Eat the Dog Food
This first category has nothing to do with eating actual dog food really. It’s far more about understanding your product deeply as if you were the customer: knowing what makes it work, or why it is better than competitors. This allows us to cater your PPC plan to the specifics of the product. This will, as we will discuss later, allow your PPC activity to be much more effective.
Adapt
Once you have eaten the dog food, and you understand your product, it is then time to adapt. Having all of this information is only beneficial if you implement it into your PPC plan. Kat shares some examples of how we’re able to do this.
Find the Right Customers
Once we understand who your target audience is, we then need to ensure adverts are seen by them: without spending money on customers who wouldn’t be interested. So, we adapt the plan to the target audience. If you cross-match the target audience with Google Audiences, you can pinpoint the company’s target market. This allows you to increase the bids for the audience you want, and decrease the bids for the audience you don’t. Saving money while increasing sales and ROI.
Embrace technology
Part of being able to adapt means being able to embrace ingenuity when you see it, “when you embrace it you can achieve great things”. “Smart Shopping” is a campaign in which you give control over to Google do the bidding, and you just monitor. Google can adjust the bids and predict the outcome much more quickly and successfully than a human can, and as a result, Kat has witnessed a 900% increase in sales and a 400% ROI in as little as 2 weeks.
The Big Picture
Sometimes there are products which people simply don’t tend to shop for online: think mattresses, tiles, etc. However, this doesn’t have to be the end of your PPC advertising. You can adjust your advertising to encourage people to go to store, where they will have a much better experience and will “buy more, basically”. The store data can then be matched with “Google my Business” which tracks when users go from a PPC online, then to store. Don’t just think about online, think about offline too. If the PPC add leads to a quantifiable increase in revenue in store, encourage that.
If You Can’t Adopt
Essentially, you get lost in a time gone by. We have the data available to know how a majority of the clients audience behave. We are able to measure how audiences spend more, be that online or offline; if you can’t tailor your PPC in a way that encourages them to do so, you miss out.
Customer Journey
Think about the full customer journey from advert to sale. If you have a PPC ad which is aimed at exactly the right person at exactly the right time, it still may not result in a sale. If there are too many steps before they’re able to complete their order, the sale could be abandoned.
PPC, despite being a relatively new form of digital marketing, is both powerful and effective. By making changes to how we use the data available, we can increase sales and ROI, at the cost of nothing, or even while saving money. Use the data to your advantage!