This is known as the customer lifetime value, and if you want to thrive you need to understand how to retain customer longevity and loyalty.

What is customer lifetime value?

Simply put, customer lifetime value, or CLV for short, is the measurement of how valuable a customer is to a business over the whole period of their cooperation, or relationship. Here are 4 factors to consider:

1. CLV takes into account the customers total worth to a company during their lifetime and is calculated for the entire relationship and not on a purchase-by-purchase basis alone.
2. It is a crucial metric to track when it comes to a customer experience program as it costs businesses more money to acquire new customers than it does to keep existing ones.
3. Increasing the value of your existing customers is, therefore, a great way to create and drive more growth, and companies that know their CLV can then develop strategies to retain existing customers, whilst attracting new ones.
4. CLV is intrinsically linked to business revenue and differs from other customer metrics such as the CSAT that measures customer satisfaction and the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is used to measure customer loyalty.

When looking at the overall picture, the CLV metric is an indicator of the profit expected from a specific customer relationship, which then allows business owners to come up with an estimate of how much they are willing to invest in maintaining it to get good profit margins.

For example, suppose a customer’s CLV number equals £1,000. A business won’t want to spend more than that to keep the relationship going as it wouldn’t be a very profitable or beneficial decision.

How to calculate the Customer Lifetime Value

The formula to calculate CLV can be a bit tricky at first, especially if you are new to it.

First, you need to calculate the average purchase value and multiple it by the average purchase frequency rate. This will ultimately determine the customer’s value, which will then allow you to multiply by the customer’s average lifespan to give you your customer lifetime value.

Sounds complicated? Here’s a little step-by-step how-to guide to make the process a bit easier.

1. How to calculate the average purchase value

Divide your company’s total revenue for a specific period (most commonly a year) by the number of purchases made during the course of the same period.

2. How to calculate the average purchase frequency rate

Divide the total number of purchases by the number of customers who made purchases throughout that time.

3. How to calculate customer value

Multiply the average purchase frequency rate by the average purchase value.

4. Work out the average customer lifespan

Determine this figure by averaging the number of years a customer continues to make purchases from your business.

4. Finally, calculate the CLV

Multiply the average customer lifespan by the customer value to give you the estimated revenue generated for your business from an average customer, during the course of their relationship with you.

How to improve customer lifetime value

Of course, once you figure out the CLV, the next question is how to improve upon this figure to result in higher revenue and profit margins for your company.

Here are a few tips for nurturing the relationship with your customers, in turn boosting your CLV figures.

Reward your customers

Recognising and rewarding your best customers with special offers is a great way to nurture relationships with those who are loyal to your business. Create a loyalty program and marketing strategy that targets these customers specifically and offer extra services or goods when they make purchases with you such as access to select services, pre-released and exclusive products, free shipping or offers on exclusive benefits.

A loyalty program makes the customer experience more personal, creating an incentive for them to repeat their purchases and remain loyal to your company.

Improve and maintain good communication

Open and transparent communication between a business and customer strengthens the relationship. It creates a level of trust, making the company seem more ‘human.’ Customers appreciate companies who allow their voices and opinions to be heard.

Therefore, in today’s competitive climate, it is vital to proactively respond to all customers, address negative comments, low ratings and any other problems that they might be having. Once a customer knows that a brand is responsive and receptive to their issues, they are more likely to return as they are confident in the knowledge that they will be well taken care of.

Retargeting

It is essential not to forget about your customers once they have made that all-important first purchase. To improve CLV, it is vital to re-engage those who have already had an experience with your business and made a purchase, to remind them of the company and increase brand awareness.

Customers who have forgotten about the excellent experience they had with you may need that little nudge. That’s why products with a shelf-life can be extremely beneficial in your retargeting efforts due to time-sensitivity, which could lead to another quick purchase.

Focus on customer experience

Lastly, customer satisfaction should always be a priority, whether it is their first initial purchase, or they are a returning client. While customer experience is made up of a variety of factors, one thing that remains constant is that the connection between the brand and the customer has to exist in every instance.

This includes points of contact through each stage of the journey, whether that be purchases, customer service contact centres, store visits and even the customer’s exposure to advertising campaigns and social media.

Become customer-centric and improve their experience with a management programme that explicitly monitors your progress. These programmes involve a process of making vital changes that ultimately lead to long-lasting improvements in how customers feel towards your company, and in turn, improving CLV metrics exponentially.

Further resources

• A Guide To CRM: The Simple But Effective Way To Manage Your Customers
• Over 50% of Customers Will Buy From a Brand With a Strong Personality
• How to Harness The Voice of Your Customers
• Data Shows Customers Are Likely To Buy And Unfollow You For Political Statements

Conclusion

With the odds of acquiring and selling to a new customer between a relatively low 5-20% compared to a much higher 60-70% selling to an existing one, it’s apparent just how important customer lifetime value is to the continued success of a company. That is why it should be an area of focus for all companies in these difficult and trying times.

Not only will CLV attract and retain long-term customers who will become natural brand ambassadors and repeat purchasers, but it will also help to build a stable and successful business along the way.

It needs to be fast, work on any kind of device, and help people navigate your site easily. But that kind of work can’t be done quickly or all by one person (at least not efficiently).

So you’ll need to hire a web design agency to build it for your if you can’t do it in-house. But now you have another problem: with thousands of web design companies and creative agencies in London, how can you find the right one?

Fortunately, we have a solution. Our list shows you 9 of the best web design agencies in London along with their expertise, quotes from the agencies themselves, and previous clients to help you pick the right agency.

