Introducing The A to Z of PPC – All Things PPC Podcast Ep9

Get them to what they’re looking for fast. Otherwise they will click away and buy from one of your competitors.

Hi there PPC friends and welcome to another episode of All Things PPC by the PPC Geeks. Now I’m flying solo this week because we’re introducing a new series called the A to Z of PPC. So I’m Chris, I’m the co founder here at PPC Geeks and today we’re going to be diving into the letter A just like Sesame Street.

We’ll explore key concepts like analytics, attribution, and more, and whether you’re new to PPC or a seasoned pro, this episode will provide you with valuable insights and optimize your campaigns better. So let’s get started and jump into the letter A. So the first one I’m going to talk to you about is analytics.

Analytics is Not just Google analytics is in this context, it’s analyzing anything, any data that you need for your PPC campaigns. So what that means is we need to get all the touch points, all the results, the conversion tracking in place in the right way. So we know what’s working and importantly, what’s not for PPC and critically.

It’s what’s not working that costs you so much money. And we don’t want to give any more money to Google than we need to. So what are the specific things we’re looking at when it comes to analytics and what we’re tracking? The first thing is the key metrics. So what are the key metrics we’re looking at?

You’re looking at understanding your click through rate, your Your conversion rate and whether your ROI is being achieved based on how much you’re paying for clicks and the conversions you’re getting and whether that hits your goal. Now you can then use analytics. That’s at the surface level. That’s just the key metrics.

Yeah. Are you, how much are you paying? What are you getting out the back end? But then when we dive into the detail and the devil is in the detail, we can look at other things like segmentation. So we can. Breakdown data by demographics, location, and devices to uncover trends. So we can see the kind of people who are resonating with your adverts.

We can understand whether the targeting is right. One of the worst things you can do is just do broad targeting. There’s, it’s very unlikely you’re selling a product or service that anyone between the age of 18 and 80, male or female. any part of the country, any demographic income bracket is interested in.

By segmenting down, you can understand better what the cost per acquisition is of different areas, and having the data in your analytics is key for that. Also, it’s important to benchmark. Not only benchmark against industry standards and your competitors, any data you can get, but also your past performance.

So how did you perform in this period last year? How did you perform last month versus this month? How does that impact in seasonality and areas like that? By having all this data hoovered up into analytics, you can then use that for analysis. The thing is with digital marketing, there used to be a saying that 50 percent of my marketing works, but I don’t know which 50 percent with digital marketing, because we can track so much, we can get a far better idea.

In fact, the problem is not having data. It’s having too much data. One of the problems there is you need to decide what you’re going to analyze. And the key thing is at least having that data captured in the first place through analytics, through Google tracking, all those kinds of things, any third party tracking and analytical tools.

So at least you’ve got the data to dive into at the right point. You can then create custom reports and tailor those reports to focus in on your specific goals and KPIs and work out what’s going on. So how often should you review your analytics to stay on top of campaign performance? Well, this is in part going to be based on the volume of traffic you’re getting and how much you’re spending.

Let’s give you an example. If we’ve got a client that’s spending a thousand pounds a month and a client that spends a thousand pounds a day and the client that spends a thousand pounds in the morning, Let’s just imagine for the sake of this scenario, but all clicks costs the same, let’s call them a pound.

One client is going to take a, uh, you know, uh, a whole month to get a thousand clicks. One’s going to take a whole day. And one’s going to take like a morning or a few hours. So how often you review things is going to be different depending on the volume you’re getting through. So you have to have some kind of sense check there, but also it’s.

Important to understand that there is a lag in analytics and attribution. So if someone converts at say 12 o’clock today, you might not see that filter through in, in the cooking of their user journey until further down the line. So you can actually look within Google ads at what the conversion window is.

So you might look at what your sales were today. And then you might look, so I’m recording this on a Friday. So if I’m going to look at Thursday’s sales, I’ll look at it today. If I look next Friday or on Monday, I can then, I will then very likely get a different result because the data has come through.

This can be quite confusing. So it’s, that’s why it’s important. Although a lot of people want to look at the data every single day, it’s important to understand that contact. Context and the lag, the lag. And that’s one of the common mistakes people make when interpreting that analytics data. They’re either looking at too short a time period, a time period, that’s out of context, or they’re looking at data too early to make it, you don’t want to be reactive for minor blips.

