Generate more leads for your small business
Are you looking for a fast and effective way to generate more leads online for your small business? Then Pay per Click (PPC) could be one of your best options since it’s by far the fastest way to produce results and does not require a large initial investment. As long as you make the effort to do a little preliminary research set up your ad campaigns correctly, you should be able to get a decent return of investment that will allow you to keep the advertisements running.
In case you’re looking to use PPC ads to generate more business leads, this article will guide you through the basics. Read the following sections, and you learn some effective hints and tips to help you effectively set up your first campaigns, while also understanding that are the common PPC mistakes and how to best avoid them. While the process of setting up a campaign is fast and straightforward, you can save a good deal of money and avoid headaches by taking the time to absorb this information before you begin.
Hints and tips on how to use Google Ads successfully
Online advertising remains one of the most cost-effective tactics to promote a brand or service – essentially because it allows incredibly precise targeting of your audience. While nearly all big companies invest in PPC marketing these days, and despite the fact most corporations have seemingly endless advertising budgets – you can still achieve a return of investment as a small business operating on a small advertising budget, as long as you clearly understand your audience, the available campaign types and do a very precise targeting.
That should be one of your overarching concerns when creating ad campaigns: to understand who your clients are and target them precisely with your ads. Pay per Click ads will allow you to be very specific when deciding the people you’re trying to reach; you can specify a wide range of parameters including age, gender, education, income level, interests, location, and many other aspects. In order to achieve a positive return of investment, you will have indeed to target your campaigns as precisely as possible, in order to avoid wasting paid clicks on curious website visitors who will not convert into clients.
Asides from judiciously defining your target audience, you will also have to work towards narrowing down on the keywords you want to focus on your campaigns. A shotgun approach is likely to only waste your advertising funds; instead, you want to reach out for your semantic precision rifle and bid only for the right keywords within the suitable networks (available options are search, display and social). You want to take some time to plunge through the relevant keyword listings (which you’ll abundantly get by querying the Google Ads console), and cherry pick only keywords that suggest a strong commercial intent – rather than the top of funnel keywords that convey a merely inquisitive or curious mindset.
By narrowing down on the keywords you target in your ad campaigns, you thus will manage to keep expenses down while maximizing results; the very statistics available from your on-going campaigns will allow you to determine which keywords are most effective and which have a poor performance, thus providing the data you’ll need to keep fine-tuning your investment. As you go through this process, you will effectively work towards improving the “Quality Score” of your campaigns, which you can think of a grade assigned to your efforts by Google Ads. The higher the score you can achieve, the better the rankings of your ads will be, which will translate in a lower cost per click and increased campaign effectiveness overall.
As you can see, taking the time to do a little preliminary research on your audience before diving right into your first campaign will pay off; likewise, you’ll find it’s a good idea to keep refining your list of targeted keywords as you keep running the campaign. These are indeed your two major concerns if you want to succeed in generating leads for your small business, as well as securing a positive return of investment that will allow you to scale up your campaigns and leverage your results. But what are the common mistakes and pitfalls that you should be mindful to avoid?
Common PPC mistakes that you should avoid
The single most common PPC mistake is to create generalist campaigns that relate very weakly to your target audience, as well as to fail to create specific campaigns for the different available ad networks (search, display, social) all of which cater to different types of users that will behave in particular ways.
The second most common is to poorly target your campaigns by not doing enough keyword research, as well as neglecting to do a continuous fine-tuning your lists of keywords across different ad networks. You need to clearly understand the differences between these networks as well as the difference between keywords with research versus commercial intent, in order to tailor campaigns for each subset of users.
The third most common PPC mistake involves not taking the time to properly review the plentiful campaign data available to you in the Google Ads dashboard while looking to sort out the proverbial wheat from the chaff. It’s only by continuously looking to build upon what works while cutting back on what doesn’t work that you can achieve truly profitable ad campaigns.
The fourth most common PPC mistake relates to failing to take the time to understand all the metrics and bid types available to you. Google Ads features a massively rich set of tools and analytics that you will be wise to become proficient with since that will be the competitive edge that will allow you to outperform your competitor’s campaigns.
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