Similar to Converted” (if you have more than 1 conversion goal, go after the one with highest value to your business). Then, also, look at “AdWords Optimized List” (and similar to it if the list size is too small to your liking).

Check out “In-market audiences”:

Open up your display campaign > Display Network > +Targeting > “Interests & Remarketing” > Click on the box > In-market audiences.

PRO TIP: As suggested in picture, use “Target and bid” option. If you click on “Bid only”, your selection of an audience might become extremely vague – and you don’t want that as we’re testing brand new audiences, and it might worsen the ability to track what’s actually working.

Lastly, Take a Stab at “Custom Affinity Audiences”:

Custom affinity audience allows you to mix and match interests, URLs, topics, and then creates a whole new list to market to specifically based on your needs (in theory). These used to be a pretty hot subject in 2016/17 – but it worked well for some, and for some it did absolutely NADA! Therefore, it’s worth testing it.

PRO TIP: Limit the frequency of your GDN ads to overcome ad fatigue!

Rule #3 – Make sure you know where your ads are shown!

Most accounts I’ve seen have been wasting over 90% of the ad spend allocated to GDN (Google Display Network).

Google’s automatic placements can get quite out of hand. Not only there are terrible placements containing fake / terrible / unusable content, where, initially, you’d never consider your audience would hang out – there are little crawlers and bots that fake visits these sites, and end up clicking on your ad! What’s even worse? These bots are trained to find the conversion source on your site, and fill out that form, or sign up for email lists just to slide by all filters an account manager might have created.

Is that something that should worry you?

Not in 2018! Outsmart the bots, and simply don’t even give them a chance to waste your ad spend! You should now instantly (well, after you’re done reading this article) do 3 things:

Go to your display network placements, and manually revise websites that has spent the most money on your ads & are performing well. Then, use common sense and eliminate all fake sites that might have been robbing you of money for months!

“I want my SaaS free trial ads to show up in mobile apps” – said no one ever. Review whether your ads are showing up on mobile apps.

PRO TIP: To exclude ALL mobile app placements, exclude: adsenseformobileapps.com

Go ahead, open up your Display Planner, and look up legitimate placements. If you’re a car parts shop, advertising on jalopnik.com would make a lot of sense. There are 25-30m impressions available weekly – that placement alone could drain your budget quite quickly!

And remember – these all are warm leads, but they just don’t know it themselves! Keep nurturing the leads you land & watch your business bloom in front of your eyes!

The “After Click” Experience

Like I’ve said many times before – one thing is buying traffic, converting it is something completely different.

In other words, in today’s competitive PPC environment – great account structure is not quite

enough. Landing pages can increase AdWords Quality Score factors, which can furthermore improve CPCs and avg. position; but, most importantly – it can make or break campaign’s profitability.

So, where do I start?

Most websites are ok to send traffic to, but very rarely they’re able to generate higher lead volumes, or, ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) when compared to landing pages. Why? Because the best practices suggest it is in your best interest to create multiple landing pages for each different topic you are looking to advertise for on AdWords.

Build a Landing Page

Now, once you have decided you need landing pages – how to proceed, you may ask? Well, there are 2 options:

You can use a landing page builder – no developer help needed, but keep paying monthly fees (Usually between $35-$80/mo depending on the service provider)

If you’re handy enough, or, have befriended a talented developer that will be available to help you out with landing pages – create it under your domain.

It is extremely important to make your landing pages straight forward, easy to observe, make sure they load extremely fast, and, lastly – appealing to eye, and have strong CTAs (Call To Actions)!

Start Testing it!

Cool, you have a landing page. What next? Here at Best PPC Marketing we never launch a PPC campaign without creating at least 1 or 2 contenders for each landing page design we are about to use.

The initial test for your landing page can be:

Building couple additional, completely different landers

Disorganize the current version (make a super short version of it, and then a version where you move around blocks of data & add different CTAs / logos / testimonials / etc.)

If you’re not planning on netting too many clicks, start as little as test different CTAs on your buttons

PRO TIP: If you’re not using a landing page creator, check out Google’s FREE tool optimize.google.com. It allows you to do all kinds of testing on your landing page with a very user-friendly interface.

Oh, right, and ALWAYS test desktop from mobile traffic separately. Even though you might think it’s the same audience, the user experience is totally different. (Speaking from experience).

In other words – not splitting your on-site tests based on device type is equivalent to eating Tide pods.

Just like any PPC item – nothing is “set and forget” (or, at least, shouldn’t be). Once you’ve found a statistically significant winner from the initial test, create more tests! Test new CTAs, button colors, button placements – you name it!

Landing page optimization, if done properly, can single handedly take an average AdWords account and turn it into a money making machine!

These are Best PPC Marketing insights on PPC Marketing in 2018!

Do not forget to bookmark & share this blog with your colleagues as it will get updated as time rolls by. We will share our thoughts on Google AdWords updates, new features, etc.!

If you have any questions about PPC Marketing – feel free to drop a comment below, or contact us directly!

from https://bestppc.marketing/ppc-marketing/

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