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A pay-per-click (PPC) program can be one of the most beneficial aspects of your marketing strategy. When done right, it can help drive traffic, grow revenue and offer helpful insights into your target audience.
But when your PPC strategy is broken, it can feel more like a weight tied to your company’s foot, slowing you down and getting you nowhere. Luckily, there are ways you can tell if your PPC needs fixing. Let’s break down some of the more common ones below.
You’re getting leads, but they’re not converting.
So you have an influx of leads. That’s great — unless those leads aren’t qualified. If you’re sorting through a high number of junk leads, it’s time to revisit your PPC strategy.
There are a few factors that could, well, lead to bad leads. It may be that you’re using too many broad keywords that aren’t specifically targeting your desired audience. Or perhaps you’re not making use of a negative keyword library, which Google defines as “a type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase.”
Targeting prospects at the bottom of the funnel is key to attracting quality leads. Create ads that closely match your keywords, and leverage audience targeting tools that search engines offer. Consider creating single keyword ad groups (SKAGs), which have a one-to-one relationship between the keyword and ad.
You’re not mapping the customer journey.
No matter your industry, your customer journey likely has many stages. By only focusing on one aspect, like driving traffic, you risk having prospects drop off. Luckily, this is easily avoided by mapping the entire customer journey and pinpointing how exactly you can lead people to take the actions you want.
Let’s go back to the traffic example. If you’re only focused on traffic, you may see an uptick, but you won’t see much else. That’s because you’re not making it clear what the next step should be once someone lands on your site. As a result, they bounce.
Focus more attention on how your customers behave and how you can cultivate that one-to-one relationship through the customer journey. Tactics like targeted landing pages that speak directly to search terms and common pain points are a great place to start. It’s not just about educating through your pages (though that’s important, too), but about guiding people to the answers they need.
Your tracking isn’t accurate.
Tracking your PPC performance may seem like table stakes, but you’d be surprised by how many companies don’t do it — or do it wrong.
By not tracking your PPC performance, not only are you flying blind, but you could also be wasting serious ad spend. Whether you work with an agency or an in-house team or you do it yourself, going through your whole site to ensure tracking pixels are in place and firing accordingly will help ensure your tracking is good to go.
Alternatively, your tracking could be tripping you up by double-counting conversions (which inflates ROI without the revenue to back it up) or giving all conversions the same weight.
Implementing lead scoring and measuring conversions as “hard” or “soft” (“hard” is a bottom of the funnel conversion, which would carry more weight) also helps you calculate more accurate figures when it comes to things like cost per acquisition (CPA) and lifetime value (LTV). The latter stands for the overall impact that sale can potentially have on your business throughout your relationship with the customer.
You haven’t determined your top-performing keywords.
Each brand has its own set (or sets) of “money keywords” — those keywords that bring you the most ROI. By identifying these keywords and optimizing for them, you can optimize your PPC campaign accordingly.
This is another place where tracking comes in handy. Proper tracking gives you visibility into what keywords are generating the most quality leads and, ultimately, the most sales. Take time to score your leads; then you can adjust your campaigns based on the quality, score and LTV of those leads.
You don’t know your PPC competitors.
It’s natural to expect that some of your usual competitors will be vying for (i.e., bidding on) the same keywords as you. But in PPC, there’s another layer of competition you might not have considered: your digital competition.
These are the brands that aren’t your direct competitors in terms of products or services, but you’re both bidding on similar keywords. For example, if you’re a service provider, you may find that some of the software as a service (SaaS) companies that offer tools you leverage are bidding on the same keywords as you.
This is yet another reason it’s crucial for your ad copy, landing pages and overall strategy to be targeted and consistent. Think of it this way: If both of your companies show up on the search engine results page (SERP), you want your messaging to make it clear that your offering is the one they’re seeking.
You put your strategy on autopilot.
I get it — tools are great. They make our lives easier and save us time, particularly in the digital marketing space. But if an automated tool is what’s driving your PPC program, you may start seeing your competition catch up and even outpace you.
While it can be tempting to lean heavily on automation, it’s worth remembering that tools simply don’t understand the nuances of your audience. Tools can’t gauge their pain points and behavior. For the best results, you need a human element, with tools to assist. Automation is simply no match for a company with a strong marketing team of passionate humans.
Here’s the takeaway.
As with many aspects of business (and life!), the more you put into your PPC efforts, the more you’re likely to get back. By staying hands-on, paying attention to performance, allocating more budget to what’s working for you and specifically targeting your audience, you can turn an underwhelming PPC program into one that exceeds expectations.
