PPC – Adzooma

The Average Cost of UK Marketing Agencies

Danielle Strouther — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 10:55:00 +0000

There’s not a set cost for an agency in the UK, which means you’re never sure what price tag to expect.

And, when you’re quoted a price it makes it harder to question if you’re overpaying for your service, or getting a bargain. It’s one that you can only really work out when the results start coming in, but even then it’s difficult knowing if you can get the same results for cheaper elsewhere.

Not knowing the price can also make it hard to factor into your budget when deciding whether or not it will be worth the cost for your business.

So, to make this easier, we’ve done the research and found the average cost of agencies in the UK, split into different services. This data was gathered from a range of freely available sources and online pricing information, as well as confidential submissions from various UK based agencies and clients.

Note: these are just averages and don’t take into account the hours or particular offerings that an agency might offer.

This is what we found (click the image for the full-sized version).

Click the arrow to reveal the full data table.

Common (and Costly) Google Ads Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Adzooma — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 10:00:07 +0000

Google Ads is one of the most effective ways for a business or organisation to reach a target audience. But despite its unparalleled success, many people are still making costly mistakes with their Google Ads campaigns. Mistakes that you can easily avoid.

In this blog post, we’ll look into how to identify and avoid some of the most common pitfalls. Soon, successful Google Ads optimisation will become second nature.

Mistake 1. You’re not using negative keywords

Negative keywords are a crucial part of search campaigns. Using negative keywords effectively will help prevent your ads showing up in irrelevant searches. Plus, using certain words and phrases can result in you spending money for no reason.

The Solution:

When using Google Ads, it’s so important to continue to expand your negative keywords list. You should action this on a weekly basis at the very least. And you need to base it on your search term reports.

Begin with a standard list of negative keywords. You can source these by using online tools or sites that provide lists that are ready to use as soon as you need them. Your list of negative keywords will save you money on Google Ads with minimal effort. Plus, you’ll also be able to attract more qualified leads and discredit searches that are unlikely to convert.

Once your initial list has been uploaded, you can discover the exact search terms that people are using to find your ads. At this stage, you’ll probably see some keywords that have nothing to do with your campaign. If you do, add them to your negative keywords list right away.

Helpful Hint:

Aim for a minimum of 50-100 negative keywords when you start out. Then, keep refining the list based on actual search term data in your Google Ads account.

Mistake 2. Not optimising for conversion rate testing

A worrying amount of decisions around campaign settings are made without considering conversion testing.

If you don’t set up any form of conversion testing, it’s impossible to have a clear picture of your campaign. For example, you can’t see how much it costs to obtain a lead or sale from your campaigns. Or even which keywords are driving sales or which keywords are no help at all.

The Solution:

By optimising your ads for conversions, you can boost your ROI and get more for your money. Imagine a successful conversion is a customer making a phone call. Google Ads will optimise your campaign to drive more phone calls based on the historical data linked to your campaign.

Make sure you have set up every possible conversion action depending on your product or service.

Helpful Hint:

Set up as many conversion actions as possible. Make sure you always optimise your campaigns towards achieving specific goals.

Mistake 3. Not testing your bidding strategies

There are many bidding strategies available and choosing the right one may feel like a daunting task. If you use the wrong bidding strategy you risk overbidding on keywords. Overbidding leads to wasted ad spend and a severely drained campaign budget.

Automated bidding strategies can seem like a big help at first. Especially as they remove the pressure of decision making. However, you should always be testing a few different strategies to find the one which best suits your campaign needs.

The Solution:

Choose the right strategy for you. If you need more control over your bids in the long term, opt for manual CPC. But, if you’re planning on testing out a campaign in just a couple of weeks, enhanced CPC could work best. These bid strategies allow Google to get the most clicks at the best price possible.

Ideally the strategies you want to focus on are targeting CPA and also targeting ROAS. These will allow you to bid in line with your established Cost Per Action or Return On Ad Spend. You will be able to spend the right amount on ad targeting to reach your ROI and get the most out of your investment.

Helpful Hint:

Always monitor your campaigns’ ad performance. You can easily achieve this by adjusting bidding strategies to ensure optimal results. Adjustments can include changing or pausing keywords or match types that aren’t performing.

Mistake 4. You’re only creating one ad variation

When compiling your own Google Ads best practices, creating several ad variations per ad group should be high on your list. If you want to boost your conversion rate and keep costs low, it is important to create several ad variations per ad group.

Creating one ad per ad group or one ad with one variation is a common mistake. This limits the amount of data you can collect and reduces the optimisation of your ad copy.

The Solution:

It is important to get several ad variations and test them out to discover which one converts better. Even if you are using the same headline or the same description.

Once you find a winning ad, you can pause the rest and create a slightly different version of the winner. Then you can continue split testing.

Helpful Hint:

You should carry out a lot of testing and fine-tuning your campaign. Testing will help you to find the ROI sweet-spot.

It’s extremely rare for a campaign that hits the ground running to generate significant leads or sales from day one.

Mistake 4. Not adding ad extensions (now called assets)

Google Ads extensions (now called ‘assets’) are optional bits of content that can provide searchers with more information. They can make your ads more compelling and help them stand out from the crowd.

Assets such as sitelinks or phone numbers also take up valuable visual real estate in SERPs. They are an easy way to create properly optimised ads that drive more qualified traffic to your site and boost your CTR.

Assets can be an extremely effective way to increase your clicks. Ignoring them would be a huge wasted opportunity.

The Solution:

Take advantage of assets when running Google Ads. You can add sitelink extensions, which show different links to your website and send people to relevant pages. You can add callout extensions, which enable you to show some of the unique selling points you have. Structured snippet extensions, message extensions, location extensions, and price extensions are other types of useful extensions you can use.

Helpful Hint:

You can’t control how assets will appear. Google actually decides what assets appear and for which ads. It is worth checking the extension (asset) tab occasionally. Then, you can pause the ones that don’t convert or replace them with something better.

Google is the one that decides what extensions appear and for which ads. Your ultimate goal is to look at the extension tab from time to time and see which extensions convert better. Then you can pause the ones that do not convert or replace them with a better version.

Mistake 5. Choosing to ignore regional trends

Make sure your ads target your customers’ locations. By using the default location settings, you could be wasting ad spend by not reaching your intended audience.

For example, if you own a restaurant in Manchester, you don’t want your ads showing up for people who can’t eat there. But if you don’t tweak your geo-targeting settings, there’s a good chance that this will happen.

The Solution:

Define the specific locations where your ads should appear to maximise relevance.

First, you need to consider the area you want to cover. If you are a local business, you’ll only want to run ads in the immediate area. On the other hand, businesses that don’t have this limitation can test a wider geographic area.

The benefit of this approach is that once you have some data to work with, you can examine your ad performance. For example, you may find the cost/conversion from one city is lower than another. This could be a reason you turn down the budgeting for the more expensive city and turn it up for the other.

Or, you may find that sales or leads from a service are only coming from a few key cities. If so, it could be a cue to adjust your bids and campaigns accordingly.

Helpful Hint:

Test out different locations to find where you can get the most cost-effective leads and sales.

Mistake 6. Not testing out keyword match types

Google Ads has three types of keyword match available. These are exact, phrase and broad:

Broad match: These push your ads to a variation of your target keywords. These can include synonyms, related searches, and misspellings. Broad match keywords help you find new opportunities but can show your ads to irrelevant search queries.
Exact match: These allow your ads to show for searches that include the exact phrase you’ve targeted
Phrase keywords: Similar to an exact match, but they can also include additional words before or after phrases. Combining these can help narrow down the audience to be more specific.

By testing out these different types, you can discover the relevant keywords that will be most effective for your campaigns.

Using only broad match keywords will make your ads eligible to show on a larger range of queries than either exact or phrase keywords. By not focusing your broad match keywords with past performances or conversion data, you risk matching to queries that are irrelevant.

The Solution:

Choose one keyword match type per ad group and review performance on a regular basis. Ideally, every two weeks. Then, test other types to see if you can improve performance.

Helpful Hint:

If you are a large budget advertiser, broad match keywords can actually lower the cost per conversion in the long run.

Mistake 7. You’re not using Experiments

The Experiments tool in Google Ads can help you to run split tests to find a better way of working.

In one safe environment, you can test different landing pages, ad copy, keyword match types, keywords, and more.

It also lets you decide on the specific amount of traffic you want to direct to each of your experiments. This means you can limit the risks, and even better, the potential for rewards is much higher.

The Solution:

Give it a try. By taking time to use and understand Experiments, you may find a new approach that your bottom line will thank you for.