But before we get to that, let’s look at what a web design agency actually does.

What does a web design agency do?

A web design agency brings your website to life, from planning to build and deployment. Primarily, they focus on criteria, including:

• The design of the site
• The site’s responsiveness, particularly for mobile
• Integrating with a content management system (CMS)
• Calls to action (CTAs)
• Intuitive navigation
• User experience (UX)

While there are nuanced differences between web design and web development, there are cases where a web design agency can cover both, depending on the client, level of expertise, and the number of web designers who work on projects.

So, let’s have a look at 9 of the best web agencies in London.

1. Spread Like Wildfire Media (Adzooma Recommended)

SPLWM build high-quality websites that are mobile-first in terms of optimisation and design. What’s more, they’re optimised for conversions too and, primarily, the people who visit them. They do this with a dedicated team of designers, marketers, and videographers.

One of our main areas of focus in the last few months has been consulting with businesses about how they can build a better marketing strategy to keep business flowing in light of COVID-19. However, as you can see from our list of services, we do much more than this, but if we know anything, it’s how to be flexible!

While their main office is in Manchester, Spread Like Wildfire Media’s West London office means clients from either end of the country can reach them with relative ease.

Previous clients include Luminant Pictures and Movielux Entertainment.

2. Temper (Adzooma Recommended)

Temper offers forward-looking brands the growth and competitive edge they need with a range of services including:

• Branding
• Digital marketing
• Web design
• Web development
• Mobile development
• UI/UX

We live where technology & creativity meet – Our people-first approach increases brand engagement, captures valuable data and converts visitors into customers.

Previous clients include Diageo, EDF Energy, Europcar, and Five Guys.

3. RB Creative Digital (Adzooma Recommended)

RB Creative Digital pushes the boat out when it comes to creative web design.

We design beautiful websites focused on leads and conversion metrics. Always pushing the boundaries between design, automation, and aesthetics. Website visitors just understand.

Their team of 12 “exceptionally talented digital doers” are ready to create the most powerful outcomes for you and your clients.

4. ID Studio

ID Studio is London’s “premier web design agency” and home to a variety of highly-skilled web designers, developers, and marketing strategists who have delivered incredible designs and digital solution for their clients. The agency works with clients of all sizes and budgets so it’s no wonder they regard themselves as London’s #. Their specialities include:

• Web design
• Web development
• App development
• eCommerce
• Digital strategy

Previous clients include MTV, Budweiser, and Prince’s Trust.

5. The Web Kitchen

The Web Kitchen is an advocate for form and function as a combined strategy rather than one over the other.

To design something without an understanding of how it works is to fail from the outset. When we ask ourselves ‘does it look good?’ we are also thinking ‘will it work well?’.

The agency goes above and beyond for its clients by not only meeting their expectations but exceeding them. That passion has lead The Web Kitchen to a number of awards and commendations from the likes of Awwwards, The RX Club, and Computer Space.

Previous clients include Epsom College, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Amazon.

6. Regency Creative

Regency is a multi-disciplinary web design and branding agency based in West London. The team’s specialities lie in three key areas:

• Web design
• Branding
• Print design

Regency takes its role in all three areas seriously and prioritises creativity and consistency through the design process.

Previous clients include Dropbox, Dyson, and City of Westminster.

7. Web Heads

Strategy is important to Web Heads. You have to know what the website will achieve before you create any sketches of the design. Their openness works hand-in-hand with their technical solutions to turn those ideas into incredible web designs.

Being a relatively small web design agency, we are contactable, approachable and most importantly we work hard to create the best website solution that delivers real tangible returns. We are not just a website design company, we are people who understand business and work hard at understanding your requirements to create effective solutions to almost any budget.

Previous clients include The Fall Magazine, Heathrow Express, and Daytona.

8. JBI Digital

Responsive web design is this company’s calling card. But what does this mean? It means that they will make one of the best mobile websites around. JBI Digital provides fresh, creative digital services and focuses on results rather than purely aesthetics. They work by four key principles:

• Design
• Develop
• Promote
• Support

Where other agencies may provide work and that’s it, JBI goes above and beyond to support clients so their success can be sustained.

Previous clients include Hovis, Hitachi Europe, and ITV.

9. Lilo

Lilo’s passion is to make superb mobile websites and to turn ideas into solutions for their clients. They do this with a wide range of expertise in:

• Web development
• eCommerce
• SEO
• WordPress and Magento
• .NET development
• Branding

Over the years we’ve created lasting relationships with businesses of all sizes, from individuals and start-ups to blue chip companies and institutions, delivering expert and cost effective digital & design solutions. With the core of our production staff operating from Cape Town, designers in three continents and account leads in London, Cape Town and Perth, Australia, we’re able to pull in the right people to fit all briefs & budgets and deliver the right solution every time.

Previous clients include Hovis, Hitachi Europe, and ITV.

Conclusion

So there you have it – 9 of the web design agencies in London. Web design takes time, hard work, and imagination to get right and as we said at the start, it’s essential to if you want a successful and sustainable online presence.

But if 9 agencies aren’t enough or you want to look a little wider in the UK, check out Adzooma Marketplace. It has a host of web design agencies from all over the country, as well as other digital agencies that can provide full digital solutions for your business.

So as a small business trying to reach new customers, social media should be a critical part of your marketing strategy.

To learn more about your audience, it pays to do research (literally). Ask yourself: who is interacting with us? Then you can start to tailor your content and responses to them. It can also give an idea of how broad your audience is (and whether you have an audience at all).

In this article, we’ll look at how to make the most out of social media marketing for your small business.

