1. SEO:
   • Methodical
   • Focused on long-term acquisition of market share in the digital marketplace
   • Results seen over long period of time, not immediately
   • Cost-conscious and affordable for most businesses at various levels
2. PPC:
   • Aggressive
   • Short-term gain of clicks, impressions and leads
   • Results can be sustained, but realized very quickly
   • Expensive and sometimes cost prohibitive based on industry

SEO is incredibly important to every company’s long-term success, and there are great ways in which SEO and PPC can work together to create even stronger results. But, this article is a focus on the proper strategies for building up PPC campaigns, how to structure them and when to use them most effectively.

Types of PPC Channels

While PPC might sound like one specific strategy, there’s a lot more that goes into the process of even picking which is the proper channel to engage in with paid ads. Even then, various channels and platforms offer different ways of delivering your ad to users across the web.

The most popular channels that see significant PPC spending is the paid search and paid social media space. While we will address the positives as well as shortcomings of each further in this article, there are many options to consider. From Google to Microsoft or LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter) and more, there are plenty of channels that could help promote your brand and drive more business.

What Kinds of PPC Campaigns go on Which Channels?

Each platform or channel offers many types of advertising. There are a few basics that dominate most of the ad spend with small, medium and large businesses and are the most popular across business scale and industry.

1. Paid Search Ads

These are most common on search engines, think Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising. Paid Search Ads essentially overpower the traditional search results on a Google search result page (SERP) and push your ads that look just like normal, organic search results. Advertisers pay by the click of each of these, but automatically have a “bid” of how much they are willing to pay for a click for the ad to appear. Higher budgets usually lead to more appearances of the ads, leading to more clicks and more conversions. High competition can drive prices up, but finding the right keywords can make this type of advertising very fruitful for any business. It’s no wonder why this is by far the most common form of digital advertising today.

2. Social Media Sponsored Ads

These ads showcase your business in various ways on social media feeds. These are often made to look like a normal post from a friend or business, but only it’s sponsored and with the proper demographic targeting data, can get a product or service in front of the right eyes. This type of advertising is functional for very specific types of businesses, like e-commerce or companies with content/services that have particular virality. Most businesses, even if they think they might, don’t have this very rare asset, and find social media advertising most beneficial for Remarketing.

3. Shopping Ads

Shopping ads are specifically for e-commerce businesses that offer products for sale directly online from their website. With the proper setup, these ads can help drive users to your products without knowing what your business is, but knows they need a product you sell. These ads can help drive new, untapped business without the user even needing to get to your website to purchase.

4. Display Ads

This form of advertising is much more visual and requires more setup work than Paid Search Ads, for example. Display ads often involve some well-produced video content or image assets that help portray your business through visual media, like YouTube or other video streaming. A lot like Discovery Ads on social media platforms, you’re giving your business an identity and a chance to explain what you are trying to sell, with the intention of a user being captivated in the short time they have to convert.

5. Email Display Ads

Not to be confused with Email Marketing with list building and expansive campaigns, Email Display Advertising is somewhat of a hybrid between various forms already mentioned. It combines the emphasis on text content like Paid Search Ads, but shows up in a more passive sense like Social Media Ads. These ads appear in users inboxes, like Gmail inboxes, with a small “ad” tag to differentiate between real, spam and advertising mail. Google charges by the click to open the message. This form of advertising can be used best with specific demographic and audience attributes tailored to who might be the most interested in your product or service.

6. Local Services Ads

One of the newest forms of advertising on Google, these ads put Paid Search Ads to shame with their heightened importance and prevalence on a SERP. These ads appear in the same place as normal Paid Search Ads, but often bump those traditional ads down and showcase at the very top of the page. These ads are available for specific industries that are common enough for search results to generate a Local Services (or often seen as Google Guaranteed) section. This section provides a green checkmark, large info about a business, even an image of the logo or primary contact at the business.

This type of ad requires much more vetting on the backend from Google with verification and identification, but the benefit is that Google gives your ads prime real-estate on the SERP to gather leads. Budgeting is separate from traditional Google Ads, but can be set at any limit, and you are charged per phone call to your business through the ads. In the backend, there are options to see call duration, topic, and at times even a transcript of the initial call to your business.

7. Discovery Ads

This type of advertising is in the same type of virality-necessary type of ad. Showcased in various social media platforms explore pages, this type of ad capitalizes on trending activity and the potential for a completely uninterested person finding your products or services and becoming interested within a timeframe to convert with your business.