In summary: avoid common Google Ad mistakes and achieve campaign success

With so many variables within Google Ads it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Especially if you’re just starting out with PPC campaigns. It can feel tough to keep up. But, this list of common mistakes should help you to spot any quick wins and make sure your funds are making the biggest impact.

Looking for more tips on optimising your campaigns? Check out Adzooma’s resources.

How to Create a PPC Strategy That Converts

Ash Winder — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 12:10:52 +0000

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an essential element of a comprehensive marketing strategy because it can drive immediate results.

You can achieve a range of different goals with PPC, and some of the most common reasons to use this marketing channel includes:

Improving visibility
Identifying new leads
Increasing site traffic
Boosting conversions

While PPC can be simple to execute, it does take some planning and preparation. That’s why we’re sharing our top tips on how to put together a successful PPC campaign strategy.

Start by Optimising Your Website

Ensure Your Landing Page Aligns With Your Ad

When targeting large amounts of keywords, creating unique optimised landing pages for your ads can be a challenge. However, directing visitors to generic product or landing pages is really wasted ad spend. Not only are site visitors less likely to convert, but their on-site behaviour can also lead to lower Quality Scores, making reaching them through PPC even more challenging.

Make sure your PPC ads draw a strong link between audience targeting and landing page optimisation. The more relevant a landing page is to the initial search intent or audience demographic interest, the more likely site visitors will click through, sign up, make a purchase, etc.

For instance, if you were running a PPC ad with a two-for-one offer at your restaurant, then the landing page for the ad should have more detail about the promotion or something else that relates specifically to the ad content.

Optimise Your Landing Page

Landing page optimisation for PPC is the process of creating well-designed pages for PPC visitors and optimising each element on the page in order to maximise the percentage of visitors that complete your desired goal. The ultimate goal of PPC landing page optimisation is to build pages that better engage your target audience, so you can drive more leads through paid search.

In a nutshell, landing page optimisation leads to more conversions, which raises the ROI of your PPC marketing campaigns. Here are a few ways you can maximise your landing page so that customers will be more likely to convert:

Use clear and compelling calls to action
Use a clean design and layout
Write compelling and attention-grabbing headlines
Write copy that’s clear and straightforward
Use video and images strategically to retain attention
Make information easy to digest by using bullets, stand-out quotations and visuals

Select a Bidding Strategy

There are several different bidding strategies to choose from, and picking the right one will depend on a variety of factors, including: your budget, your experience with PPC and your goals.

Manual Bidding

One of the first choices you’ll have to make is between manual and automated bidding. If you’ve never done PPC before, you might want to start with manual bidding, especially if you’re working with a low budget. That’s because manual bidding allows you to set a cap on your cost per click. The trade-off with manual bidding is that you don’t have an opportunity to optimise your bids.

Automated Bidding

On the other end of the spectrum is automated bidding. This strategy will reduce the amount of time you’ll need to put into managing the PPC campaign, but you might end up paying a little more. There are several different bidding strategies when it comes to automated bidding. Essentially, there are various strategies you can choose depending on whether your goal is to increase conversions, visibility, or traffic.

Set Your Budget

Budget is an important aspect of a PPC campaign. But the best part about this type of advertising is that you can still do it on a limited budget, and you can retain close control over how much you spend.

In fact, if you’re new to PPC, don’t have a lot of money to throw around, and just want to test the waters, you can still get started with a small investment.

Research Your Keywords and Choose Them Wisely

Keyword research is arguably one of the most important aspects of a PPC campaign because it’s the backbone of the entire process. Without keywords, there would be no way for the search engine to know when to display your ads.

Just as importantly, choosing the right keywords can virtually guarantee the success of your campaign, and promise you the most views, the most click-throughs, the most traffic, and the most conversions. Here are a few tips for selecting keywords:

Take a look at what keywords your competition is using
Think about what you’d search if you were a customer looking for your products or services
Use Google’s keyword search or some other tool to identify keyword opportunities
Be specific with your keywords rather than generic or vague
Choose local keywords when possible

The better you are at choosing keywords, the more hits you’ll get. Beyond that, however, you’ll also be rewarded with a higher quality score and a lower cost per click as a result.

Another important element of keyword selection is negative keywords because these will filter out keywords that you want to exclude. For instance, say you want to advertise ice cream but don’t sell soft serve, then you’d use soft serve as a negative keyword to exclude searches looking for that type of product.

Create a Winning Ad

Once you’ve got your landing page ready, decided on a budget and bidding structure, and carefully chosen your keywords, you can finally get cracking on your actual ad. One of the key things to remember is to keep your short and to the point. Afterall, you don’t have a lot of time to catch the attention of prospects.

Another important thing is to have a goal in mind and to write the copy based on that goal. For instance, if you want to increase sales for Mother’s Day, your ad copy should reflect that. You don’t have to be overly creative, but you do have to grab your audience’s attention, hold their interest, and pique their curiosity.

To help grab that attention, consider coming up with a unique value proposition that makes your offer different from competitors and describe in one sentence how that will benefit customers.

Don’t Forget the Call to Action

Without a call to action (CTA), there’s no point running a PPC ad. Ahe CTA tells interested prospects what they’re supposed to do next. You can keep the CTA short and sweet, but it must be clear, concise, and compelling, such as “buy now.”

Test Your Ads to Ensure Performance

Once your ads are up and running, your work still isn’t done. In fact, this is when the real work begins, and that includes tracking your ads, measuring performance, and making changes as necessary to improve results.

A great way to measure performance is with A/B testing because it enables you to run two near-identical versions of the same ad at the same time, with one key difference. You can modify just about any element of the ad you like, including the copy, CTA, keyword, or even the landing page itself. Once you know which version performs better, make the necessary changes and stop wasting money on the less-effective ad.

Key Takeaway

PPC isn’t overly difficult, but it does require some knowledge of how the process works and a great deal of planning and research if you want to get the best ROI from your efforts.

All of the above tips will need to be addressed as part of your strategy so that you can give your PPC campaigns the best possible start.

It’s important to remember that every account is unique, and will have its own reactions to different features and strategies. Of course common practices exist because they’re considered to work the best for most accounts, but you’ll never know until you test.
For help growing your business, discover Adzooma’s platform. Or discover CTI’s expert PPC services.

What are the best PPC platforms for your business?

Ash Winder — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 11:03:27 +0000

Not all digital advertising platforms are equal. Knowing how to utilise different PPC ad platforms to fulfil your marketing objectives will help you maximise the effectiveness of your digital marketing budget. Whether your objective is lead generation, sales or brand awareness, you need to ensure you’re working with the best PPC platforms to achieve those goals.

With the right PPC platform and the right strategies, your business can reap great rewards.

In this article, we take a look at the best PPC platforms to help you decide where to focus your marketing efforts.

The Best PPC Platforms

Google Ads

Google Ads is the most well-known and commonly used PPC advertising platform. It offers the easiest user interface to navigate and has exceptional data compared to most other PPC platforms.

With Google Ads, you can target keywords that your audience searches for to get your ads to appear for relevant terms. For instance, if you search for “patterned wallpaper” on Google, you’ll see a handful of PPC advertisements at the top of the search results linking to patterned wallpaper or similar products.

This form of advertising is ideal for most businesses because it gets your ads to the top of the search results, making it an effective way of reaching your desired audience. Google also offers advertising on their display networks, YouTube, and other partner sites.

Microsoft Ads

Similar to Google Ads, Microsoft Ads is a keyword-based platform. It will show your ads to people who type queries into Microsoft Search Network engines if that query matches your keyword or close to it. So, you’ll be reaching people with higher intent to purchase your products and services as they’re likely actively searching for them.

Microsoft Ads also has display capabilities and shows image ads across the Microsoft Audience Network (a lower intent channel, just like Google Display).

It’s worth noting that not all businesses are as successful with Microsoft Ads as they are on Google. And this is partially because Google and Microsofts’ user demographics are different. Majority of Microsoft Ads users are 45-54, so if your products appeal to younger audiences, Microsoft Ads may not work as well as Google.

Facebook Ads

These days, anyone who scrolls through Facebook is bound to come across a sponsored ad approximately every 3–4 organic posts. Not only that, but most of us know they’re strangely relevant ads. Facebook’s complex algorithm works in the background to decide what posts and what ads are most relevant for users to see in their feed.

Instead of targeting keywords (like you would on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads), this audience-based platform targets people based on their interests, demographics, behaviours, or actions they’ve taken on your website.

Facebook users get added to these audiences based on various signals they express, including which pages they follow and interact with, or the posts they’ve engaged with in the past. If someone follows a sports nutrition brand on Facebook, they might be added to a “fitness lover” audience.