Advantages of having a social media presence

You’ll increase your brand awareness. By implementing a social media strategy will greatly increase your brand recognition since you will be engaging with a broad audience of consumers.

It will create more inbound traffic not only through referrals but search engines as well. While social has no direct effect on the way Google ranks pages, it does have an impact on Bing’s search algorithm. According to Radd Interactive:

“Content that is popular and shared frequently on social media may rank better on Bing because its algorithm is designed to acknowledge social signals.”

Social media also builds a loyal customer base. It’s becoming crucial to regularly engage with your customers and build a rapport with them. Customers often use social media channels as a way of communicating directly with your business, meaning that it’s an excellent opportunity to connect with them.

Social media is not limited to introducing your brand’s products and promotional campaigns.

The best social platforms for small businesses

When it comes to what platforms are best for your business, then it’s wise to do some research to find out where your audiences spend their time online. You can use different social channels to reach different audiences or to meet various business goals.

Establish a presence on the social platforms that matter. The best ones are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest

It’s also important to keep up with the latest social media trends and apply them to your small business.

5 quick tips for small businesses on social media

1. Consider your goals

First of all, you need to be thinking about what you want to achieve with your socials. For many, it can be a combination of elements, such as:

• Generating new leads
• Building your brands profile
• Driving traffic to your website
• Establishing a ‘community’ to surround your business
• Providing high-quality customer service and effective outreach
• A way of growing your revenue
• Boosting engagement

2. Think about your target audience

It would help if you then considered your target audience, who will share common characteristics, such as demographics and behaviours. They are a specific group of people you want to reach with your social channels, as they are the people who are most likely to be interested in your content, products, or services.

3. Decide what content you want to publish and when

So what type of content should you post and how often? Ultimately, you want to be able to convert your social media followers into customers, so your posts need to be engaging and of course, relevant to them.

Your content should be posted at optimal times and posted using the best hashtags – to help your reach. This can sometimes be easier to manage by creating a social content calendar that will keep your posts scheduled and consistent.

Read: 20 Social Media Marketing Tips for 2020

By creating content that starts a conversation, such as a poll, then you are actively engaging your customers and encouraging them to interact.

4. Make your content interesting

The content you post can be about anything you want, but it needs to attract attention and be useful. This can be new products, client testimonials or videos. You can even post photos of your employees to help put their personalities at the forefront of your brand.

Also, consider eye-catching visuals where applicable. Facebook and Pinterest, for example, are very visual platforms and people expect the best images.

5. Measure your success

Higher audience engagement leads to more people seeing your posts which will help you achieve your social media goals. This is where engagement analytics tools are handy to gain some insight on where your posts might be lacking, which will enable you to focus on creating interesting content to boost your engagement.

You can help boost your engagement organically or pay for this.

How to judge success

There are a variety of metrics available that can help you determine how well your socials are doing and whether your efforts are paying off.

For many businesses, their goals revolve around increased engagement, new followers, faster response times or listening to social conversations more thoroughly.

The use of demographics and post habits can give you a greater knowledge of how well your social media marketing performs. Success can be judged by any number of factors such as:

• The amount of engagement your posts receive
• How many times they are shared
• What their reach has been and whether you have received a spike in followers

Engagement is fast becoming a social media buzzword but knowing when and how users engage with your content can influence your future strategy. For example, Twitter offers 3 ways to publically engage with a tweet:

1. Like it
2. Retweet it (you can also quote tweet or “retweet with comment”)
3. Reply to it

You can do these in any combination and from there you could measure the sentiment behind replies and quote tweets or create ratios between each form of engagement. The more granular you get, the more advanced your techniques will be so only do this if you have the capability.

Twitter also offers its own tips for what to tweet to get the best engagement:

• Limit to 1-2 hashtags per Tweet
• Be conversational
• Keep your copy short and sweet
• Use images, GIFs, and/or videos whenever possible
• Test, test, test (and use analytics to see what works)
• Monitor events and trending conversations

Try them out!

Should you use a marketing agency?

Agencies are undoubtedly useful for bringing new customers to your website, and they’re able to optimise your campaigns to achieve great results.

If a company doesn’t have someone that has the time to devote to social media, then an agency might be the answer. However, it’s becoming more and more common for people to manage their own social media platforms.

It’s important that you keep track of which methods and platforms are working best for your business and concentrate on those channels. By using the available analytic tools, it will help give you a greater understanding of your audience and how best to appeal to them.

In this article, we’ll look at what ECPC is, why it’s important, and how it works with other features and strategies within the Google Ads platform.

What Is Enhanced CPC? (ECPC)

Enhanced CPC (ECPC) is one of many bidding strategies that you can use to adjust your cost per click, and ultimately, maximize conversions. It works by raising your manual bids in any situation that seems likely to lead to another salt or conversion. It also lowers your bid that seems less likely to lead to this outcome.

If you want a limited degree of Smart Bidding, you can test ECPC with third-party bidding systems which will give you what you’re looking for.

Every time you use ECPC, you will be giving Google partial control of your keyword bids. Google then uses what you provide to raise and lower your bids automatically based on their calculations. To optimise your bids, it uses signals such as:

• Browser
• Location
• Time of day

This all happens within your max CPC restrictions.

Benefits of ECPC

ECPC has a variety of benefits for any Google Ads campaign, whether it’s a Display, Hotel or Shopping campaign. Here are a few:

1. Increasing conversions

The greatest benefit of ECPC is that it helps to increase conversions, without having to increase your overall spend by a substantial amount. In turn, you end up with a bigger profit margin, without having to run CPC manually.

