Top 3 PPC Marketing Objectives & Challenges for 2012
The goal for any paid search campaign should be to support your overall business objectives. How each Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign accomplishes this depends on the nature of your business.
Our friends at MarketingSherpa have just come out with their latest benchmark report on PPC - MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition. As usual, it’s a wealth of information for digital marketing agencies like ours since it helps us see what the latest trends are in paid search, as well as what’s working and what’s not.
According to Marketing Sherpa, the top three objectives for PPC campaigns are:
- Increasing web traffic
- Increasing lead generation (especially if you are a B2B company)
- Increasing only sales revenue
While these objectives are to be expected, what’s interesting about the chart are the challenges. Increasing traffic is not that hard to accomplish. What they discovered is that it’s difficult to increase your number of leads and it’s equally hard to achieve or increase measurable ROI. Since traffic is not that hard to accomplish, the trick is to make sure more of your traffic converts to leads and that those leads are good enough to eventually translate into sales.
We come up against these challenges all of the time, and as much as we’d like to offer an easy fix, there really isn’t one. But here are three ways we’ve found to get the most out of the traffic we generate from our PPC campaigns.
1. Create highly targeted ad groups. Achieving high conversion rates often comes down to segmentation and creating small, highly relevant ad groups. For example, if you are selling auto insurance, how you appeal to a new driver is different than how you attract a senior. The copy you create for the one is going to be different than the copy you write for the other. What this often means to a robust PPC program is that there are many different ad groups that you have to monitor and measure. And within each ad group, you have to determine which keywords are performing best and giving you the best ROI.
2. It’s the landing page, stupid. All the good PPC ads in the world can’t help a terrible landing page. Send your PPC ads to either a home page or a generic landing page that works for thousands of keywords and you’re throwing money away. When creating a landing page you need to make sure there is:
- A logical path from the ad to the landing page
- A clear value proposition on the landing page that relates directly to the PPC ad itself
- An offer and call to action that is crystal clear and prominent
- A lack of unnecessary distractions on the landing page, like navigation bars or information that does not relate to the offer
3. Test. Yes, A/B testing is hard and takes a concerted effort. And most people don’t do it. In fact, MarketingSherpa found that only 33% of organizations split test landing pages. But here’s why it’s worth it. More than 50% of these same marketers found split testing landing pages to be very effective in achieving marketing objectives. So why don’t more do it? Like we said, it’s difficult. When it came to degree of difficulty in PPC tactics, split testing landing pages and creating relevant ad copy for each ad group were ranked the most difficult.
A Final Note
We found it interesting that the fourth biggest challenge was developing an effective and methodical strategy. We buy that. However, only 23% of marketers surveyed thought having a strategy worthy of being an objective. In our experience, not having a strategy where you can set your goals and determine your approach is really the best way to point your ROI downwards.
The Bing Factor
Having a strategy allows you to take full advantage of the opportunities. For example, your strategy might lead you directly to using Bing for paid search, whereas without a strategy you may not have even considered it. In one of our recent blog posts we reported that you may find PPC cost savings of 50-70% on Bing due to the lower competition.
Find out more how Bing can help your PPC. Get our free "Simple Guide to Importing Google AdWords into Bing."
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