PPC Advertising... Top Tips

In general, PPC (pay per click) costs are rising, and campaigns tend to be complicated to set up. You're not alone if you're worried about the complexity, and about costs going out of control with PPC. However, if you choose your platform wisely, it can in fact, be easy to control and straightforward to set up.

PPC Complexity

Companies drop cookies on your devices and know more about you than ever before. They know where you live, what you’ve shopped for recently, the items you’re interested in, your hobbies… they can almost tell what you ate for breakfast this morning! Targeting is becoming ever more advanced, and therefore setting up campaigns can be very involved. 

If you're new to PPC, but you're keen to try it out, it's best to start with a platform that offers easy set up, via a simple interface, with easy to understand targeting methods, such as LikesXL.

Rising Costs

PPC is becoming a pricey option, with competitive keywords costing a fortune. Wordstream estimate that the Top Ten most expensive keywords are as follows:

• Insurance
• Loans
• Mortgage
• Attorney
• Credit
• Lawyer
• Donate
• Degree
• Hosting
• Claim

Some companies can pay £70 per click for an expensive keyword, which is staggering.

PPC used to be an affordable way for small businesses to gain visibility online, however now with competition from giant companies with equally massive marketing budgets, we find the smaller guys are being pushed out. And the cost continues to rise.

This is where the LikesXL PPC option becomes even more attractive than usual! Because the platform charges a flat rate of €0.06 per click, no matter what the keyword or ad, it makes PPC a very affordable option for smaller advertisers, and potentially an extremely attractive option for larger ones, especially if they operate within a very competitive market place.

Mobile Growth

Mobile traffic is increasing, with mobile devices now taking the lion’s share of all traffic globally. When advertising using the classic PPC platforms, advertisers need to think about targeting mobile users with mobile optimised ads instead of simply pushing desktop ads to mobiles and thinking that’s good enough.

Mobile and desktop traffic behave differently, so in the same way as we must ensure that our sites are optimised for mobile devices, we also have to ensure we optimise our ads for mobile users too.

Success Criteria

We must accept that the customer journey is now extremely complex, across multiple devices, websites, shopping portals etc. We all consume ads and content at an alarming rate whilst researching a product before actually reaching the conversion point. The same applies to PPC, so a paid ad may trigger a decision, but the actual journey thereafter, will often involve cross device, cross channel or even offline activity, then the paid ad won’t be attributed the conversion.

When this happens, the PPC campaign doesn’t get the credit because there’s simply no way to track it. Put another way, our customer journey may have been tracked and influenced when visiting touch points X, Y and Z before starting a new, totally separate and untracked journey at point A. LikesXL represents an example of point A in the above scenario.

Cross channel/device/off and online tracking is a universally understood issue that has been challenging software developers for years. Despite this, the reality is that PPC budgets tend to be increasing year on year, with hot favourites seeming to be text ads on Mobile, AdWords and Facebook. There are other newcomers in the PPC arena growing in popularity too… enter LikesXL!

With customer journeys becoming ever more involved, rapid, complex and involving membership sites where activity behind logins cannot be tracked, advertisers need to open up to the potential that new platforms offer. 

Audiences are becoming more involved in membership and community sites, no doubt because most of us like the feeling of being 'involved', 'connected' and 'a part' of something. As advertisers, we can't control our audiences, and we can't track their every move, but we can make sure we are where they are likely to be, such as on LikesXL!

Generating Leads Online: A "How To" Guide

There are many ways to generate leads. Some methods like Pay-To-Click or Pay-Per-Click can offer virtually immediate exposure. Others can take long time to develop before you start to see the benefits. generally speaking, it's a good idea to include an element of short term and longer term lead generation strategies.

Lead Generation Via PPC & PTC

Pay-Per-Click advertising, involves bidding individually on keywords in such a way as to out-bid your competitors to win the clicks of people searching fro your chosen keyword. To understand bidding basics, the Google Guide is very helpful and informative. Targeted carefully, starting with small budgets, low bids and regular meticulous optimisation, PPC can yield good results. The obvious benefits are a very quick launch to the top of the search engines, creating maximum visibility in the shortest time. 