Note: using ECPC does not guarantee more conversions. If you find that ECPC doesn’t work for you, try an alternative strategy.

2. More knowledge of Google Ads

Because ECPC is a partially automated system, it gives you some good practice and some knowledge of how the systems work. It will help you to achieve your business goal while giving you control of your bids.

3. ECPC is a good temporary strategy

If your campaign currently has a low volume of conversion data, you might not be able to use any of other Smart Bidding strategies such as Target ROAS which is where ECPC is so useful. Different systems have different requirements for the amount of data needed, and if you don’t have the right amount to hand, it won’t work for you. Smart bidding systems will make their calculations using data that you have accumulated, meaning that the more data you have, the more accurate the calculation will be. This is where ECPC comes in. You can use it temporarily to before opting for an alternative, more permanent strategy.

How to calculate ECPC

Once the campaign has finished, the ad costs are divided by the actual clicks. So, if the ad costs $2,000 and there were 10,000 clicks, you divide $2,000 by 10,000 and the ECPC is $0.20.

How ECPC works with other Google Ads features

Conversion tracking

To use ECPC, you need to have conversion tracking enabled.

When you use Google Ads, the system starts to look for patterns of clicks and conversions. Then it will compare them to the results that your business has seen. If it seems like a specific location has more sales, the Google Ads platform will know about it. Then, you can use ECPC to improve the conversion rate where your company is not doing so well. Keep in mind that if you are tracking sales, then it is best to count every conversion, but if you’re tracking leads, then one conversion per ad click will work. While you don’t need conversion tracking to be able to use ECPC, it will help you to see whether your ads are effective or not.

When it comes to conversion value, the ECPC adjusts your bid each time it appears. This is based on how likely the click will lead to a conversion. When you are using conversion tracking, you can let all conversions have different values, or give them all the same value. Some conversions are worth more to your business than others, and ECPC helps to maximize the value of each conversion which is why you need to know the cost as well as be tracking each one.

Split testing

Google Ads also allows you to perform a split test, or as it is commonly known, A/B testing. It lets you compare two different versions of a web page to figure out which of the two works better. Using a split test is simply another way that you can boost your conversions, which is what ECPC is for. When these two work together, you will be able to get the highest number of conversions possible.

Dynamic search ads

Another feature that ECPC can work with is dynamic search ads. This feature will use Google’s web crawling technology to be able to find and target relevant search queries all based on a website’s content. They can help when it comes to filling in gaps in keyword campaigns, which will give a better return on investment. When coupled with ECPC, you can enhance your campaign on both fronts, boosting your ROI and also, hopefully, boosting conversions along the way.

Summary

If you don’t have the time to handle your CPC bids manually, then ECPC could be worth checking out as a temporary solution. It can be beneficial for advertisers who do not have sufficient conversion data to use any of the other smart bidding strategies for this particular campaign. Define the conversions correctly and keep an eye on what’s going on. That way, you’ll get the most out of an ECPC strategy.

With that in mind, here are some criteria to consider.

1. What kind of marketing agency do you need?

Firstly, you need to establish what kind of marketing agency you need for your business. They can help get the word out about your business through physical marketing or just focusing on the digital aspects. It might be a social media strategy you need or an agency that will focus on growth. It could be that you are open to both organic marketing options or paid marketing options.

Here are some examples:

Strategic agency

A strategic agency specialises in data insights to create smarter strategies for your business goals. From there, these strategies can be integrated into other channels including:

• UX design
• PPC
• SEO
• Social media
• Sales and customer service

The best marketing agencies will offer a level of strategy as part of their services but if you need a bespoke solution, you might consider a specialised agency.

Multidiscipline agency

If you need an agency to cover every step of your marketing strategy, you’ll need a multidiscipline agency. These agencies offer:

• Account managers
• Strategists
• Designers
• Executives

With so many disciplines covered, a multidiscipline agency will likely be more established and come with bigger fees.

Niche agency

As the name suggests, niche agencies focus on very specific services or industries. While you won’t get the scope of a multidiscipline agency, you’ll get more of a personal touch. There’ll also be more attention to detail and quicker results when choosing a smaller niche agency.

2. What are your marketing goals?

Before employing a marketing agency, you need to decide what your goals are. They could involve things like driving more traffic to your website, which could see a marketing agency focusing on SEO and building your site visibility through it. Or you might want to focus on growth, conversions, or brand awareness.

For ideas on marketing goals, read our PPC roadmap guide.

3. Is experience important?

It is understandable that you will want to hire a marketing agency that you feel has the most experience and proven success. But sometimes going with an established agency might not necessarily be the right fit for you and your business.

A newer agency might sound like a risk but if you need to be the sole focus and require fast results, they are more likely to provide that than an established agency with hundreds of clients. Experience does count for a lot, but ensure that when you are doing your research you take time to understand their techniques and the actions that they take to meet their objectives.

4. Tools of the trade

Finding a good marketing agency means that you need to consider things such as their experts and tools of the trade. It is important that you think about things such as where their marketing expertise and skillsets lie. You also need to understand what they can offer, such as:

• PPC
• SEO
• Social media (organic and paid)
• Email marketing
• CRM
• Content creation
• Strategy
• Customer experience
• Competitor analysis
• Site migrations
• Link building

When looking for a marketing agency, it’s worth noting the types of software they use and software providers they have worked with. This can demonstrate how forward-thinking they are in terms of technology and innovation. Some tools and platforms to look out for include:

• Google Ads
• Google Analytics
• Facebook Ads
• Microsoft Ads
• SEMrush
• Salesforce
• Buffer
• Deep Crawl

5. Costs

Cost is going to be an important factor when it comes to finding a good marketing agency and it might be that you will find the better the agency is the higher the cost.

