Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click Ads.
Experience – More than a dozen years ago I was fortunate enough to run one of the larger independent Pay Per Click campaigns for a small business. They spent, at that time what I thought, and still is, a lot of money, over 10K a month. Small in comparison to campaigns I’ve run since then that have spent that in a week. But that was enough experience for me to really dig in and learn how to make a Google campaign successful.
There are a lot of buzz words you hear surrounding marketing but what it comes down to is how much do you spend per sale in your marketing. What we do here is specifically digital marketing. What you want to know is your ROAS or Return On Ad Spend.
In my early years I had great success when I was able to get a supplier in the home improvement market to increase their conversion rate by over 500%. That means qualified prospects were finding them and inquiring. They had to increase their sales staff.
For several years I dabbled in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay Per Click campaigns (PPC) mainly by setting up basic accounts for small business clients based on their primary key words. But more than a dozen years ago now I was fortunate enough to be given the experience spent nearly $10,000.00 a month on Adwords and I managed it for a year and a half. During this time I increased conversions over 100% from previous “SEO Experts” who not only set up the account but others that were hired to run it before I was there.
Working with PPC is no different than any of the SEO work. It needs to follow the service providers instructions and it needs to be executed well. If you are working with Google for example, you have quite a bit of reading to do to find out exactly what are the things they look for and just what they now consider “bad practices” or black-hat. Just follow the instructions of good practices, don’t leave any stone unturned, hard work and you will be rewarded.
First, allow me to clarify some terms for persons new to this. You have 2 really important factors that you keep an eye on to detect when things are not right. These trigger you to look deeper, your CTR or Click Through Rate and your Conversions. Click Through Rate is just what it sounds like the number or percentage of people that Click Through your ads and go to your website. Conversions are whatever action you set it for that is considered a conversion. It can be making a purchase or for them it was the prospective client making contact about a product. Of course there is tons of data to look over and tweak this and that but if you are not in a position to do that and you need to look quickly at what is going on you need to keep a close eye on those two.
One of the bog buzz words now on Digital Marketing is ROAS or Return On Ad Spend. That’s important right? In order to do that you need to have all the proper tracking in place and an entire workflow to follow it end to end.
In the first year the changes and adjustments made increased the “conversion rate” over 100% meaning the number of people that actually contacted Stone-Mart about products doubled from their Adwords (now Google Ads). We had conversion rates as high as nearly 4%. To put that into perspective you can search this and learn that Google will tell you that if you get 2% on a “Click Through” rate you have a successful campaign and are doing good. They suggest a 1% conversion rate is doing well. Their campaigns were so successful that Google used them to collect data with. Literally, they contacted me and let us know they wanted to use the account for testing. Quite an honor.