What Are Some Downsides to These Types Of PPC Ads?

There are a number of downsides, inefficiencies and items to consider about each type of advertising to make sure it would make the best sense for your business to be spending its hard-earned money. It only makes sense to run ads if it makes a difference for your business and helps improve your bottom line, increasing leads and traffic.

The biggest thing to consider about your business is its recognizability in the marketplace. Are you an established brand with a good reputation in your community beyond just your clients? If so, you have the blessing of being able to be more adventurous in your ads. With brand viability, you can engage in email and display advertising, as well as social media advertising. Those can be difficult for companies to use when starting out as a new business or one with little name recognition, meaning the place to start is almost always Paid Search Ads.

While display ads use the continued emergence of video across the web, the best chance to convert is with clips of well-produced video. A lot of businesses either 1) don’t have video ready to use or 2) don’t have the content or capacity to create such videos. It can be a losing effort to push hard for the video content when it has a more difficult chance of converting users to new leads.

The Social Media Ads Asterisk*

Social media ads are controversial. Many businesses think of this type of advertising first, but without certain brand recognition, conversion rates are untenable. Given the passive nature of social media, getting someone to click on your ad who wasn’t particularly looking for what your business can provide is a monumental task, and one that has proven time and time again that it doesn’t work for a majority of businesses.

One aspect where it can provide some value on the offensive, is more awareness with a Retargeting campaign through social media ads.

Retargeting campaigns take a tracking pixel associated with users who already visited your site at some point, and finds ways to show them ads for your business, keeping your company at top of mind for someone who has interest in your services or products and is more likely to convert. Your digital marketing partner will be able to set these ads up in short order and bring some value to social media ads.

PPC Ads In A Nutshell

It’s a major commitment for any business to make the leap and start running digital advertisements. It’s important business leaders have the right information, strategies and team in place to implement any ads that are aiming to drive more leads and revenue.

Paid Search Ads are a great place to start, and these can be easily set up with little background information and the help of a digital marketing. When venturing into the more advanced forms of advertising, it’s important to realistically understand where your business is in the marketplace from a reputation, awareness and competitive standpoint.

If you’re ready to jump in to PPC advertising, contact our expert team at DigitalParc to help you get started right away.

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Google’s search engine has major algorithm updates and changes all the time, with five or six core updates each year and more minor ones every day. But what about the trends within pay-per-click ads? What methods will work well for the upcoming year to help maximize your ad spend dollars and result in more efficient leads and loyal customers? Read below for some trends you can employ in your PPC campaigns for cost-effective, productive ads.

Smart Bidding

Smart bidding has become incredibly efficient in recent years. If your paid ads campaign isn’t employing a strategy that involves smart bidding, it could be falling behind your competitors.

Bidding strategies have evolved past just maximizing clicks to generate leads. As Google’s AI has evolved, it is much better at predicting user behavior from search history of users and those who have already interacted with your business and those in similar industries. Smart bidding strategies such as Maximizing Conversions with Target CPAs or setting a Target ROAS (return on ad spend) can help Google best spend your budget. These are key to maximizing efficiency and reducing budget wasted on clicks that are less likely to proceed through the sales funnel into a worthwhile lead or customer for your business.

Understanding Value Of Leads 

The best trends sometimes can be the tried-and-true ones. That is absolutely evident in businesses understanding some of the basics of their leads and customer base. Google’s AI is continually getting better at understanding more context around searches on its platform. The Google Ads interface has also been making it easier to enter contextual data about your business so it can learn best where to serve ads.

If your business has a major sales performance management software, there’s a chance it could be integrated with Google Ads to import anonymous data points that can help the system learn more about your core customer base, and therefore serve good ads to people that are most likely to convert.

Additionally, take advantage of the various inputs like conversion value to give signals to Google on what type of leads are the best for your business. Assign dollar values to phone calls, form submissions or other types of conversions to show which bids and conversions to prioritize more than others. Are mobile users more valuable than those on desktop? That prioritization is customizable, too, so your business is using its ad spend more efficiently.

Try New Ad Types

If your business has engaged in Google Ads in recent years, you likely did most of your advertising via Expanded Text Search Ads. One of the most notable items of 2022 is that Google phased out that type of ad and stopped allowing those to run in June. This basic type of ad is best left in the past, though, as Google has developed much broader and effective ad types to choose from.