Additionally, advertising through Facebook also allows you to advertise through Instagram, which is great if you want to expand your reach to multiple platforms. It’s also ideal if you run an eCommerce business, as you can add your online store to both Facebook and Instagram to try and sell your products directly from these social platforms.

LinkedIn Ads

With millions of active users from job seekers to managers and CEOs, Linkedin offers a unique solution to those wanting to build a professional network and engage with individuals within their industry.

LinkedIn is one of the top PPC platforms for B2B firms that primarily focus on lead generation. These firms can use LinkedIn ads to target users by job title, function and industry, allowing them to place their brand and services in front of relevant decision-makers.

Using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool can be effective in discovering high volumes of quality applicants. You can even specifically target job seekers or employees with relevant skills in your chosen industry.

Amazon Ads

Amazon advertising is a great option for many sellers and vendors who want to run ads on one of the most popular online shopping sites beyond Google. Amazon has millions of active customers ready to spend their money.

Amazon offers sellers several different types of PPC ads to use, with customisable targeting options. These include:

Sponsored product ads: these ads appear in search results and product listing pages, and can closely resemble organic listings.
Automatic targeting: this strategy involves targeting keywords that Amazon’s algorithm determines are related to your product listing. Over time, Amazon uses data that it collects from shoppers’ clicks and purchases, then adjusts the ads to better suit your listing and increase conversions.
Manual targeting: these ads only appear if a shopper’s search terms match your chosen keywords. As a more “hands-on” type of ad, you will need to monitor changes in costs and make adjustments where applicable. This optimisation often results in more effective ads and a lower long-term ad spend.
Sponsored brand ads: allows sellers to drive awareness to more than one product at a time and catch shoppers’ eyes with more robust visuals than with Sponsored Products.
Sponsored display ads: allow sellers to retarget customers who have visited their product detail pages, on and off Amazon. Unlike Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads, Sponsored Display ads can appear on Amazon’s affiliate sites, including Google, Facebook, Netflix, and even mobile phone apps.

For help growing your business, discover Adzooma’s platform. Or discover CTI’s award-winning PPC services.

How To Apply The Top 3 Essential Automation Rules For Every Business

Danielle Strouther — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 13:19:20 +0000

PPC automation is the secret weapon that businesses need to get better results from their campaigns.

Acting as your virtual assistant, automation monitors your account all hours of the day, making changes and sending you an alert when you need to take action.

Before, automated rules meant using or coding scripts inside Google Ads. With Adzooma, these rules are set up easily with our simplified rule builder.

And to get you started, we’ve taken the top 3 rules that every business needs to apply, showing you how to apply them in your free Adzooma account.

Broken Campaign Alert

Get alerted if your adverts aren’t showing to customers with the Broken Campaign Alert. This gives you confidence your campaigns are all up and running and notifies you to take action if something is blocking your campaigns.

To set this up, you’ll need to click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’. Using our rule creator, follow these steps:

Give the rule a name

First things first, let’s give this rule a name. We’ve called it the ‘Broken Campaign Alert’ here.

If you want, you can also add a description in this box to help remind yourself what the rule does.

Set the campaigns you want it to look after

On the ‘Apply To’ step, you can select which campaigns you want the rule to look after. As this rule alerts us if any of our campaigns aren’t showing, we’re going to want to set it to look after all our active campaigns.

To do this, select ‘Campaigns from the first drop menu and ‘All active campaigns’ from the second.

Create our actions

In the ‘Conditions’ stage, we set what our rule checks, and what action it takes. For the Broken Campaign Alert, we want it to alert us when something is wrong. So using the drop down menus, you’ll enter the following information.

Action: Notify me
Time Period: using data from Custom, 1 days of data.

Now we have to add these AND conditions.

Spend = 0
Clicks = 0
Impressions < 0

This means that for this rule to notify us, the spend on your campaign needs to be 0, your clicks have to be 0, and your impressions need to be less than 0. Or, in simple terms, your campaign isn’t spending money or being shown to anyone.

To add these conditions, press the blue ‘Add condition’ button and search for the above from the drop-down menus.

Set the frequency

Now the hard part of the rule is done, we have to set how often Adzooma should check this rule. For this rule, we’d recommend setting it to run daily at a time you’re most likely to be online.

For this example, we’ll set it to run every day at 10am, but you’re free to choose a time that works best for you.

With the above in place, you’re ready to go! All you need to do now is click save.

Low Quality Score warning

Quality Score is a number between 1 and 10 that looks at how relevant your ads are to your keywords, how many clicks they’re expected to get and what experience users will get from your website.

Your Quality Score is a big factor in where your ads are shown and how much you have to pay for them. The better your Quality Score (i.e. closer to 10), the cheaper your ads, so it’s a big one to pay attention to.

With this rule, you will get alerted if any of your keywords have a low Quality Score so you can take action. To set it up, you’ll need to click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’ like before.

Give the rule a name

First up, the rule needs a name. We’re calling it ‘Low Quality Score Warning’ here.

If you want to add a description to give extra context, you can enter that in the box below.

Select all active keywords

In the ‘Apply To’ stage, you can select which campaigns you want the rule to check. Because this rule is a great all-rounder, we’re going to apply it to any active keyword that you are running in all your campaigns.

To do this, just select ‘Keywords’ on the first drop-down menu and ‘All Active Keywords’ on the second.

Create our actions

Now it’s time to tell Adzooma what we want the rule to do.

Firstly, under the action, you need to select ‘Notify me’ from the drop-down menu. This will make sure you are alerted as soon as the Quality Score drops.
Secondly, you want to select ‘Last Week’ from the time period menu for accurate results.

Next, it’s time to add our conditions. There’s only one thing we’re looking for in case – keywords with a Quality Score that’s 3 and under.

Click the blue ‘+ Add Condition’ button
Search for Quality Score in the first box
Select ‘Less Than Or Equal To’ in the second
Enter 3 in the final box.

Set the frequency

At this point, we set how often we want Adzooma to check our Quality Scores, which can be as often as every 30 minutes.

However, in this case, we’re going to set it to run every Wednesday at 11.00am, which is a day we have time dedicated to make any changes to our campaigns.

And that’s it! Click save and you’re done.

Pause underperforming keywords

Keywords are the foundations of your campaigns. If there’s a weak spot, the whole structure becomes a little shaky.

With this rule, you can make sure that you’re always building on solid ground. It will identify the keywords that are affecting your performance and pause them on your behalf to save money and deliver more clicks.

To get started, click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’ as normal.

Give the rule a name

Following the same drill as the other rules, your first step is to give this rule a name. We’ve called ours Pause Underperforming Keywords. It does what it says on the tin.

If you want to add any extra information to this rule, just fill out the optional description box underneath it.

Select all active keywords

Same as the last rule, we want to apply this to any active keyword that you are running in all your campaigns. This gives great all-round protection to every campaign that you’re running.

Select ‘Keywords’ on the first drop-down menu and ‘All active Keywords’ on the second.

Create our actions

In the ‘Conditions’ stage, we set the nitty-gritty details about what we want the rule to check and the action we want it to take.

In this case, we want it to pause any keyword that isn’t performing. To do that, we need to:

Choose ‘Change Status’ from the Action drop-down menu, then select pause.
Select ‘Custom’ in the Time Period data menu, then type in 90 days. This will give us a better scope to understand and measure your keyword performance.

Now, we define what bad performance is for your keywords. You can customize this to suit your business, but we’d recommend the following settings to get started.

CTR is less than 1%
Impressions are greater than or equal to 200
Clicks are greater than or equal to 15

These conditions are chosen to target keywords with a bad clickthrough rate, but avoid any keywords that are new or haven’t had time to collect data yet. They need to have been seen, but not clicked.

Use the drop-down menus to enter the above information, using the blue ‘+’ button to add a new row.

Set the frequency

Finally, we need to set how often the rule runs.

For this rule, we’re going to set it to run every half an hour, every day of the week. That gives us 24/7 protection over our accounts.

When this rule runs, your keyword will be paused but you’ll also be notified so you can optimize your accounts. Want to swap these keywords out with new ones? Take a look at our PPC keyword research guide for more expert tips and advice.

Set rules in a click with Adzooma Plus

We’ve detailed how to manually set up these rules inside Adzooma. But if you would rather set these rules in a single click, you’ll need Adzooma Plus.

With your Adzooma Plus subscription, you’ll gain access to 81 automation templates created by PPC experts, including the three above. All you need to do is find the one you want, then click apply.

To upgrade to Adzooma Plus, login to your account and click billing from the right-hand menu. Or get in touch with our team to get a tour of what’s on offer.