However, knowing what you need from a marketing agency may help you to control the cost a little more. We’ve written about costs for PPC management agencies and while that covers more of a niche agency, the considerations are transferrable to all types of agencies.

6. Agency case studies

Great marketing agencies use case studies to advertise their expertise and successes and these are important to read, not least because they act as free pitches. Case studies showcase a range of different businesses and subsequently different marketing goals that each of them would have set.

The best case studies show not only the successes but also challenges and possible failures. That might sound counterintuitive, and there shouldn’t be too heavy a focus on things that didn’t work, but it’s important to see all sides of a campaign and their methodologies.

7. Are they up to date?

There is no denying that you might need to think about whether or not the marketing agency and the tools that they have are up to date. Technology and trends, especially things like social media, seem to change rapidly, and as a business you would expect your marketing agency to be up to speed with these things. Always ensure that they are covering what will work for you but are also not afraid to try new things and be unique. Some agencies may be stuck in their ways and that might not suit you as a business.

8. Expertise and creativity

Marketing is a saturated industry so agencies will do all they can to stand out. The best ways to do that are by being creative with their content, designs, and their processes.

When choosing your marketing agency make sure you seek out the different methods they utilise. From things like Facebook for themselves and how they conduct themselves online to other factors such as the case studies and the general tools they have. Take time to understand their specific skill sets and also make sure that you have a greater understanding of who you will be dealing with.

Examples of uniqueness and creativity for agencies include:

• Mailchimp’s “mispronunciation” campaign
• Anheuser-Busch move from beer to hand sanitiser
• 360i’s work with Oreo and Game of Thrones

9. Handling urgent queries

It is also important for your marketing agency to be accessible. There could be urgent enquiries that may need attention straight away, from comments and messages to specific content that hasn’t been received well. You might also want to think about how you might get in touch, with that being an online chat system, email or whether there will be a direct line. Marketing can often not be perceived in the way you imagine it would, so you need to ensure that your marketing agency is on hand to handle any fall out if there is any.

The final thoughts

Once you’ve got a better understanding of what you need, you’ll want to match up your expectations with a high-performing agency and Adzooma Marketplace can help.

Adzooma Marketplace puts you in front of the best marketing services from around the world. Simply search for the agency you’re looking for, read their dedicated agency pages to find out more, and contact them to see how you can work together.

And for marketing agencies wanting to stand out, a listing on Marketplace is the perfect solution.

• Promote your brand to clients looking for your services
• Sit amongst fellow industry leaders
• Showcase the benefits of your agency
• Offer new leads easy ways to contact you

Submit your agency on Adzooma Marketplace today.

Whether you hire them to take care of the difficult work or you learn from them and go it alone, having the right people to learn from is a must.

What makes someone a Microsoft Ads expert?

It takes a lot of work, experience, patience, and understanding in order to become an expert in Microsoft Ads. Things change quickly and frequently over time in PPC (Microsoft Ads used to be called “MSN adCenter” and “Bing Ads” until it changed to its current name in April 2019).

As the network isn’t as popular as Google Ads, this means anyone who has the expertise really knows what they’re talking about. Here are some criteria to judge a Microsoft Ads expert:

• Keeping up to date with changes to the platform and monitoring performance
• Understanding how and why fluctuations occur and applying best practices
• Evidence of working with global brands
• Having an impact on the industry in some way, whether it be on social media or with the work they do behind the scenes
• Showing innovation and creativity
• Sharing their strategies and advice to help individuals or brands make the most of their PPC ads
• Sharing their challenges or failures can also be beneficial as a learning tool 

Expertise is somewhat of a spectrum rather than a binary system. That means people are always learning and you can never know everything about Microsoft Ads or any PPC platform. But it’s helpful to have that knowledge and advice ready for anyone who needs it as an expert.

So let’s look at our list of 5 of the best Microsoft Ads experts to follow and engage with, should you need insights into the advertising platform.

1. Purna Virji

Purna Virji is a Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft and the first name you think of when it comes to Microsoft Ads expertise (or Google Ads).

In 2016, she was named the most influential PPC expert of 2016 by PPC Hero and won US Search Personality of the Year in 2019. The “Wonder Woman of PPC” has over a decade of experience in search and she’s a well-renowned keynote speaker.

Further resources

• Microsoft’s Purna Virji on Lifelong Learning, Lifting Others & Positivity [PODCAST]
• Interview with Purna Virji at Pubcon
• Marketing in a Conversational World: How to Get Discovered, Delight Your Customers and Earn the Conversion

Follow Purna on Twitter and LinkedIn.

2. Christi Olson

Christi Olson is a Search Evangelist at Microsoft, having studied and worked in SEM for the past decade. She has worked for the likes of Expedia and with other Microsoft products before settling with the Bing Ads team. Outside of search, she enjoys ACUO crossfit and running races with her husband, craft beers, and long walks with her dogs.

Further resources

• The consumer decision journey will drive paid search in 2020
• Today’s customer decision journey is so complex but AI can help
• Key COVID-19 Search Trends & 5 Immediate PPC Strategies to Act On

Follow Christi on Twitter and connect on LinkedIn.

3. John Lee

John Lee is a Learning Strategist at Microsoft Advertising, with expertise in SEM, display advertising and social media advertising.