The most common replacement for Expanded Text Ads is the Responsive Search Ad. RSAs offer more headline and description options and allow for more programmability for location and service to more keywords.

To diversify your ad serving and capture a higher market share, consider adding different types of ads and compliment your existing targets. Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are incredibly valuable in that they capture targeting related to your web content and searches that the account administrator may have missed. While your attempt is to be as thorough as possible, often search habits change faster than the data can tell you to manually adjust it. DSAs help make up that gap in your ad serving on the search network. Display Ads are important for serving on website ad space, videos and other articles online. This can help capture users on sites related to your business and videos about services or products you offer, different than search ads where there is some more initiative from the end-user to see the ad in the first place. Local Search Ads are relatively new to the Google Ads realm, helping serve ads specifically to local service searches that show up in maps and in Google’s new “screened” ads section for certain industries.

In Summary

Google’s Ads platform is evolving as fast as many other parts of the web, so it’s important to keep up on what can make a difference for your business for the better and rise above the competition. DigitalParc’s PPC experts are ready to manage your ads campaigns and help your business thrive. Our experienced pay-per-click team has more than 10 years of working with Google Ads, as well as other online ad portals, so we have the background to effectively give your ads the best shot of succeeding with users. We have also been recognized by Expertise.com among the Best Pay-Per-Click Agencies in Minneapolis in 2022.

Contact DigitalParc today at 612-845-5590 or fill out our form for your digital advertising needs!

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Luckily, there is now a way to give your potential customers reminders of your product or service after they have left your site. This is accomplished through the use of Google remarketing tags. The process for creating the tags is simple. A small section of code will be placed on various pages of your website. Once a user visits this page, they can be added to the remarketing list for specific terms, and they are accessible to you outside of your website. There are three highly effective ways to utilize this marketing tactic and bring back the wayward sheep of your customer flock.

Remarketing for Paid Advertising

The first Google remarketing method is utilized through PPC advertising. You can create a customized campaign for those who are on your remarketing list. You have the option to choose which keywords you want your ad to display for. If you have an individual who visited your site and viewed the “Televisions” page, you can then make sure that your ads appear the next time they search Google for “TV or Television”. Also, you can customize your PPC advertising bid for those on your remarketing list, meaning that you can bid higher amounts for those valuable potential customers.

Remarketing on Google’s Display Network

If you want to make an impression outside of your website and the Google search section, you also have the option to remarket on the Google display network. Your ad will have the potential to show on specific Google partner websites when a remarketing customer reaches their page. If you have a remarketing set for any ski-related terms, you can make your ski ads appear on Aspen vacation websites and provide a complimentary item to what the partner website has to offer.

Dynamic Remarketing

If you want to create a highly personalized advertisement that will appeal to a very specific customer group, you can participate in dynamic remarketing. This process allows you to tailor a custom ad that can display specific products or prices, and certain calls to action for a potential customer that may have put an item in their cart or compared specific products. This approach can be very useful for bringing back a customer who was previously on the fence. However, this type of remarketing should be used sparingly and intelligently.

Remarketing on Google can be a great tool in the utility belt of any savvy marketer. The key is to make sure that your message is consistent across all mediums, and you present your product in an inviting way without becoming overbearing. Good luck in your marketing efforts and thanks for reading!

-By Evan Wright

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SEM Rush. Unlike Google’s Keyword Planner Tool, SEM Rush compares your SEO and pay per click (PPC) information together. You will get a clear view of how your keywords are performing and how your competitors are performing using their keywords. It will also tell you how many times your brand name appears on the major search engines. In addition, you can use it to monitor the backlinks of your competitors. SEM Rush offers a free version.

Monitor Backlinks. This is a great tool for backlink analysis. This tool provides you with a clear view of the quality of your links. The report is incredibly easy to understand and you can instantly see where your backlinks lead to, whether they are “follow” or “nofollow” and how relevant they are. As of this article’s writing, you can evaluate one website per week under the free version.

Majestic SEO. This tool is beneficial when it comes to analyzing your backlinks as well. Majestic SEO allows you to easy monitor the backlinks of your competition and know exactly how relevant each backlink is. Of course you can monitor your own backlinks and understand how each one affects your search engine rankings.

Woorank. This offers a complete SEO analysis of your main site as well as your internal pages. You simply need to type in a URL to analyze and it will give you an entire form of SEO quality information. It will tell you what aspects of your site need to be improved for SEO purposes and will even develop a marketing plan for you. It will alert you to any major issues like broken links. You can also use it to analyze the quality of your competitors’ sites.