The main players in the PPC arena are Google AdWords and Bing. In my experience, the customer profile of the two is very different, so that you cannot assume simply copying a campaign over from AdWords into Bing, or vice versa, will necessarily work. However, both platforms, when optimised properly, can indeed produce fantastic results, over time.  The disadvantage of these platforms is that competitive keywords can be extremely expensive, costing anything up to €10 per click or more. Obviously if a campaign is not set up carefully, a large budget can be burnt through in minutes for little return. 

Compare this with exchange platforms, which also offer PPC and in addition, PTC (Pay-To-Click) advertising, both of which which can be extremely cost effective. LikesXL for example, offers extremely competitive pricing structures, and bidding set up in such a way that more competitive keywords are no more expensive than others... in fact there is a flat rate charged across the board.

So for example, bidding on a keyword on one of the top two PPC platforms may cost you €10, whereas on LikesXL it will cost a tiny fraction of this. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most of the keywords you will bid on using likesXL, you will pay a fraction of the price normally charged by other PPC networks. 

This is a massive advantage for companies operating in competitive marketplaces, and many are yet to wake up to this golden opportunity.

The other unique advantage of LikesXL, is that chances are you will be benefiting from advertising alongside top brands and household names.

Targeting systems on LikesXL are being continually improved, and the audience is growing rapidly every day. Watch this space!

Lead Generation Via On-site Optimisation

It seems that the most popular method of lead generation by businesses the world over, remains getting their website to the top in the natural rankings by optimisation.

Why? If your site is at the top, more people will find it, and you will therefore normally generate more leads. The beauty of this technique, is that the leads you generate are free.

FREE? Yup. Once you are at the top for specific keywords or phrases that convert well for you, you will inevitably enjoy a stream of leads coming through that won’t cost you a cent!

Getting your site up the natural rankings for your chosen keywords is an art. Conduct keyword research to find keywords that are not competitive, but are the kind of search terms your target market will be typing into search engines.

  

You need to select your target keywords carefully, choosing those that are not too competitive, and therefore where you stand a chance of getting to the top. If you choose a keyword that has massive competition, chances are that all your efforts will be a waste of time, because you’ll never get anywhere near page one, let alone position one on page one!

Once you have a strong keyword list, you can structure your on-site optimisation around it.

For example, choose short, concise page titles, and include one of your important keywords in each title, making sure that you keep the content on the page relevant to the page title.

Tips on improving your Google rankings:

• Regularly update your content, keeping it fresh, unique and interesting
• Make sure your site is easy to navigate, so that visitors can easily move from page to page
• Keep your site uncluttered so that visitors can find what they are looking for easily… Google calls this having a “good user experience”
• Use lots of images to break up blocks of text
• Keep a Blog and post regularly. Make sure your content is useful and unique
• Keep text short and punchy. Long, rambling blocks of content are a real turn-off
• Feature site-wide, multiple calls-to-action. Every visitor is valuable, so entice your audience as much as you can to subscribe, download, contact you or make a purchase. Have Call-To-Action buttons in main content, in side-bars and your footer
• Ensure your Call-To-Action buttons are large with bold colours and compelling text prompts
• Make sure it is very easy for your visitors to understand your pricing structure
• Help your prospects keep within their budgets by categorizing your products according to price ranges
• Access to lead generation forms should be present in both your main content and sidebars

Lead Generation Via Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO is also a vitally important part of the marketing mix, to help your site climb to the top of the natural rankings.

One of the most effective things you can do is to find high ranking websites and link to their Home page, or better still, persuade them to link through to your site from THEIR Home page.

Also:

• Find broken links on your site and either mend them or remove them
• Remove toxic backlinks, as these will have a big negative effect on your natural rankings
• Make sure you have lots of outbound links that go to Authority websites. For every piece of content you publish, link to at least three sites that offer quality, relevant information. 

  

Lead Generation Via Email Marketing

Although email marketing seems to have been around for eons, it continues to be extremely popular with all businesses large and small. Email marketing now involves high tec. targeting methods and tracking software, which when you are on the receiving end, can feel a little bit like Big Brother is Watching You!