Having joined the digital advertising industry in 2006, he has worked with the likes of Hanapin Marketing, Wordstream, and is the co-owner of Clix Marketing. John is also a writer and regularly contributes to Search Engine Watch, Acquisio Blog, and PPC Hero alongside speaking at top conferences such as SMX, HeroConf, and State of Search.

Further resources

• All About Bing PPC (Microsoft Ads) With Brad Geddes & John Lee (Simplilearn Webinar)
• How to Make Responsive Search Ads Work for You
• PPC Town Hall #1 – Microsoft, Agency Savvy, ZATO Marketing, Aimclear

Follow John on LinkedIn and Twitter.

4. Frances Donegan-Ryan

Frances Donegan-Ryan is the Director of Consumer Marketing at Indicio.tech, after leaving Microsoft Advertising in October 2019. Her 6 and a half years at Microsoft facilitated her passion for simplifying complex technical concepts on top of a decade’s worth of experience in tech and SEM. As a passionate storyteller, Frances enjoyed spreading the gospel of Microsoft Ads, inclusive marketing, diversity and inclusion, and culture.

She also likes commuting on her bike, and travelling with not one but three passports (due to three visas and when it’s safe to fly).

Further resources

• Six Helpful Tips for Holiday Search Ad Campaigns

Follow her on Twitter @FrancesDR and follow on LinkedIn at Frances Donegan-Ryan.

5. Lisa Raehsler

Lisa Raehsler knows her way around PPC and SEM, having founded Big Click Co, an online marketing agency in the US. The company provides management of search marketing, PPC, display, retargeting, and paid social campaigns.

Lisa is also nationally-recognized speaker and writer for publications such as Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and ClickZ. Her experience spans over two decades and she’s previously worked with large brands including Thomson Reuters and a former recipient of the Microsoft MVP Award for Bing Ads PPC.

Further resources

• 5 Tips for Managing PPC During the Coronavirus Outbreak
• How to Use Paid Search & Social Ads for Promoting Events
• 7 Out-of-the-Box PPC Advertising Ideas You Should Try Now

Follow Lisa on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Summary

As I said earlier, expertise is a spectrum and learning about Microsoft Ads can take time. But with the help of these Microsoft Ads experts, you can be on your way to making the best campaigns yet. Another way to help is having a tool like Adzooma to put that acquired expertise into practice

We’ve worked with the team at Microsoft Advertising to craft our award-winning platform and take the stress out of Microsoft Ads management. Optimise and automate your campaigns and manage multiple accounts all from one screen with a click of a button.

Interested? Give Adzooma a try today and see how much time and money you could save.

Download: Free PPC roadmap template

What is a PPC roadmap?

A PPC roadmap (or PPC plan) is an outline of your campaign goals and how you aim to achieve them. It often comes in the form of a document and can detail some or all of the following:

• Your goals
• Your target audience
• Location targeting
• Target keywords
• Negative keywords
• Budget
• Ad creatives
• Remarketing
• Evaluation

It’s useful to think of a PPC plan as a communication document that anyone in the business can understand. You set out the elements of your plan in detail and then evaluate at the end.

Why do you need a plan?

PPC campaigns cost money to run and it’s strongly recommended you don’t run one without an idea of what you want to achieve. If you’re testing Google Ads as a new lead channel alongside your SEO strategy, you can be more relaxed, but bigger campaigns need more focused plans.

Before you even get started with a roadmap, jot down all the questions that will help form the basis of your plan. Here are a few examples:

• Which metrics are most valuable?
• What do I want to achieve?
• How long will it take?
• How much budget will I have?
• What do I predict will happen?
• What do I do if I don’t get conversions?

By asking these questions, you might come up with answers and they can go into your plan. You can also test out your theories and evaluate everything at the end.

Building your PPC roadmap

During the initial stages of building an effective PPC campaign, you will need to carry out plenty of research. Thorough customer research is vital to determine what your target audience wants. You’ll need to find out which products and services they are searching for, as well as any related queries you can answer better than your competitors. Your customer research is first on your to-do list, followed by your keyword research.

To build a strong PPC roadmap, you need to go through the process of setting yourself goals. These goals are specific to your business but there are lots to choose from. Let’s take a look at 4 potential goals you might want as part of your plan.

1. Improve leads, sales, or conversions

Improving lead generation and sales is a common PPC goal. While increasing traffic to your site is important, it becomes redundant if your visitors exit your site before they go through the later stages of the sales funnel. Lead generation is an ongoing goal for any business, making it a regular part of a typical PPC strategy.

How can your roadmap help you with this goal?

Quantifying your lead/sales/conversion goal gives you a tangible target. You can also link it to related metrics like cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, and cost-per-conversion.

Note: a conversion is defined as a valuable action on your website; this could be completing a form, subscribing to a newsletter, or making a purchase. How you define the specific nature of your conversions depends on your goals.

As part of this task, practice conversion tracking with tools like Google Analytics and use the data that you find to make changes to your campaigns. For instance, your data will offer insights about which keywords and ads are providing more conversions. With this information, you’ll know where to assign more of your budget.

Part of your PPC Roadmap should be tracking user behaviour. By doing so, you can see which elements of your site are achieving conversions, and which are not.

2. Increase traffic to your site

Who doesn’t want more traffic to their site? Without traffic, you can’t achieve the above goal, and with competition growing everyday, it’s more important than ever to get new and returning visitors to your site.

How can your roadmap help with this goal?

When adding this goal to your plan, focus on metrics like:

• CTR (click-through rate)
• The ratio of new vs. returning visitors
• Session duration
• Pages per session

Doing so will help you to analyse how much traffic you’re getting in, but more importantly, the quality of that traffic. CTR is particularly important as it affects your Google Ads Quality Score and your Ad Rank. The better they are, the higher your position in the SERPs.