The reality is things do change over time. And then based on that data, you need to take the right actions, of course. So having all that data available is, is really key and you want to not change everything. If you find suddenly you’re getting a certain age group doing things, certain area of the country, certain keywords, that’s great things to know, but changing all those things at the same time is going to send things in, in a, in a funny tits.

So the key a, and the reason it’s the first thing I’m talking about is analytics. You need that data. You need to. Have the tracking set up in the right way to understand it, and then you can have that data ready to act on. So regularly reviewing your analytics can reveal lots of hidden insights and strategic adjustments that you can make in the right way, but it all starts with having accurate data in the first place.

Now the second A that I want to talk to you about is attribution. Attribution is closely related to analytics. So We had a client, for example, who believed their social media ads were underperforming because they weren’t seeing any direct conversions. However, by looking at the attribution of how people found them to how they were converted, we could discover that ads played a crucial roles in those early stages of the customer journey, because ultimately that’s how they found them.

Another example is when you can skew too much to brand search, let’s say you sell red pens. And so. Someone’s red pen runs out, they type into Google red pen and you get loads of companies up. They look at your company, but they don’t convert straight away. They get distracted. They get a phone call. Not that anyone gets phone calls these days, all that kind of stuff.

And then they come back later and they’ve remembered that your brand name is really cool. It’s superredpens. com. So instead of typing in Red Pen, they go, I like that. There was a three, two deal on there. I’m going to go and buy that. So they type in superredpens. com. They click on that advert and then they convert.

So if you haven’t got your attribution dialed in, you may think that people had only found you because they already knew your brand name, that point of conversion where they actually type the final term in and convert. Would be what you track as the reason they converted, but in actual fact, they found you a different way.

They were typing in red pen. It’s very simple analogy. And the same happens with social media. If you’re doing an interruption based advert, say on LinkedIn or Facebook and people. Find out about your company. Maybe that you do luxury holidays. They didn’t know that they could rent a castle in Yorkshire for a special deal.

They then go away and talk to their spouse about it. And then they remember your name and then they find you through Google or some other way. Then. The discovery mechanism for what you do and how they actually convert could be different. And that’s why it’s so critical to look at the overall attribution.

How do your adverts impact the discovery path and how do you then. Understand what it is that tips them over to converting. And that is the main advantage of multi touch attribution tracking. And then there’s the whole complication when it comes to, if you’re driving leads, but you convert those leads offline, how do you understand whether, where the value comes from?

So for example, someone calls up and they don’t, maybe it’s a high touch service. They don’t make a decision straight away. And then they, they, they build a relationship with one of the account managers in your team. And they calling up, they’re asking more questions and then ultimately they make the purchase.

You need to have that tracking of how they initially found you and bring that in to the fact that they’ve made a purchase. And if those purchases happen offline, then that’s. Uh, where offline conversion tracking can come in. So all in a simplest form, someone types in a keyword, they find you offer what they want, they click a get a quote button, they fill in a form, one of your reps calls them up and they have a chat and go, yes, I would like to go ahead.

They move them in the CRM to the sold position. Once they’ve taken the money, you can actually set up that that data goes back from that offline transaction back into Google to further feed the algorithms and your knowledge. Of what works and what doesn’t there, but if you’ve got limited resources, how can you effectively implement these kinds of attribution models?

Well, a, they’re not too expensive. A lot of it is, is it’s that first point about having analytics set up in the right way. And another element is just ensuring. That you understand the value that you can bring to your business. If you ultimately know where that customer has come from and you can double down on what works and what doesn’t.

So the key thing to understand about attribution is understanding the user journey enables you to further refine. How people find you and ultimately get better results because you can then expand on that. You use your budget more effectively, and you can appreciate the full value of each of your marketing channels.

So the next day I want to talk to you about is bit less technical. It’s ad extensions. Now add extensions. If we look, think of a traditional, oops, a traditional search ad. There are those, it is those elements below. So you might have the title of your advert. It’s those elements below the call outs to site links, uh, the call extensions to call the phone, uh, location extensions and structured snippets.

So a lot of people who set up Google ads campaigns might just do the bare minimum. They just think, Oh, I just need to get my ads live. People are searching for these keywords. They’re going to buy from me. But these small tweaks of adding these ad extensions and importantly, testing them do Give you a notable increase in your click through rates and, and, and give you more traffic to store location extensions and things like that.

