Our approach is to always save the ad budget for our best prospects. We don’t want broad campaigns to use the budget and miss maximum visibility in front of the best prospects. We use settings such as Network, Location, Demographics, Audiences, Devices, Time of Day, Day of Week, and Negative Keywords to focus campaigns.
We fully fund these focused campaigns, while running more broad campaigns only where needed. We don’t want to starve the funnel, but ad networks made quite a bit of money on waste and broad targeting.
Other aspects of our approach:
– Favoring bidding methods with control and data. That means more favoring manual CPC and tight management with data over Google’s automated bidding management and a black box. Some prospects would rather pay more per click instead of hiring a firm to manage: Automated bidding and the old “Adwords Express” were created for those people. Those aren’t our prospects.
– Testing EVERYTHING for conversions and Click Through Rate: Keywords, ad copy, landing pages.
– Creating ads and landing pages for every kind of Call To Action.
– Remarketing/retargeting to prospects, with ads and landing pages that match where they are in their buyers journey.
Using the lessons of PPC to inform SEO decisions
1. Title tags and meta descriptions. Clicks are expensive, so it’s vital to use those lessons everywhere. We can raise organic CTR, which gets more visitors and may be a ranking factor (The “rank brain” part of Google’s Algorithm watches what people are clicking!)
2. Site structure
We organize ad campaigns around types of prospects. Websites should be organized similarly into “silos”. Google rewards this structure, and it makes sense. On an economic development website, there are existing business members, prospective members, and site selectors visiting. Each has unique needs and should have a unique area of the site.