If your PPC campaigns were unsuccessful in terms of expected performance or revenue, not all is lost and these campaigns can still be extremely valuable to your business. Since all PPC campaigns hold vast amounts of information, it’s just a matter of asking the right questions to make the most out of them.
1. Is there a real interest in my products or services?
The first thing you can find out from your PPC campaigns is whether your target audience is actually interested in your services or products. Perhaps you have done a fair bit of market research about your target audience, what their expectations and behaviours are. You probably have a well researched keyword structure in place too. However, the real interest and potential shows only when your PPC campaigns actually go live.
2. Are my products, pricing and values for customers set correctly?
If your PPC campaigns have a fairly good CTR and generated some conversions, but failed to gain a significant traction, there may be other factors at play. By looking at PPC data and customer feedback you should be able to identify and potentially fix any issues related to the product price or the features.
3. Targeting the right customer?
Google holds a huge amount of information about the users and visitors clicking on your ads. This information is readily available and can be useful for other forms of marketing (social, SEO) It can come as a surprise to see that the age of your best converting audience is 65+, while you’ve been mainly targeting <35.
4. How long is your customer’s buying cycle?
PPC campaigns are often done as trials for 2-3 months time to see if there is any potential or if it “ works”. But what if the user’s buying cycle is longer than this period? This is a typical situation for a higher value products such as cars or holidays, where potential clients tend to spend more time doing their research and evaluating competitive offers.
This can be easily identified by looking at different attribution models in Analytics and taken into consideration when evaluating your PPC performance.
5. How important is brand awareness when deciding?
Brand awareness is another crucial aspect when it comes to online marketing. If you are entering a new market or a new channel, you will be up against a number of well established players with a significant following. Due to the lack of historical data it may be difficult to set your KPIs accurately and to allocate sufficient resources to your marketing campaigns. By reviewing your competitor’s bidding on the same keywords and your existing impression share metrics, you’ll have a better understanding of what it takes to compete effectively in that market. Perhaps focusing on building brand awareness may be a more appropriate strategy to go for.
6. Is my customer on mobile or desktop?
In today’s world it’s hardly a surprise that many of us use more than one device for our online activities. It’s quite common to enter the customer journey or the buying cycle on one device and to complete it on another one a few days later. It’s crucial to understand what are the entry and exit points of your best performing audiences and give credit to all the touchpoints appropriately. Otherwise you may end up spending your budgets advertising on desktops only to find out that all of your conversions have actually taken place on mobiles.
We believe in data driven digital marketing here at Anicca and that’s why we see even the less successful campaigns simply as opportunities to begin again, but this time more intelligently.
If you had a similar experience in the past and would like us to help you answer these questions, get in touch with us here at Anicca or come and see us at our E-Commercial Conference on 31st October.
