As part of our series on digital marketing, I wanted to cover the area that most people think of first – PPC Campaigns. At Big Red, we cover two main paid campaigns; 1) Google Ads and 2) social media ad campaigns. The main principles I’ll outline below are relevant for both campaigns, although the specifics for each platform is slightly different.

People run campaigns for many reasons, and the main one is to increase the volume of traffic to their website, which should in turn convert them to a lead, enquiry or sales. It takes time for ‘organic’ rankings to settle in, and oftentimes markets can be crowded, and so instead of waiting for the boost in numbers to happen naturally, you can pay for top rankings, or for your adverts to appear in relevant feeds on social media.

What is a PPC Campaign?

In short, a PPC campaign is a model used in digital marketing to help drive traffic to a website or social media feed. The advertiser only pays when someone clicks on their page. Costs per click vary, and depend on the popularity of the keyword because it works on a bidding system. This means that the more people who want to appear for a specific search term, the more expensive that term will be.

Usually people would employ a PPC campaign to increase their website traffic with the aim of attracting relevant users who would be interested in their product/service.

PPM

There are other models that also work well for our clients including payment per impression (or Pay Per Mille, PPM). This is where you pay a set price per 1000 people who have your advert appear on their screen, whether they click or not. This can help with brand/name recognition, and is a less expensive method than PPC.

This usually has a lower conversion rate for clicks to a website, but if you are looking to solely increase your awareness in the market, it can be a useful tool.

What can it do for your business?

PPC campaigns can have several impacts to your marketing and sales generation –

- It provides instant, trackable and measurable results.

- It can help you boost your organic SEO work, which can take longer to produce results. This is especially true if you are a newer entrant into an established market.

- You can be very specific about who and where you are targeting to maximise your spend.

- Your adverts can include dynamic search terms, and remarketing campaigns, to tailor them to your specific audience and produce a higher return.

- You remain in control of your spend.

Why Outsource Your PPC Campaigns?

We know you can run your own PPC campaign. So why should you outsource it? We get asked this, a lot. And the short answer is because the experts will deliver you better results, faster.

Design

Setting up a campaign involves a lot of thought and planning – you’ll need to choose the right type of advert (display/text, content) in the right place (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) for your goal (which sometimes is undefined by our clients at the outset).

Research

Keyword research is vital to make sure you are targeting the right term for your end goal, and budget. It takes time and expertise to do this properly. For example, if you are in a saturated market, it can be costly to go for terms that are in high demand. Oftentimes we make recommendations to our clients to go for a mix of relevant terms which can spread their cost per click, and give higher returns for their spend.

Negative keywords are just as important! These are the terms you’d want to exclude your advert appearing for and this can eliminate waste in a campaign. For example, if you sell Doc Martin steel-toe capped boots for building sites, you wouldn’t want to attract those people who are looking for the traditional Doc Martin boots. Taking time to do your research will pay dividends in the future, but most people don’t have the time or skill to do this properly.

Time

All of this takes time to understand and perfect, and if you don’t have the background or expertise in-house to perfect this art, and truly focus on campaigns, this can be costly to you as a business. This is why we can achieve higher returns for our clients than they can produce themselves – because this is our business. We have spent the time understanding the intricacies involved in running successful campaigns, have partnerships with the platforms to keep up to date with their constant changes, and it is this expertise you are buying when you outsource your digital marketing campaign to us.

Results

In addition, at Big Red, we give you monthly reports to tell you exactly what we’ve done – and we are on hand to explain what they mean! We always share Analytics with our clients on all web and marketing projects we work on, but also take the time to explain the data, and make recommendations to ensure we continue to deliver results to our clients. This reporting is vital to those marketers who are justifying the cost to their CEOs and reporting to the sales team on the results achieved.

It can take time to make it work – just like business investors look at their investment over a period of years, a PPC campaign (although it can be checked and amended daily) should look at trends over a longer period. We run 12-month campaigns for our clients, which gives us time to work on their behalf and look at seasonality, success and tweaks to ensure we can deliver, every time.

We’re confident in our service, and have the results to prove it! See here for some of the remarkable ROI we have achieved for clients. If you’d like to see a better return on your paid campaigns, get in touch with me to start the process today.