Put Your Best Face Forward! Building Your Business in The Medical Beauty Industry

Alditama — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 11:07:50 +0000

Analysts predict that the business will grow by more than 10% by 2023, with the medical beauty market estimated to be worth $17 billion.

In this article, we will provide recommendations and tactics to successfully market your medical beauty clinic, build up your business and to reap the benefits of these trends.

Understand your business and profit

It is important to start the marketing process from the inside of your practice itself. The quality, integrity, and competence you provide to patients is the cornerstone of any excellent marketing campaign for beauty treatments. This will ultimately drive your marketing efforts and make people enthused about the treatments you’re offering.

Defining your business goals is the first step before beginning on a marketing campaign.

“Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used by all successful businesses to assess performance, and medical beauty clinics are no exception.” Says Elissa Doyle, Project Manager and Content Director at Geonet.me. “KPIs will paint a clear picture of where there is profit and perhaps loss in your day-to-day operations. This allows you to determine what makes you the most money and what may potentially lose you money.”

Medical beauty clinics can and should take full advantage of sales KPIs to determine whether or not you will reach your sales goals.

Average Client Spend

Average client spend is about knowing your client base, how much they are willing to spend. and where you can maximize revenue. For example, premium services (fillers, thread lifts, body sculpting) can range in the thousands, while facials and IPL treatments are more affordable.

That way, you can find the right mix for your different audiences.

Client Retention

Client Retention is the percentage of existing customers that continue to use your services over a certain time period. It’s important that while you are working hard to attract clients, your team is nurturing existing clients by providing a positive client experience and creating a loyal client base.

Therapist Revenue Goals

It is essential to look at how your team members are performing and contributing to your revenue goals. Set weekly or monthly targets for each team member, in relation to hours worked as well as the salaries paid.

This will help you to maximize the earnings for each team member, which can be maximized through training sessions on new treatments, adding new skills, and educating them on upselling techniques.

Client Retention

Client retention is critical to the success of any marketing campaign. Studies have found that repeat or loyal clients not only spend more, but they are also easier to sell to. According to Stitch Labs research, recurring clients spend 120% more each year than new ones.

There are several ways to keep your happy clients coming back to the clinic:

Make sure the client receives a warm and welcoming experience every time they walk into the clinic, this can include using the first name basis and offering welcome refreshments.
Create client loyalty programs that encourage repeat visits
Reward your loyal clients with exclusive offers and thank you gifts
This may seem trivial, but never underestimate the value of a simple thank you card, or a happy birthday and holiday card.

Optimize The Benefit of Digital Marketing

82% of patients interested in medical aesthetics will begin their search on the internet, so it is important to make full use of the tools the web has to offer.

But, where can you start?

Build a strong brand

To succeed, you must cut through the clutter, capture your target customer’s attention, and show why your clinic is the place to go to enhance their beauty. Creating a strong brand is the most effective method. Successful brands are built on three essential elements:

Consistency: Customers will know what to expect from you if your branding is focused and consistent. In multichannel marketing, customers should see consistent visuals and messages across all platforms, whether it’s your website, social media, email, advertising, signage, or in-store experience.
Community: With a well-defined and consistent brand experience, you will attract not just like-minded clients, but also followers within social networks, building a community around your brand.
Content: Content is one of the vehicles to achieve your goals. With suggestive and aspirational content and visuals (for example, Before & After photos, top treatments etc) you can increase client engagement and frame how they will use your services to fulfill their needs or desires.

Build trust

Obviously, getting your patients to trust you will go straight to your bottom line. You can gain trust through social media. Showcase your expertise with before & after photos, bio posts on team members, training sessions and awards won.

It’s all about building trust so followers eventually feel confident to pick up the phone or book online.

According to a survey, 59 % of customers say personalization impacts their shopping decision. Your clients will expect a tailored, personalized experience at every level. This could start with a thorough, professional and free one-on-one consultation.

Not only does this help you tailor the best treatment, it also makes the client feel valued. Ensure that your team is well-versed in the services so that they can provide advice, answer questions, and conduct comprehensive consultations with your clients.

Increase Engagement Through Social Media

Celebrity culture and social media increasingly impact numerous aesthetic treatments trends, which frequently translate into patient desires. Have a strong and consistent presence across a range of platforms, so they can find you before they reach your competitors.

Social media can be used to reach and convert potential clients. Social media advertising is an effective approach to nurture leads and convert prospective clients into loyal ones. This is because, unlike any other advertising channel, social media allows you to engage and communicate with customers.

Facebook

Being the world’s largest social media site, Facebook provides access to an infinite pool of potential patients. You may showcase your services on Facebook, create an online following of actual clients, and launch paid advertising campaigns to generate appointments.

However, it is important to note that the medical beauty industry is heavily regulated by Facebook advertising guidelines. Some Facebook ad restrictions are as follows:

Before and after images
Zoomed in images focusing on certain body parts
Sexually suggestive videos or images
Nudity in ad creatives
Misleading claims (e.g. weight loss)
Implication of personal attributes (e.g. race, name or criminal record)
Sale of prescription pharmaceuticals
Over the-the-counter medicines

Instagram

According to surveys, 60% o f users claim to find new products and services using Instagram, and 75% of them take action after seeing a brand’s post. Instagram is all about visuals. While you want to make sure that your brand is consistent, you also can use Instagram to give users something to expect from the clinic. Here are some post ideas for your clinic:

Photos of you and your team
Before and after photos of your clients
The inside and out of your clinic
Current promotions
Lifestyle and educational posts

YouTube

When it comes to social media marketing for beauty clinics, YouTube does not appear to be the obvious choice. But, videos are the future, and you need to embrace them if you want to build your brand, your client base, and your social media engagement.

According to statistics, YouTube has 2 billion active viewers on a daily basis in 2021. Creating and publishing unique video material on YouTube is an excellent method to increase your clinic’s visibility and reach new potential clients.

In general, there are 4 types of content that you can post on YouTube:

Inspirational content: Post client’s transformational journey videos, with the clear narrative of before, during and after the treatment.
Educational content: Give your viewers some tips and information about your services that can trigger your viewers’ desire to know more about you and your clinic.
Promotional content: Showcase your current promotions and featured treatments. A good promotional video can really convert a potential client into a real one.
Up close and personal content: This includes behind-the-scenes videos, live streams, Q&As with celebs and influencers. Intimacy and authenticity are the keys here, so do not worry if your videos are not polished or the lighting isn’t perfect.

Get found on Google

“If there is anything that is as important as social media in your digital marketing plan, it has to be Google,” says Doyle. “You need to ‘be seen and be found’ on Google by potential new clients. Because if they don’t see you, they will see your competitors instead.”

There are 3 main ways to boost your chances of being seen on Google:

Check your listing on Google My Business

Optimize your Google My Business account so both Google and potential clients can instantly see what treatments you offer, your opening hours, your location, your phone number and your website. You also can add some attractive photos to showcase your clinic, services and team, so potential new clients can see what to expect.

Encourage clients to write reviews on your profile. Remember that your brand is shaped by the people who experience it. Reviews that are posted on Google My Business will appear in searches and it is the first thing that most people are going to read.

Improve your rank using organic SEO.

According to statistics, 33% of us click on the first search result displayed by Google. Only 18% click on the second result. The traffic just gets worse from there.

Many business owners tend to think that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a fast and dirty fix. However, ranking high on Google, Bing, and YouTube is difficult and requires continuous work. Having a beautifully designed website alone will not boost your Google rank, you also need relevant information that is properly optimized for search engines. If not, your prospective clients will struggle to find you online.

One of Geonet’s clients, Fresh Faces Cosmetic Medicine, a leading cosmetic clinic in Perth, has experienced how powerful SEO is. This doctor-owned practice is now on the first page on Google for keywords related to their tear trough fillers, and collagen lip fillers. The result? The clinic increased the Average Client Spend by 61% over the past 6 months and total sales by 54%.

Pay to advertise with PPC

PPC or Pay Per Click is the process of buying keywords or phrases relevant to your business in a Paid Search platform such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads. Specific keywords and phrases can be used to target consumers using the search platforms.

Identifying the right keywords and listing them in a managed PPC campaign is essential to reaching new clients, driving revenue and achieving a solid ROI.

Develop a communications plan

All the above means nothing if you do not maintain the communication between you and your clients. It is critical to manage consumer expectations proactively by creating a pipeline of information and communications.

Direct channels of communication, such as email or SMS text marketing, can be extremely successful in bringing new and recurring patients to your clinic.