Read: What Is A Good CTR For Google Ads?

Improving traffic numbers and qualities can also help your SEO strategy. PPC traffic often contains a very specific group of people who have an intent to buy but they might also need answers to questions about your product, service, or industry. Feel free to add any of that information into your plan.

3. Boost brand awareness

A brand awareness goal is less about converting visitors now and more focused on spreading general awareness. If they can represent your brand with the type of product or service you provide, it can help sway their decision when it comes to buying.

You should aim to get your target audience interested in reading your content and engaging with you on social media as well. When it comes to brand awareness, you can use PPC marketing to your advantage.

How can your Roadmap help you with this goal?

As tracking brand awareness can be a wide gamut, you should consider areas like remarketing and metrics like pages per session and session duration. What is their site journey like and how long as they staying? When they leave, how can you retarget them again to make sure they come back? These are the kinds of questions you should answer in your roadmap.

Remarketing is a great way to boost brand awareness, and it’s also a powerful conversion tool.

4. Micro-moments

The customer journey should be an integral part of your strategy and understanding micro-moments can help you guide that journey in an improved way.

The idea of micro-moments were created by Google and refer to intent-rich moments when a person turns to a device to act on something they need-to-know, go, do, or buy. As part of your marketing strategy, anticipate each micro-moment, and be visible and responsive to your customers during these moments.

How can your Roadmap help you with this goal?

Creating micro-moments can all start with an effective ad. Think about your creatives: the copy, headlines, descriptions, and images. They act in a similar way to shop windows. Department stores like Selfridges do a brilliant job of this, with beautifully dressed shop windows and enjoyable experiences when you walk in. You can emulate that with your ads and your landing pages.

The experiences you provide must be highly relevant to the moment in question. For example, if a customer is searching for knowledge, it’s no use pushing your product page as a search result. You must ensure that your PPC strategy is as much about providing useful content, as it is about selling products.

What complements a PPC plan?

For a strategy to work effectively, it needs the collaboration of multiple channels.

1. SEO

SEO and PPC follow different marketing concepts, which is why they complement each other so well. SEO data can inform your PPC goals and PPC data can do the same for SEO. If you’ve already got workable SEO campaigns running, then you’ll have data about high-performing keywords. You can use this data to fuel the success of your PPC ads. Data from your SEO campaigns regarding geographic location can also help with the location targeting aspect of your roadmap.

Here are some great SEO tools that you can use:

• Mangools
• AnswerThePublic
• SEMRush
• Dashword
• SEO PowerSuite

2. Competitor analysis

Analysing the strategies of your competitors helps you set benchmarks for your plan. Many businesses wonder if they should still bid on keywords that they rank for organically, especially if they rank first. Some companies choose to bid, and others remove the word from their campaigns altogether. It’s advisable to research what your competitors are doing with regard to these organic and paid keywords.

You’ll likely have spent a lot of time on your keyword research, yet we all miss important details sometimes. By looking at your competitor’s keywords, you might find a word or two that previously slipped your attention.

3. Split testing

How do you know if your success was sustainable or just beginner’s luck? With split testing.

Running split tests on ads is can help you find improvements you wouldn’t have thought about – things like reordering your descriptions or changing the text in your display URL. Another reason to conduct a split test is to remove bias from your campaigns.

You may feel that certain ads perform well because they’re “good” when it could be related to seasonality or current events. Assumptions cost money in PPC and you need the evidence to back up your decisions.

How can Adzooma help you achieve your goals?

You’ve probably noticed by now that managing your online advertising can be time-consuming. Many tasks are repetitive, and micro-managing the finest details gets old fast. That’s why Adzooma is at hand in two ways.

1. A free PPC roadmap template

We’ve created a free downloadable PDF template for you to print out and fill in (or edit if you have the necessary software). Remember that list at the start of the article? Well, we’ve added those criteria into the template for you to plan out your goals.

Download your free PPC roadmap template here [PDF]

2. The Adzooma platform

To make paid advertising more effective, and faster, Adzooma has got you covered. Using our combination of high-performing automation tools, you can let the platform do all the hard work while you focus on the exciting stuff.

Our award-winning platform helps businesses worldwide to adjust targeting and bidding strategies to improve their ROI. Whether you’re running Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or Facebook Ads accounts, Adzooma can connect all of them. Having all your accounts in one place under one screen can only increase your productivity.

To enhance the performance of your ad campaigns, join Adzooma for free today.

TL;DR

• Keyword planners are essential for uncovering data about how you can find a better use for your keywords.
• Google’s own Keyword Planner can help you research which keywords are going to be the right ones to use for your campaigns.
• Long-tail keywords can give you a cheaper CPC and target customers who are further down the sales funnel.

Go onto any digital marketing blog and there’s one term you’ll see plastered all over the place: keywords.

That’s because keywords are what helps your website and content get delivered to your customers. For example, if someone breaks their sink, they might need an emergency plumber. They’ll more than likely Google the term “emergency plumber in Northampton” (if they live in Northampton of course).

Generally, if one of your keywords matches this search, your website or ad will be right in front of them, ready for them to click. That means keywords influence who finds your business and aren’t something to be brushed aside easily.

Yet, so many people don’t take advantage of the readily available tools that you can use to really perfect your keywords. Their loss is your gain. Want to step ahead of your competition and attract more visitors to your website?

Use a keyword planner.

What do keyword planners do?