Automated email generation is big business, with B2B systems thought to be increasing revenue generated in this way by approximately 50% year on year, with eMarketer.com stating that some companies have seen conversion rates from email campaigns up to a remarkable 50%!

If proper email marketing techniques are used and executed, with relevant emails sent to your database at the right time in the buying cycle, this form of marketing exercise can be a highly effective method of lead generation.

Lead Generation Via Social Media

Research tells us that both SEO and content marketing via Blogs and Social Media are becoming increasingly important, and are now perceived as vital parts of the Marketing Mix for the vast majority of companies wanting to generate leads, increase sales or build brand awareness online. 

A great way to benefit from the huge popularity of Social Media channels is to have links to your pages on all the major platforms from your footer. Linking your site in this way provides visitors with a quick and easy route to your Social Media pages and posts. Maintaining a steady stream of new posts and unique content on these platforms will help support your SEO and improve your position in the natural rankings.

In addition, paid ads on Social Media channels is now a massive growth area, that many businesses are using as efficient methods of lead generation. 

Summary

If you are in business, lead generation will undoubtedly be at the heart and soul of your daily activities. Whether online or in a traditional shop on the High St., you will be looking to convert visitors into paying customers.

The key to success, is to get up close and personal with as many digital forms of lead generation as you can. To side step digital marketing is a mistake I’m not sure anyone can afford to make these days, if they expect to survive. Grab the bull by the horns and utilise all the tools available to you.

Start today with LikesXL targeted ads. Utilise the platform properly, and you’ll be generating more leads than you can handle!

How To Make Your Ads Work Harder

Do you find online marketing easy? Maybe not.

The online world of advertising becomes more competitive daily. How do you stand out in such a crowded market, when (as rumour has it) most of us are exposed to one ad every 11 seconds of every waking minute!

Getting noticed in a crowd is not easy

Most of us business folk use paid search and social media ads to promote our wares, but how do you get more bang for your buck? We need a solid return on spend or we may as well pack up now and go home.

Where do we start? 

Well, we first need to identify where your customers are. If you have a website selling running shoes, you might be able to get your ad on the website of your local gym or running club, but chances are the sales coming in from that source won’t keep you in energy bars for very long.

So we need to spread the net further and wider, over as many channels as possible, in order to generate sales that will make you and your bank manager happy.

That sounds easy, but where? And how?

Finding where to place your ads yourself is difficult, time consuming and quite frankly, pretty demoralising.

So let’s work backwards. 

You want your brand message to be seen by as many people as possible. You want to be able to get your ads in front of people who are likely to buy. You want the set up to be as easy as possible, and you don’t want to pay agency fees on top, or be tied in to a long contract.

Lastly, but certainly not least, you want to appear alongside top brands, and benefit from the “being sold on the same shelf” scenario.

That’s a long list. Surely that’s not possible?

How to get eyes on your pages

Ah ha! Allow me to introduce you to the concept of the exchange platform, in particular, the LikesXL platform.

This is a very special exchange platform which is kind of like a supermarket of websites, blogs, promotional videos and landing pages, that uniquely also offers a huge engaged audience. Ad agencies love us for this, but also because they can buy ad space in bulk, which saves them a huge amount of time and effort. LikesXL also deliver targeted views and engaged clicks… the Holy Grail in digital marketing.

To try to generate this kind of exposure on your own is a massive task. Why spend all that time and effort when there is a platform already set up that can do the job for you, very effectively too.

LikesXL... first off the blocks

Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry, and exchange platforms have earned their place on the grid. They offer a serious proposition, and are intent on what they do. In particular, LikesXL is first off the blocks within this exciting industry to offer totally unique and highly attractive packages for large corporate advertisers. 

The market is yours for the taking

If you use the platform correctly, it will generate brand exposure, leads and sales for you, in a way that is out of reach until you are generating big traffic to your site unilaterally. The platform offers a win-win situation.

If you are already advertising on other networks or platforms… no problem. You won’t be asked to enter an exclusivity deal, or do anything that could possibly clip your wings. Just think of this as an extra exposure generator.

See what I mean? Win-win!