Here are some direct marketing ideas:

Weekly or monthly update emails should be fun, engaging, educational, and build relationships. They may also include promotions and sales, but this should not be the main focus.
Special messages for birthdays, anniversaries and more. This is a great way to build personal relationships with your clients. You can give them a special voucher on their birthday too!
A simple follow-up after appointments. You can use email to ask for their feedback, and also provide the link to your social media platforms or Google page to leave you a review.
A special limited time offer can encourage fast bookings and spread the word.
Refer-a-friend programs can boost loyalty through referrals and recommendations.

When it comes to successfully marketing your beauty business, it’s not a system where you can cherry-pick only a few platforms. Nowadays, you and your brand must be everywhere.

Our recommendations above are the start of an effective marketing plan, and all tools must work together like a well-oiled machine. To find out more about how Geonet can provide full-service digital marketing, contact us.

10 Affordable Productivity Tools Every SMB Should Be Using

Tom Mortimer — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 08:54:00 +0000

We know for SMBs so much of your working week is spent on fiddly tasks that take ages to do.

So we decided to speak to a number of SMB owners and employees about their biggest timesaps at work and what tools they’re using to streamline the more manual side of their business.

In each section, we’ll give a bit of a rundown of why the software’s so good, how much it costs (almost all of them come with a free trial or free option), how much time it’s likely to save you, and a quote from an SMB owner/employee about why they like it so much.

Quickbooks – Finance & Bookkeeping

“I used Quickbooks when I first started my company on the advice of an accountant friend who said I would be thankful I started tracking all of my finances come tax time, and he was absolutely right.
“Startup businesses would do well not to neglect accounting software from the get-go, because expenses and revenue can become a nightmare to keep track of once your business really hits its stride.”
Trevor Larson, CEO at Nectar

Quickbooks has rapidly become the go-to place for SMBs and sole traders to manage their finances.

The reason is that it lets you manage pretty much anything from a financial perspective – expenses, payslips and pensions, taxes, while it also integrates with your bank and business apps.

For those who struggle with their bookkeeping or want an easier way to do it, this piece of software is a must.

Price: From $7.50 per month

Estimated Time Saving: 8 hours a month (per website)

HR Locker – Recruitment & HR

“The benefits of this product are amazing for me. I can now run reports at the touch of a button and don’t have to use lots of excel sheets, which I was previously using. I love the help function. I could go on and on about my plans for the usage.”
Anita Walsh, Head of People at Ward Solutions

There are a lot of HR tools out there (we’ve been through a lot of them at Adzooma!), but from our experience nothing comes close to HR Locker.

From managing staff’s time to getting a handle on recruitment, HR Locker is a great all in one software.

HR fundamentals, recruitment and onboarding, staff development and happiness, performance management, and more, HR Locker has it all in its… locker (sorry).

Price: Free for > 4 employees per month, $3.50 per additional employee

Estimated Time Saving: 90% of your time (per website)

Monday.com – Project Management

“Monday.com is an incredibly effective tool that helps our team to streamline and tackle projects as they come. Their social media managing feature has been a game-changer for us!”
Christian Adams, Co-Founder at Coffee Affection

Whether you’re a plumbing business or a digital marketing business, managing your projects and tasks isn’t easy.

But that’s where Monday.com comes in, as it allows you to easily build, run and scale your workflows in one beautifully designed platform.

Project management platforms are another thing we’ve been through a lot at Adzooma, but Monday.com is by far our favorite. That’s almost entirely down to the stunningly intuitive interface which almost makes project management seem fun (or at least a lot more fun than it used to be).

Price: Free for up to 2 users. $8 per user after that

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

Hubspot – Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

“Among all CRMs I have tried, HubSpot has a friendly user-interface that allows new users to easily navigate the software.
“What I like most about it is how I can jump from creating a sales funnel to creating email campaigns and landing pages in a short amount of time. It is innovative, and just the right software SMBs need to grow their business.”
Nate Tsang, CEO of WallStreetZen

Hubspot is one of the most respectable software companies out there and for good reason, because the products they offer are nothing short of outstanding.

Live chat integrations, customer service ticketing software, email marketing templates, call recording; if you’re looking for a piece of software that can help with every touch point of your CRM journey then you can’t look beyond Hubspot.

From marketing to sales, operations to customer service, Hubspot has all the tools to help keep your current customers happy and get new ones through the door.

Price: Number of free tools. Bundles start from $45 per month

Estimated Time Saving: 250 hours a year (per case study)

Survey Sparrow – Experience Management

“We have been very satisfied with SurveySparrow and their customer support. The survey platform has helped us to gather user feedback in a very efficient way and their customer support has been very helpful and fast with any questions or problems.”
Jaako Jalkanen, Business Manager at Brella

Now, compared to some of the others on this list Survey Sparrow may seem a little bit basic, but the word I’d use is specialist.

Because what Survey Sparrow concentrates on is delivering on customer feedback, and the way it does this is by making sure you can be present with your feedback across a whole range of touchpoints – email, QR code, web link, chatbots, embeds, SMS, etc.

We all know how important getting feedback is, whether it’s for your product/service, your website, your marketing, or for something else, Survey Sparrow does this better than anyone whether you’re looking for customer reviews or conducting consumer research.

Price: Free

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

Shopify – eCommerce

“We’ve been able to build something in 3 years that a lot of brands haven’t actually gotten to in 10 years.
“You don’t need to go into debt trying to launch your brand.”
Chimo Ngwudo, Owner of Cee Cee’s Closet

If you’re a company that sells products online then Shopify is your Holy Grail.

Why? Because it offers everything you need, from building your website to processing payments, from managing orders to marketing your business. And it makes all of this so easy too.

Shopify is King for eCommerce businesses, it’s used by nearly 2 million businesses worldwide and over $200 billion has been made in sales through the platform. Honestly, it’s just magnificent.

Price: 14 day free trial, then from $29 per month

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

SEMrush – Digital Marketing

“I’m a small business owner, and SEMrush is what helps me compete with larger firms while sticking to my smaller budget.
“I have a marketing background, so I want to handle as much in-house as I can, and SEMrush makes all of it easy, especially with all of the new features that are constantly being released.”
Bryce Walker, CEO of CPA Exam Guy

So far we’ve concentrated mostly on the day-to-day running of your business, but now I think it’s time to concentrate on the marketing.

SEMrush is the ultimate platform for SMBs looking to take a data-led approach to their digital marketing because quite simply, it is a treasure trove full of data.

Whether you’re looking for how many people search for the products you sell on Google every month or you want to know how much search engine traffic your competitor is receiving, SEMrush will be on hand to help. Quite simply, it’s the ultimate tool to help you plan and monitor your online marketing strategy.

Price: Free Trial, then from $199.50 per month

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

Adzooma – Paid Marketing

“Adzooma is a phenomenal platform that can really be able to save you time and resources, evaluate what is performing and what is not performing, giving you the right suggestions.
“With the help of Adzooma, I feel like I have a team backing me to make educated decisions to build a strong campaign.”
Alejandra Perdomo, Digital Marketing Manager at Flooret

For those managing paid ads on Google, Microsoft, or Facebook, there is no time-saving platform out there like Adzooma.

Adzooma takes all the manual side out of paid ad management and turns all the overwhelming data into bite-size chunks of information – which you can then action with just a single click. Certain ads wasting money? Adzooma will tell you that and you can sort it out right away.

Adzooma has over 50+ single-click optimizations to help you with your day-to-day work, plus there’s in-built reporting, automation, and SEO capabilities built-in on top. Adzooma really is a no-brainer.

Price: Free

Estimated Time Saving: A day a week (per case study)

AWeber – Email Marketing

“I use Aweber for all my email marketing needs and refer it to all my clients and students. I love their customer support, the ease of using their drag and drop campaign builder, the unlimited emails and their deliverability rates.”
Trent Jessee, Founder of Watchman Advisors

Email Marketing is a crucial weapon in an SMB’s armory and is something that needs to be deployed with poise and quality. We’ve been through a lot of different email marketing platforms at Adzooma, and AWeber is definitely something to help you with both.

Drag and drop editor, pre-built templates, automation, sequences, sales tracking; AWeber contains everything you come to expect from an email marketing platform in 2021, but more than that, it also offers great landing page capabilities and a host of opportunities for ecommerce companies too.

For those looking to get into email marketing for the first time, or looking for an upgrade on their current platform, AWeber is the choice for you.

Price: Free for up to 500 subscribers, $26.15 per month up to 2,000

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

Crowdfire – Social Media Management

“I have used Crowdfire since my initial days as a Digital Marketer. Since it is browser-friendly, it is possible to track all the social media mentions and manage posts from the browser itself.
“It also offers automatic analytics updates weekly which is useful in understanding the social media audience reach and compare it across the platforms. Crowdfire doesn’t have any content limitations, unlike other social media management tools.”
Nathan Hughes, SEO Manager at Diggity Marketing

In 2021, it’s crucially important to have a presence on social media. Even if you’re not super busy, it does a lot for your credibility just to have a profile to make you look legitimate.