Screaming Frog. This tool will examine your site in the same manner that Google bots do. It will then provide you with a report that allows you to understand the quality of each of your website’s pages and how they compare with the quality of your competitors’ pages.

Using any of the five digital marketing and SEO tools above will give you a strong advantage over your competitors because it is likely that they do not know about them. To learn more about your SEO, digital marketing or web design options, feel free to contact DigitalParc today.

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You are focusing on the wrong things

The number one factor you should be focusing on when launching your advertisements is sales and profit, not the number of visits to your site. When your ad drives a lot of clicks, the cost of each click goes up. If your site is not converting, then you will find yourself losing money quickly. We recommend bidding on keywords that are not as competitive but still inspire buying habits.

Keywords and content do not match

When you prepare your content for the ad, the content must be consistent with the keywords that you bid on. When Google assesses your ad, it gives it a quality score. The higher the score, the less you will have to spend on bids. If you hastily create your ads, you will get charged more per click for having a lower score. Conversely, ads with poor content are not going to convert, which will cost you more money.

You do not use proper keyword matching

Google supplies you with a broad matching program in its keyword planner. This tool will give you an idea on what keywords to pursue, but you should not trust it completely. Dig a little deeper to come up with more conclusive data to match the buyer’s intention. If you take a very limited approach to your keyword research, you could lose a lot of money. Google has more specific features to help you learn more about the buying intention of your audience, including its Exact Match, Phrase Match, and Negative Keywords options.

You leave your bidding strategy unmanaged

Starting an Adwords campaign without any strategic planning will probably get you nowhere. Not only should you plan extensively before you launch a campaign; you should constantly manage your process and make sure that you are not spending too much. It is helpful to monitor what keywords are driving the most profitable sales and comparing them to what keywords are driving the most visitors. It is all about finding the customers who are the most likely to convert.

You leave your campaign unsupervised

There are ways to improve upon your campaigns after they have launched. You do not have to stick to your original terms. You can make your ad target a specific region. This may cost more money immediately, but if changing your radius leads into more conversions, it will be well worth it. If you end up spending more money than you planned, make sure it was intentional. Do not simply let your funds drain away through ineffective marketing.

There you have it! Make sure you implement the right strategy and pay close attention to the progress of your campaign. It takes a lot of work to run a successful PPC campaign, but if managed correctly, you might see a massive generation in revenue. If you are intrigued by the prospect of lead generation and higher conversion rates through PPC, contact DigitalParc and learn about our PPC advertising solutions. We have been selected as one of the Top PPC Management Agencies In Minnesota by DesignRush.

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How Biased Habits Affect PPC Performance

Keeping with Tradition

Habits developed from years of experience tend to make people more efficient managers. With PPC and online marketing, however, those habits might actually work against you. Take Bing versus Google for example. Google tends to be the more popular target when it comes to SEO and PPC ad space. Part of that has to do with the difference in their universal event tracking (UET). The other part, however, stems from the assumption that Google carries more weight, and therefore should be given more attention. Limiting your efforts to only certain campaigns can, in the end, do you a disservice. Although Google definitely gets more traffic, failing to test Bing Ads when taking on new clients can seriously impact the traffic on your site.

Segment Campaigns by Match Type

As humans, we are never as open to change as we’d like to think we are. Once we find a comfortable way of doing things, we stick to it. Managers operate in the same way. For example, PPC managers either do, or do not segment ad groups by match type. That’s a decision that, as Middleton points out, likely stems from earlier on in their careers when they were still learning based on someone else’s own experience and biases. Whether you do or do not segment campaigns, try doing the opposite for a quarter and see if the change has any affect on your campaign. After all, it never hurts to try new things.

Formatting Ad Copy

How you write your ad copy plays a huge role in the success of your campaign. Some people KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) and others use very descriptive language. Unfortunately, like management itself, writing ad copy is a craft that has no universal formula. It requires constant testing, reworking, and more retesting to figure out what tends to work for your specific niche. Be sure to take your time and test out new copy that you write for Bing Ads and Adwords. You may not understand, or even like each ad that you write, but it’s important that you try and understand why it does or does not work.

Finally, always remember that your style of management is your own. As aforementioned, there is no universally correct way to run a PPC campaign. Take all the advice that you get at face value. Test it before you decide to fully dedicate to it, or implement it in your campaign.

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