When using paid advertising of any type it is important to really think the whole process through. Since you’re spending your hard earned money on the ads, you do have some risk that if it doesn’t convert well that you’ll end up losing a significant amount of money. What is nice about PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) ad campaigns compared to most other options, however, is that you will have a lot more variables that you can use to improve the outcome of the campaign. This, however, does require some additional planning up front. Bing Ads has provided some great tips and strategies that can help to improve your overall ROI with your campaign.
Targeting Lifetime Customers
One of the first mistakes marketers make when running any type of PPC ad campaign is that they are looking to make their next sale. While sales are obviously a good thing, they are not (or should not be) the number one goal of the campaign. Your primary goal is to find your next lifetime customer. This means not only tweaking your campaign to find people who may be interested in making a purchase, but optimizing it in such a way that you get your product or service in front of people who can truly benefit from it.
Sustainable Marketing
Another thing that you should be thinking about when planning a PPC campaign is how you can reduce the need for a PPC campaign over time. Of course, you will likely always want to run PPC campaigns to grow your business, but when you optimize your overall marketing strategy, PPC can help build brand recognition and loyalty. This will, over time, lead to a larger amount of organic traffic. This organic traffic is likely to convert better, and of course it will be free.
The following web analytics channels chart provided by Bing helps to illustrate how you can start moving a certain percentage of your traffic from PPC to organic:
Taking Measurements
While businesses do need to look for quick returns on investment sometimes, they also need to be planning for the future. One of the most important things you can do to improve your results long term is to track your progress today. This means having analytics and other data gathering strategies in place. Measuring your progress over time will help give you the information you need to know what is going to work, and what isn’t. This will also let you tweak your strategies along the way to get better returns.
Of course, all the information in the world is useless if you don’t know how to interpret it. Look at the following image from Bing Ads that shows some key points to understand in your analytics:
With proper planning and implementation, PPC and SEM can provide both immediate results and significant long term growth opportunities. If you don’t take the time up front to get them set up properly, however, they can be a source of constant frustration and even loss of capital. Learning to run these types of marketing can be difficult at first, but it will pay off in the long run.