But social media management can be a timesap, so that’s why using something like Crowdfire is great because it allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram pages all from the same place.

From there you can also schedule posts, receive recommended content to post, analyze your competitors, and more. It’s a great way to make social media management a breeze.

Price: Free

Estimated Time Saving: 30 minutes a day (per case study)

Why Productivity Tools?

Productivity tools come in all shapes and sizes, and what’s great about most on this list is that they almost always come with a free trial or freemium option.

Now, tech truly is starting to really take over – from the stock market to how we spend our downtime – it means that the tools that are becoming accessible to SMBs are just getting better and better.

The technology is being taken to new heights, and that’s what you see with the tools on this list. From helping your day-to-day project management to helping you manage your paid advertising, every single part of your working life can be transformed by productivity tools.

Try them out, if they’re not for you, they’re not for you.

But with more tools popping every single day, there’s definitely going to be a tool that will solve a huge problem for you in the future.

How To Spend $1,000 on Google Ads and Make $7,500+ ROI

Burkhard Berger — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 09:37:33 +0000

Google Ads offers one of the most reliable ways to profit from your online presence. And all you have to do is increase conversions and reduce spend, right?

Unfortunately, as many marketers have found, that’s easier said than done.

In fact, this failure to reconcile these two desires leaves a lot of marketers with the inability to make money because they don’t know how to maximize their Google Ads ROI (return on investment).

If that sounds like you, read the rest of this article to discover how to spend $1,000 on Google ads and make $7,500+ ROI so you can grow your customer base without spending more on advertising.

1. Optimize Your Website

Image So urce

Optimizing your website may seem like a no-brainer. However, with regard to maximizing your Google Ads ROI, this type of advice is worth repeating.

It’s getting more and more expensive to run ad campaigns. That’s why it’s crucial to optimize EVERY aspect of it, including your website, to ensure that you make the most of your efforts.

Making sure your site offers a great user experience is one of the first steps toward getting a decent Google Ads ROI. After all, what’s the point of working so hard to get targeted traffic if you’re sending them to a bad website experience?

That would just be a BLATANT waste of money.

According to studies, almost 75% of mobile users state that they will abandon a website if it isn’t mobile-friendly. As an advertiser, these are clicks that you are paying for – even if those people immediately leave your website. The same goes for a website that is:

Slow;
Hard to navigate; or
Looks like a cluttered mess.

What’s more, in addition to paying for clicks that you had no chance to convert, offering a bad website experience will earn you a low-quality score from the ever-vigilant Google. That’s why your first step is to optimize your website experience. But how exactly do you do that?

By following these tips:

Increase Website Speed

You can test your website’s speed by visiting Google’s Page Speed Test. You will then get recommendations on how you can improve your speed.

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Many of them are easy to apply, and even the smallest tweaks that you make, such as optimizing images or removing unnecessary widgets, will significantly speed up your site.

Make Navigation Easy

Take a look at your navigational menu and buttons. Do they make it easy for new visitors to find the pages or information they need? Or maybe you’re creating analysis paralysis by offering too many options?

Either way, view your menu from the eyes of your visitors and optimize it as such.

Test Pages on Different Devices

This is something many marketers overlook. You need to test your website from a variety of devices. Make sure your text is big enough to read on small mobile screens.

Check whether or not visitors have to scroll back and forth to see entire images of pages, and so on. You should have a VERY CLEAR picture of what your website looks like to readers on all types of devices.

Can you imagine just how poor this site’s mobile experience would be if these images and text were not optimized?

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Luckily, Google has a free Mobile-Friendly Test to help you get started.

And remember:

You need to write your website copy in a language that your audience understands. All the website optimization in the world can’t help you if your copy isn’t clear and compelling.

2. Focus on Quality Score

Your second step in maximizing your ROI is to understand the Quality Score.

Each of the 9 tips in this article will help you improve your Quality Score in some way. BUT, understanding what quality core is will help you better apply that information so you can quickly boost your Google Ads ROI.

Quality Score is a metric used by Google to influence ad rank and ad CPC. It’s rated on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, and 1 being a disaster. Your Quality Score plays a major role in the cost-effectiveness of your PPC advertising.

A good score means you can get discounts compared to what others are paying for the same click. You also get better ad placement, all of which translate to an improved Google Ads ROI.

On the other hand, if you are providing a low-quality experience, then Google doesn’t want to work with you. In such a case, you’re likely to find yourself paying as much as 400% more than someone who has a respectable quality score.

Remember, the search giant’s main goal is to provide the best and most relevant results in response to users’ searches.

So, by making YOU pay more for each click, Google is trying to get you to either stop running ads (since they won’t make financial sense as far as you’re concerned) or improve your user experience by fixing whatever is wrong. The latter is what Google is really hoping for.

Below, we take a look at how Google determines the Quality Score. By understanding what the search engines are looking at, you can work towards fixing and optimizing things to improve your score.

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How Google Determines Quality Score

Click-Through Rate: Your ad is considered relevant if a lot of people click on the keywords you requested for the ad.
Keyword Relevancy: Google also looks at how relevant a keyword is to the ad group.
Landing Page Performance: Google analytics show how people respond to your landing page from the time they click, up until they leave your site.
Ad Text Relevancy: If people don’t click on your ad (or if they click and then immediately leave the page because it wasn’t what they thought it was), then the text is not relevant to searchers.

Remember, you can always hire freelancers to help you with the different improvements to get your Quality Score up to par.

3. Optimize Your Landing Pages

As previously mentioned, your landing page plays a huge role in maximizing your Google ads ROI. Google needs to know that your ads are aligned with what users want. And as such, your landing pages should be aligned to your ads.

With so many businesses and marketers overlooking the analysis of their landing page performance, this is a good opportunity for YOU to give yourself an edge over the competition.

Follow the steps below to optimize your landing pages and make your Google Ads more profitable.

Place Your Call to Action (CTA) Below the Fold

This just means that visitors must scroll down a little to see it.

First, tell your visitors who you are and explain how you can help them. Make it clear what they’re getting, in other words, what’s in it for them?

Then – and only then, can you add a call to action button to your landing page.

Include One Offer Per Landing Page

Don’t make people think about which options to choose. This just leads to visitors having second thoughts.

Have only one offer on each landing page and this will improve your conversion rate.

Eliminate the Menu

Remove the navigation menu, or if you can’t eliminate it completely, at least reduce it.

Ideally, your landing page should stand alone and it should not give people the option of going anywhere else.

Test, Test, Test

Conduct A/B tests on your landing page design and formats to discover what works best with the same ad. You can change different elements, such as:

Text
Color
Image
CTA, etc.

If something doesn’t seem to be working, tweak and improve it. Make changes, and compare your results until you have a page that performs well.

For instance, this website that offers study resources found that a landing page with a simple “search” box (for students to find resources) performed better than one with lots of text and images above the fold.

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Don’t forget to use online tools to help you prevent plagiarism.

Plagiarized content is something else Google can’t stand, and if your landing pages are filled with it, that might affect your overall Quality Score.

4. Align Keywords With the Buyer’s Journey

One way to improve your Google Ads ROI is to match your keywords to the buyer’s journey. Your ad should align with the landing page, and the keywords you choose should align with the ad.

You can do this by thinking about the customers buying process, which is described below in a nutshell:

Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is at the top of the funnel (TOF).

It’s the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

Most marketers build awareness through content marketing and social media – for instance, by finding top-quality blogs that accept guest posts and submitting high-quality content as a way to reach brand new audiences.

But if you choose to generate awareness through Google Ads, it’s important to take the right approach. The goal at this stage is to offer your audience valuable information to educate them AND convert visitors into leads.

Make sure people are aware of you and the challenge you solve. At this stage, they are in “research mode”.

Someone in the digital marketing niche (for example), might target awareness keywords such as:

Wix vs. WordPress Review
Shop for Video Editing Software
Digital Marketing Guide
What are the most important content marketing metrics

As you can see, keywords like “review”, “shop for”, “best”, “guide”, “what are” are clearly targeted toward people who are at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.

Consideration Stage

During this stage, buyers are in the market, but they may not be feeling any urgency to make a purchase.

They are considering the information they researched during the awareness stage. However, they might be persuaded to buy now IF presented with the right offer.