Keyword planners are a way of researching and uncovering data about your potential keywords before you use them. Whether you’re just looking to improve your organic search rankings through SEO strategies or perfect your paid advertising, the information you get from keyword planners is essential.

With keyword planners, you can find useful metrics such as:

• Average monthly searches
• Competition
• Bid estimates
• Related keywords
• Projected clicks
• Projected impressions
• Projected clickthrough rate

All of which are useful in helping plan your keyword strategy and get new customers through your door.

Which keyword planner should you use?

When it comes to keyword planners, Google’s Keyword Planner is the primary choice. But unfortunately, you can’t access this information without entering your billing information for your Google Ads account.

If you’re already set up and running Google Ads, then this is no bother. If not, there are plenty of alternatives out there, including:

• Mangools KWFinder
• SEMrush
• Keyword Tool
• InstaKeywords

We have an in-depth guide on SEO keyword tools you should check out for more information.

How to generate ideas with a keyword planner

First of all, keyword planners are a great way of generating ideas for building your keyword lists, as well as topics to write about on your website.

Let’s say that you’re a local beekeeper that sells organic honey online.

With this in mind, we pick ‘organic Yorkshire honey’ as a base for our search. This gives us the following results:

Now, some of these, like ‘bees for sale Yorkshire’ aren’t useful for our business. But this can be useful for generating ideas and new keywords.

If you’re seeing a lot of questions that come up, it can also help influence your content. These are questions that your customers have.

On seeing the keyword “where can i buy raw honey”, you might decide to write a blog post on your website or even a page that answers it. You’ll tell your users exactly where and how they can buy raw honey and then guide them to your honey store after you’ve built some trust. It’s useful, it’s insightful and is what your customers are searching for.

How keyword data helps your business

You’ve searched your keywords and now have all that juicy information. Now what?

You need to use it to make sure that you’re selecting the right keywords for your business. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting a lot of time, effort and money on something that won’t deliver the results you need.

Using the same beekeeper business, we’ll start with generic keywords such as ‘bee’ or ‘honey’.

As you can see, these keywords are pretty broad, receiving 10-100k searches a month.

Having a broader keyword can potentially help you reach a lot of people. But the problem is that sometimes your message can be diluted.

That’s because this search doesn’t just include people looking for local honey. It also covers a wide range of people that are searching for other reasons.

This is why broad keywords aren’t always worth the resources you put into it. That’s because you’re not just targeting your customers, but people who just won’t want your services. They also tend to be more expensive and competitive. Which means you’re paying more to appear in front of audiences who ultimately don’t care.

Let’s compare this to a less heavily searched keyword such as ‘local honey near me’.

Now, this keyword doesn’t get as much volume as the others.

In general, this means you’ll pay less and have less competition. But it’s not just about the money.

These keywords have a much narrower focus. So, you’re more likely to target those who are your actual customers. Low search volume keywords can give a higher ROI when targetted correctly.

That’s because if someone is searching for local honey near them, it’s pretty clear what they want. They want honey. That’s local. They’re much further along the buying journey and ready to buy.

All they need is to find out where they can buy from.

These type of keywords are called long tail keywords. They’re normally made up of 4 or more words that create very specific search terms

The name, in exciting news, comes from a statistic graph showing the types of keywords that are searched. These keywords are the end portion of this graph that just seems to go on and on, which looks like a long tail. Makes sense right?

Keyword planners are a great way of discovering long tail keywords, which can form a key part of your strategy.

Plan your PPC campaigns with a keyword planner 

Keywords play a key role in making sure that ads are shown in the right places.

But if you’re bidding on the wrong keyword, you’re literally throwing money away on the wrong audiences.

Keyword planners are a good way to do your research before you spend any money by showing you exactly what you can be expecting to pay per keyword.

If you’re using Google’s keyword planner, this data is available under the ‘get search volume and forecasts’ section on the start screen.

This section allows you to add all your keywords as an ad group, seeing how they’ll be able to work together to get you the best from your budget.

For example, we’ve added the following keywords together, which individually returned this data.

For those that need it, here’s a quick rundown of what each term means when using that particular keyword:

• Clicks. This is how many clicks your adverts are projected to get.
• Impressions. This is how many people your adverts are expected to reach.
• Cost. This is the total cost you would be expected to pay for your entire campaign.
• CTR. This is the expected percentage of people who will click your ads after viewing them. For example, if 10 people saw your advert but only 5 people clicked, your CTR would be 50%.
• Average CPC. This is a breakdown of how much it would cost every time someone clicked your ad.

Altogether, these keywords can deliver:

Unfortunately, we can’t tell you how to do this bit for you.

You should already have a marketing budget in place and know how much you want to spend and what goals you want to achieve.

This tool makes it easier to estimate what keywords you need to make it happen.

Need more help with your keywords? 

Adzooma has you covered.

Once your campaigns are up and running, we’ve got the platform you need to monitor your data and make the most of your results.

Our Opportunity Engine uses machine learning to analyse your accounts. It takes a look at your keywords, creating suggestions to improve your campaigns such as:

• Increasing or decreasing your keyword bids
• Creating or removing negative keywords
• Pausing underperforming keywords
• Removing duplicate keywords

It’s not just used for keywords but gives you personalised opportunities to improve over 50 aspects of the performance of your campaigns. What’s more, any changes you want to make can be actioned from our platform in seconds.

Combined with easy, customisable reporting, alerts and automation features, Adzooma is here to save you valuable time and money on your paid advertising.

Ready to see for yourself how we can help optimise your campaigns? Try Adzooma today.