So there’s lots of different types there. And this is what I likened to going through every nook and cranny of the account, using all the tools available to you to get the squeeze as much juice out of that ad spend as you want. Google and Facebook, et cetera, make enough money. What you want to do is make sure you’re utilizing the tools as In the most effective way possible to get the most value for your business.

So part of that is making sure you use all those tools available where relevant, most of the time they are relevant. And then you want to measure how effective each of those extension types are and test what works and what doesn’t. Different things call out to different people. Really just having, you know, three to six extensions in rotation, for example, and testing those through and, and actually reviewing them.

Don’t just set and forget. Some will perform better than others. Some will cost you more money than others. And it’s delving again into that data to, to get the best results. And they perform differently on different devices, for example, as well. So if you’re B2B, it might be more important to look at how they perform on desktop, B2C more.

Uh, mobile traditionally. So there’s a lot to do there. What type of ad extensions typically get you the best results depends on your business, but it’s, it’s site links that can get them into deep areas of your website to give them more information. Um, Whether you want to use location extensions or, or, uh, call extensions, that’s a decision for yourself, which I could spend a whole other podcast talking about, but really the main thing to avoid is not utilizing ad extensions when they’re there as a tool.

So it increases the appeal of your adverts, improves the performance, offers more value on that user journey, and it makes it easier. For your potential customers to get to what they’re looking for. The key thing in marketing, there’s a saying, don’t make me think. So just give people the information, make it really easy for them.

And if they’ve got a few adverts to look at, they’re going to go to the one that grabs their attention and site links and add extensions, et cetera, a good way to do that. So our next A is audience targeting. So audience targeting is about finding the right people for your products and services. So for example, we often find when we do Facebook accounts that people use audiences that are far too big.

They think my, look, I get it. Business is hard. You think, look, if people want to buy what I’m selling, then I’m happy for anyone to buy it. But the reality is probably full size lashes are mainly going to be bought by. Uh, People of a certain type and a certain age, and maybe a certain location compared to power tools.

So by narrowing down the audience, understanding the analytics there and the attribution and all those kinds of things we’ve already talked about, but narrowing down to who your target audience is, is how you will get better results. You could in that. Simple example, just say, okay, in a broad stereotypical sense, most people in the market for false eyelashes are say 18 to 40 females.

Okay. Still a massive group. That’s still a huge proportion of the population. So you would want to. Narrow it down into people may be interested in beauty or certain brands, certain areas of the country who, um, different seasonality for times of the year, for example, coming up to Christmas, people want to dress up more, et cetera.

And you can see how you start to narrow down your audience. So this is what we talk, what I call top, top down thinking about who your target customers are. So that’s one of the areas you will look at. However. That’s just saying that’s making an assumption. These are the people it’s only when you start testing and running your adverts that you’re really going to understand who your ideal target customers are.

You know, the ones who spend the most money, the ones who come back for repeat purchases, which is key in e commerce. And then you can use the data from the audiences that you’ve built to further refine those audience. You could have a campaign just for, um, South of England, for example, for, uh, University student, female university students, and that is more narrowed down maybe to particular products that are in a particular price category.

And there’s so much you can do with audience targeting. So demographics targeting by age, gender, and location, interest based targeting. So reaching users based on their hobbies, their preferences, who they like. You can do behavioral targeting, focusing on users past interactions and behavior. Um, With your own brand and other things that they do on the web.

Remember Google, Facebook, all these platforms have so much data on people. You might as well utilize it. Retargeting as well. If people are shopping around, people get distracted. They have very low attention spans these days. So by reengaging with people who’ve already looked at your brand, you can, you can do better on the audience targeting, get better results.

And then lookalike audiences. So you can take your existing customer set and say to the platforms, please find me more of these people. And that’s how you can further refine your audience targeting for better results. So those are the kind of factors that you look at. Decide what’s most important for your product and targeting.

Generally as a general rule of thumb, the narrower and more focused you can become one, one, one product or service for one type of person with one message. The more you can start from that point of view, the more laser targeting you’ll be. That might expand your reach, but you can have multiple audiences.

And it’s about having that balance of how much volume and reach do you want versus the right customers. And then understanding. How you can learn from your existing audiences and double down on that. Effective audience targeting can dramatically increase the relevance and impact of your PPC campaigns.

And like most things in life, people just tend to need to do, be more focused and do less than, than just scattergun approach. So our next A is ad copy. Ad copy is so crucial. This is the thing most people actually think about when it comes to adverts, cause that’s what they see. Um, they might see the visual of the ad, but also the copy, the writing there.