Typically, consideration keywords are paired with an ad offering some sort of discount. For example, a site like this one that sells predictive dialing software might consider the following keywords:

Predictive dialer discounts
Predictive dialing software on sale
Best place to buy CRM with predictive dialer

Also, take a look at this example of an effective consideration stage ad for a lingerie store.

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Decision Stage

At this stage, you need to use high intention keywords that make it easy for visitors to buy, schedule, sign up, etc.

These types of keywords usually convert to instant sales. You can use words and phrases such as:

Buy Breville coffee maker
Where to buy Breville coffee maker
Appliance store near me
Buy Breville coffee maker in Austin

Keywords like these represent a point at which buyers have done their research and they know EXACTLY what they want.

5. Review Targeted Ad Groups

Another step you need to take toward maximizing your Google Ads ROI is to re-evaluate your targeted ad groups.

Look for keywords in those groups with low-quality scores. These may perform better in different ad groups, so consider either moving or removing them.

If using broad match, as opposed to exact match, take a look at the report to discover the phrases that are actually triggering your ads.

You might consider adding some of these to your keywords to allow you to better track their performance.

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6. Prevent Unqualified Clicks

Unqualified clicks can result in a lot of wasted money. For example, say you have a business that sells barcode software for large organizations. There is no use getting clicks from small business owners who wouldn’t be willing to pay what the software is worth. That isn’t your target audience.

But, even if you put the right keywords, such as “enterprise-level“, the person might still click on your ad, not knowing what that type of software costs.

For a company that sells premium products or services, one way to help prevent unqualified clicks like these would be to add something like:

“Starting at $3,000”

This would serve as a way to avoid wasting the searcher’s time – and your money. And remember to never pay too much per click. Although it may seem like the only way to get seen in some of the more competitive industries, it’s generally not worth it to pay outrageous amounts for Google search ads.

So what should you do instead?

Rather, DIG DEEPER into your ad keywords. Find the ones that are less competitive and cost less for each click. This may take some time and effort, but it will pay off massively in improved Google Ads ROI.

7. Create a Comprehensive Strategy

Google Ads are great for a lot of reasons:

Getting started is easy
You can begin generating sales quickly
Google Ads can help you meet any of your marketing goals
It’s easy to measure and improve your performance

BUT, without a comprehensive strategy to work with, you will pay a premium for each one of those clicks.

You need a complete digital marketing strategy to generate awareness for a lot less so that by the time visitors click on your ad, they have already seen your brand somewhere else. They already know who you are AND they trust you. They have an interest, and possibly even an emotional connection to you. For example:

If you have a site that sells VPNs, you might build brand awareness by publishing a series of videos and articles on “how to browse the web safely”.

This would let your target audience know about you first so that when they do land on your sales page, they already know who you are and the solution you provide for accessing the dark web.

Strategies like those in content marketing and social media can help you achieve this. They can also allow you to effectively nurture leads in the consideration phase.

Furthermore, you can add email marketing to your marketing strategy. As most marketers know, it’s a highly customized and meaningful way to build stronger relationships with your customers. The responsive website we discussed earlier is also part of it.

Bottom line?

Between the website, email marketing, content marketing, and social media you will have a STRONG marketing strategy that will generate more clicks and get higher conversion rates on your Google ads.

Conclusion

Making $7,500 from $1,000 comes down to one thing: don’t pay too much to acquire customers.

It’s impossible to get a reasonable Google Ads ROI if your CPC is not what it should be.

This article has shown you some of the simplest and most effective steps you can take right now to dramatically reduce your cost per click and increase your conversion rate at the same time. This means you will generate higher revenues at a much lower cost.

7 Steps to Increasing Your Search Visibility & Outrank Competitors

Zelst — Tue, 25 May 2021 09:41:53 +0000

For any business with an online presence, increasing search visibility and outranking your competitors are two pretty good goals to have. However, if you offer a large and varied range of products, or you specialize in a range of services, it can be difficult to know when and where to focus your attention.

That’s where targeted optimization comes in. In this blog post, we’re going to talk you through how to increase overall search visibility with this strategy which should help you attract the right customers, increase conversions, improve brand awareness and, crucially, use your time most efficiently.

We’ll take you through seven simple steps to improve your website visibility and explain it in the context of one of our most recent case studies so you can actually visualize what we’re talking about.

Essentially, we’ll explain how we achieved these results:

But first, let’s define our key terms:

Search Visibility: The percentage of clicks your website receives based on your organic rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Targeted Optimization: Optimizing your website’s content to target specific search terms that are relevant to your business and target audience.

7 steps to improve website visibility

Let’s take a look at the 7 steps you can take to improve your website visibility.

Step 1: Understand Your Business

The first and arguably the most vital step is to really understand your or your client’s business.

Are there particular services that they consider their specialism?

Are there particular products or services that they want to push at different times of year?

If you can establish a core area to focus your efforts, it will make your project more manageable and achievable.

After completing a successful site move for our client – a barristers chambers – we moved into more targeted optimization based on their chosen service areas. It’s common for barristers and solicitors to be flexible in terms of their core focus, and there are seasonal peaks for different legal services. In the early part of 2020, fraud was the legal area they requested as their focus.

Step 2: Content Audit

Once you’ve settled on an area of specialism to focus your efforts, you need to undertake a content audit to fully understand how much and what type of relevant content you have on your site.

We recommend creating a spreadsheet to keep track of your content so you can see at a glance what pages need attention and which topics need bulking out.

As part of your content audit, you should review the keywords you’re ranking for and the keywords you’re tracking. Ensure the intent of the search terms you’re ranking for align with the intent of your content, and keep an eye out for any pages that are ranking for the same keyword – ask yourself if this content would be better merged.

Review the keywords you’re tracking that relate to your focus area and assess if all of these terms are actually relevant to your business, industry, or service area. If you have doubts, plug the search term into Google and examine the top ranking pages in the SERP.

If you come across any search terms which you shouldn’t be targeting or tracking, cull them from your keyword tracking tool. This will ensure your keyword metrics are accurate and relevant.

For our client, refining our keyword list was a crucial first step. For example, we were tracking the term ‘fraud’ which, as you can see below, doesn’t pull up a SERP that a barristers chambers would naturally fit in to.

Similarly, our client’s target customers – clients needing legal assistance for fraud-related cases – are probably going to search for more focused terms, and these are the terms we’re interested in.

Step 3: Keyword Research

Now that you’ve done your content audit and reviewed your keywords, it’s time for some fresh keyword research. There are so many great tools for keyword research – our favorite is Google’s Keyword Planner which we use in conjunction with SEMRush and Mangools. These tools will help you to identify additional keywords and sub-topics that you can target.

When selecting your keywords, you need to make sure the search intent aligns with your business and the content you can create well. You also need to ensure your content could fit into the SERP query landscape. Essentially, does or can your content match what Google believes are the top search results for that query?

We also recommend paying attention to long-tail keywords. Targeting long-tail search terms can help you generate traffic to your website, especially if you’re a small business or have a weak online presence. The search volume of these terms is low, but search intent is more focused.

Hubspot defines long-tail keywords as:

“A keyword phrase that aims to capture search traffic from a specific, often 3+ word search query. Long-tail keywords are used to target niche demographics rather than mass audiences.”

For our client, we created and optimized multiple blog posts targeting terms with low search volumes, and paid attention to featured snippet opportunities amongst these terms.

For example, according to Keyword Planner, ‘advanced fee fraud examples’ has a monthly average search volume of 10, and we successfully captured the featured snippet in the SERP. This fed into our client’s overall search visibility.

Step 4: Competitor Research

If your competitors are outranking you for your core search terms, it’s time to try and understand why. Review their higher-ranking content and pick out what they’re doing better than you.

Are they answering more questions? Are their facts and statistics more up-to-date? Is their content structured in a specific way?

Of course, do not plagiarise your competitors because A. it’s wrong and B. Google won’t like it. Instead, pick out what they’re doing better than you, use it as inspiration and, most importantly, think of ideas to make your content even better.

Analyzing your competitors is another great way to uncover additional keywords you could be targeting and directly competing with them for.

Step 5: Create a Plan of Action

Once you’ve gathered all your insights and data, you should create a detailed optimization plan to start working through. If you have a wider content team to share the workload with, a Google Sheet will help you avoid any overlaps.

First, add the relevant, existing pieces of content that you identified in your audit to your spreadsheet.

Second, assign each piece of content to the terms that the page should be targeting.

Finally, add a brief explaining the steps needed to optimize the content and outrank your competition.

Top Tip: Be sure to organize the content in a priority order. For example, you may want to start with content where there’s a featured snippet opportunity to capture.