But when people set it up, it’s often neglected. You think there’s only so much I can say about power tools. So just put it there. But again, because you’ve got all these other steps we’ve talked about analytics, knowing your audience, they all relate together. Everything is very nuanced. It all relates together.

You can test different messages in your ad copy, et cetera. So. We often find this when we audit accounts that ad copy might have not been tested for quite a time and, or people have doubled down on what they think works and it’s kind of a self perpetuating machine. If you have one advert that starts to work better, you might, people might switch off the other adverts or not bother testing again and, and they assume that’s the best it’s ever going to be.

People. People change, messaging change, competitors change. So you want to constantly be testing on what works and what doesn’t. The main things you want to do are craft compelling headlines, things that grab attention. As I said, don’t make me think. And so if people are looking for something, they, what Google wants you to have and what your audience wants you to have is what we call message match.

So from what person types in to the advert they see to the landing page, they get to, that’s the traditional, keep that single flowing message and make sure it grabs attention quickly, grab them over your competitors, stand out, test what works. But creating compelling headlines you. There is a balance.

People can get too technical in Google ads and be a bit like, well, it has to have this keyword. And therefore that’s how we need to do it. But really you want to grab that attention and get those results ultimately. But, but a lot of people say, Oh, but I, I, I, I’m, I’m really bored with the ads that they’re just not creative or not.

So let’s test it. Shall we? So we test what works and what doesn’t. And sometimes in certain industries, those boring linear adverts that are structured in a certain way will perform better than the creative ones. And vice versa, in other industries. So you need to test what works. Are you spotting a theme here?

You need to test, you need to track. Value proposition. So, So why should people go with you? What are your unique selling points? How can you get that across in your advert? And critically, and something so many people forget is the calls to action. So again, don’t make people think if, if you want them to get a quote for you, say request a quote, or we pick up the phone in less than four rings or, uh, book your demo or.

You know, free chocolate bar with a demo or white paper download or enter this competition, but get drive people to take that action that you need for your business. And then you want to be testing the variations of your adverts. See what works best going back. If you remember to earlier, I was talking about.

Clients who might spend a thousand pounds in a day, a week, a month, and the difference on the volume you’ll get through for your ad copy variants. Don’t, you need to test for the right amount of time. You need to get to statistical significance with the amount of traffic that you’re getting through to see what works and what doesn’t.

But that is a way to, to understand through the analytics, what’s working and what’s not, and ensure that, as I said, make sure it’s consistent from the ad copy to the line of page. Don’t show adverts for. Uh, kids t shirts and then take people to, uh, just your homepage or general t shirts, and then they’ve got to filter for kids.

Get them to what they’re looking for fast, otherwise they will click away and buy from one of your competitors. And that, that’s really key. Make sure it aligns with the user’s intent and make sure you’re doing the A B tests. Do you need to run your ad copy? I’m not going to go into the technical ins and outs of that.

Now, there are tools built in coming out of your eyes within Google ads. Just learn how to use them and get the best out of them. Regularly test and optimize your ad copy. It’s critical for maintaining high engagement, high conversion rates and constantly improving your account or catching up when you have.

Dips in the economy or changes in intent or new competitors coming along and maybe positioning things in different ways. So another, um, another thing that we need to talk about is really getting in the weeds and that is automated bidding. So I could have put this as a B and it’s going to lead into the next episode for B for bidding, but automated bidding is a different beast.

And I wanted to include it in this episode because it’s still tied to those other things we talked about at the top of the call. Um, of the podcast, which is analytics, make sure you’re tracking things and attribution because automated bidding is only going to work if you’ve got the tracking in place.

So what, what is automated bidding first? So let’s get back to basics here. Google ads and Facebook, they are built around the idea that it’s a bidding platform. There, there is a limited amount of ad inventory available. So what this means is if we take it in the simplest sense, there’s, there’s, Let’s see, no shopping ads.

There’s four search lots at the top of a, uh, a search query results page. So someone typed in red pen, they saw, see four ads at the top. There may be a thousand advertisers trying to get that to that. So you have a supply and demand issue. So what the bidding does is bids you, you try and bid at a reasonable level for the economics of your business.

It’s all automated, um, to. Be the winner in the ad auction, which means your ad appears at the top rather than one of your competitors. The art in this is not overpaying because we can all put in place massive bid amounts and then just overpay for the adverts, but that’s not going to work for the economics of the business.

Now, automated bidding has come on a long way in the last few years. The vast majority of what you should be doing now is automated bidding. And we do see people using manual bids because they’re trying, they might. Misunderstand the best way to test and align automated bidding. Uh, I refer you to our other episodes around things like performance max with, with, with Max, our expert on that too, about the time taken to get results.

But automated bidding when set in the right way will save you a lot of time, but improve your ROI as long as you keep a close look on it. It’s very rare. We use manual bidding these days, maybe around brand terms and things like that, where you want to control it. But automated bidding within the. Ad auctions only works if you’re getting good data in, and this is why conversion tracking is so critical.

If your conversion tracking isn’t right, you’re not going to have, it’s bad data in, bad, bad results out basically. So there’s lots of different types of automated bidding, target cost per acquisition, target ROAS, maximize conversions, uh, target impression share, depending on the goals of what you’re trying to achieve.

The NIA, NIA, The naive thing to think is if you have a target row as a five and you set it as five, it’s just going to magically spit out that result. It might magically spit out that result, but you might not have the volume you need or the revenue you need. The art is in tweaking it like dials on an equalizer for your, on a sound control desk to get the sweet spot of what works for you and what you’re trying to achieve.

There are cons to, to automated bidding, and that is. It’s giving over a lot of control of your money to the dark overlords of Google who operate in a black box and Hoover up money. And if you speak to a Google account manager, they’ll, they’ll want you to do more of this. So you do need to keep a close eye on it.

And that’s all about making sure you’re testing, making sure you understand analytics, tracking. All that kind of stuff and the metrics of your business. You want to, it’s easy to set up. You click a button. The hard part of the setup is making sure the conversion tracking is right. Uh, and the tweaking of the targets, keep an eye on how it’s affecting your campaigns and the thing that everyone hates to hear, give it time to work.

It doesn’t just work by magic. You go, so it. The way automated bidding works is it feeds through based on, um, results. So it’ll get you more conversions. So you need to have enough throughput coming through to decide for it, you know, for it to work and have the data to work on. So how do you decide which automated bidding strategy is best for your campaign goals?

You first need to define your campaign goals. So what are, is your target cost per acquisition? What is your target ROAS? Um, And ultimately then you can decide if they’re good. If it’s a brand campaign, you might be going for target impression share. You might say, I need to be shown for every, every time this brand is searched for, I need to be shown for it.

So target impression share might be better for that. Some common issues that arise are the not tracking. And one thing that another final thing that people do is maybe tweak it too much. When you tweak. Beyond a certain level in your automated bidding, it will go into what’s called a learning period, which can hamper your results in terms of volume and actual performance.

If you change things too much, you’re not giving it the time to learn and work. So automated bidding can help optimize your campaigns very effectively. It allows you to focus on strategy and other high level tasks, but do keep an eye on it because ultimately don’t give Google and Facebook more money.

Then you need to, I’m sure there’s a lot more things beginning with the letter A that are important to PPC, but I’m trying to keep this to half an hour and there are several more letters in the alphabet to get through. So that was the first episode of the A to Z of PPC. I hope you found it useful.

Please do send us feedback. We’ve explored some crucial A concepts like Analytics, attribution, ad extensions, audience targeting, ad copy, and automated bidding. We haven’t even talked about AI, which is such a big new thing, supposedly in this space. But the reason we don’t necessarily hone in on it too much is because AI and machine learning have been built into how Google and Facebook work for a long time.

The AI we’re seeing at the time of recording is It’s just bringing it more to the forefront of doing things for you, but you still need to overlay, um, the automation and the AI with having the right tracking and understanding the goals and what you’re doing. So remember mastering these elements can massively increase your PPC efforts and It’s all about having all these things work in conjunction with each other to get you the best results.

And that’s why we thought this podcast series would be useful. There is so much at play when it comes to PPC, that if by understanding, picking up a few tips for each of these episodes, you can just. Do some tweaks in your campaigns, get better results, then that’s better for everyone. So thanks for listening and be sure to tune in next time.

We do one of our eight set of PPC episodes where we’ll discuss, of course, the letter B, but until then happy optimizing and enjoy. Your PPC results that you get. And if you need anything, if you want to get more insights, sign up for our newsletter, and if you are overseeing PPC campaigns and want better results, then get in touch with us, our website, ppcgeeks.