Step 6: Optimise Your Content

Now, this is where all the hard work comes together. Work through your spreadsheet and begin optimizing your content by following the brief and undertaking any additional research as you see fit. If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve listed some tips below.

How to optimize content:

Include your target keywords throughout your content without it sounding unnatural
Be sure to include your primary keyword toward the start of your opening paragraph and in your concluding paragraph
Use your primary search term in your title
Use headings to break up your content and give your page structure
Include target search terms in your headings
Check both internal and external links aren’t broken and fix or remove any that are
Add relevant internal links
Check all external links are pointing to secure sites
Update any data or statistics and add external links to source your data
Include a clear call to action at the end of your page

Step 7: Track Progress

Tracking your results is important so you can monitor if your content strategy is working. There are many tools you can use to track your site’s visibility, keyword rankings and organic traffic. We primarily use Moz, SEMRush and Google Analytics to track our clients’ performances.

Look at how your content is performing for the relevant search terms, and also examine how this feeds into your site’s overall visibility. You should also keep an eye on the performance of your core terms.

Through targeted optimization, our client saw a huge increase in rankings. Using SEO software, we could easily see that our client ranked on the first page of Google for 68 fraud-related search terms.

Our targeted optimization strategy also fed into our client’s overall visibility and helped us to capture more competitive terms and key, local terms. We ranked #1 on Google for ‘leeds barristers chambers’, and #2 for ‘barristers in leeds’ and ‘leeds barristers’ – highly relevant and competitive terms for our client.

Using Google Analytics, you can see here how our client’s organic traffic really picked up from April 2020, once started implementing the plan.

And from Moz, you can see how our rankings skyrocketed for our tracked, target terms:

So make sure your SEO tracking software is all up-to-date so you can accurately monitor your progress and your success!

We hope you now have a solid understanding of how to increase search visibility with a targeted optimization strategy. As a search marketing agency, we love helping our clients maximize their online potential and outrank the competition. If you want similar results for your business, please get in touch with our team.

What Is Click-Through Rate & How To Improve It

Sophie Logan — Sat, 15 May 2021 13:01:37 +0000

Click-through rate (CTR) is a common metric in Google Ads analysis, but what can it tell you on its own, and what is a “good” CTR? Lets guide you through it…

With any Google Ads campaign, it’s important to improve your KPIs where possible. But how do you know if your campaign is performing well or not if you don’t have anything to compare it to?

There are reports that can assess your campaign performance, but if you don’t know the average CTR for your industry, you could be running campaigns that just aren’t hitting the mark like they should.

In this article, we’ll cover what CTR is, how it’s calculated, if there’s such a thing as a ‘good’ CTR, as well as how to improve CTR.

What is CTR?

CTR stands for click-through rate and measures the percentage of clicks an ad gets based on its total number of impressions. An ‘impression’ can be defined as each time an ad is visible on a page, and therefore when an ad is seen.

It’s commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns.

Why do click-through rates matter?

Some of the benefits of CTR that tie into the success and cost-effectiveness of a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign include:

CTRs are linked to Quality Score – the higher your CTR, the better your Quality Score and the cheaper it is to maintain ad position. A high Quality Score is one of the biggest indicators of success in PPC.
CTR is also a factor in a keyword’s expected CTR, which is part of Ad Rank (ie, what determines your ad’s position on the search results page).
If you are advertising on relevant queries, achieving a high click-through rate means that you’re driving the highest possible number of people to your offering.

It’s a continuous cycle and click-through rates are a tangible measurement that keeps it turning.

How is click-through rate calculated? The CTR formula

Click-through rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions and then multiplied by 100 to convert the number into a percentage.

For a PPC ad that drives 1,000 impressions and 75 clicks, for example, the click-through rate is 7.5% based on the following calculation:

(75 ÷ 1000 = 0.075) x 100 = 7.5%

CTR is used as a better metric over clicks because it shows the rate of success. 1,000 clicks is a lot for a campaign with 5,000 impressions but not so good for a campaign with 500,000 impressions.

What is a good CTR?

To assess what is considered a good CTR, the best place to start is by looking at specific industries and their averages.

Defining your CTR by industry is important because they can differ significantly.

According to Google Ads industry benchmarks for 2021, the average CTR across all industries is 5.06% for search and 0.5% for display when it comes to Google’s industry benchmarks for 2021. Some of the best performing industries include:

Travel and tourism (7.83%)
Vehicles (7.35%)
Dining and nightlife (6.63%)
Real estate (6.19%)

This data shows you a benchmark to compare yourself to. Your CTR might not have seemed so high in isolation but if it’s performing higher than the industry average, that’s cause for celebration.

The problem with averages is they’re affected by outliers. If a campaign over/underperforms, the average is pulled up or down, and those anomalies could be due to things like seasonality or unexpected events like the COVID-19 pandemic affecting searches.

A ‘good’ CTR depends on several factors, specific to your business and the ad campaigns themselves. You also want to focus on your industry and check what the average is so that you have a good benchmark to work off of when trying to improve your CTR percentage.

If your account is connected to Adzooma you’ll also see a better CTR, since you can use the Opportunities feature to enhance your results.

From the analysis we found for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, the click-through rate for the accounts connected to the Adzooma platform was around 6% and 3.7% respectively, which if you’re up on your industry averages, far exceeds the 1.91% and 2.83% you’re expected to see.

So, while you want to aim for a ‘high’ click-through rate, it’s worth bearing in mind that it will vary by industry, and your expected CTR will depend on your ad’s position, among other factors.

Equally, it’s best not to use your industry average as a hard-and-fast rule. It’s one of several guides to assess your performance but ultimately, your own goals should be your priority.

How to improve CTR

Improving your CTR can be done in a number of ways. You can:

Improve and optimize your ad copy
Make the keywords you are bidding on more specific and targeted
Reach your target audience by placing your ad campaigns in front of those you want attention from
Test your ads more, especially A/B testing
Understand your audience, whether that’s learning their language and jargon, to talking to your customers directly to see what they want

You can also increase click-through rate with Adzooma Opportunities when you sign up to our free PPC marketing tool.

The tool allows you to monitor your ad campaign, check your CTR and impressions, and enhance the success of your campaign through specific performance suggestions. These include things like adding new keywords, optimizing your ad rotation settings, and increasing device bid adjustments.

It’ll also show you how much time and money these direct suggestions will save your campaign, so you can maximize your results.

FAQs

What is CTR on YouTube?

Simply put, click-through rate for YouTube is the number of clicks, divided by the number of thumbnail impressions, or how many times your video thumbnail is seen on YouTube. Multiply by 100 to get your percentage. For example, if your YouTube thumbnail is seen 1,000 times on YouTube and 100 people then click on it, that’s a click-through rate of 0.1 or 10%.

It’s worth noting that some views don’t count towards impressions, like views on external websites or from end screens, so because of this, your impressions CTR more likely represents a portion of your channel’s total views.

CTR on YouTube will vary depending on the type of content you produce, your audience, and where on YouTube the impression was shown. It’s said that half of all channels have an impressions CTR of between 2% – 10%, with a ‘good’ CTR being 5% and above.

That being said, this is just an average, and other factors need to be taken into consideration – including your subscriber base, your niche, number of views, and how old the video content is.

Why is my CTR so low?

If you’re asking yourself why your CTR is so low, a number of different factors could be affecting it. These include:

Ad copy that is of poor quality, or doesn’t reflect the offering
Lack of targeted keywords
Ads that are irrelevant to the target audience
Targeting the wrong target audience to begin with, or not speaking their language
Uninspiring creatives
Poor Quality Score (based on the quality of your keywords, copy and landing pages, as well as CTR)
Not testing your ads frequently enough
Not using ad extensions

Essentially, it means users aren’t finding your ad relevant, while a good CTR, shows that your ad is proving relevant and useful.

If you’re struggling with a low CTR, try our Opportunities tool when you create a free account with Adzooma. It highlights ways you can instantly optimize and improve your ad campaign, which in turn will bolster your CTR.

When is a low CTR ok?

It’s not always the case that a ‘good’ or ‘high’ CTR should be your main KPI or objective.

In fact, sometimes, it’s actually ok to have a low CTR. If, for example, you’re bidding on an ambiguous keyword, for which there could be multiple meanings and purposes, it might be harder to get a higher CTR.

That said, if you do get a lot of leads from that keyword, at a good cost, then go with it.

After all, it can be just as problematic having a high CTR, but low conversions, since you could end up paying for clicks that don’t turn into customers.

So, in essence, as long as your keywords and ads are performing well as per your business objectives, don’t worry too much over a CTR that’s slightly on the low side. It’s just one of many metrics to take into consideration.