As an online marketing specialist, or just a business owner looking to take advantage of the traffic on the Internet, it’s necessary to look over your PPC marketing tactics to determine if you are getting the best bang for your buck.
Let’s be honest. PPC advertising is expensive, (it’s been said that Adwords is Google’s preferred method of vacuuming the cash from your wallet) and that’s especially true in the beginning when you are purchasing data to find out what works and what doesn’t work in your market – i.e. keywords.
You need to begin asking yourself some key questions in order to get your PPC marketing on track for success from the very beginning. And if you are working on a campaign now that isn’t delivering the kind of results that you want, then you need to use these questions to figure out where you’re going wrong so that you can make the necessary changes to right the ship.
Whether marketing on the Google platform or using Facebook ads, these questions will help you to make changes when changes are needed the most.
How Is Your Company Measuring Success?
This is the crucial first question that you need to begin asking prior to ever starting a PPC campaign. Every company has their own specific goals, wants and desires that they are looking to achieve when buying traffic.
What might be an important goal for your business could be the last thing on earth that another company is trying to achieve. So establishing your goals and determining how you measure success ahead of time is the #1 determining factor of whether or not your campaign is succeeding or failing.
In order to properly answer the question of how you are measuring success, there are a couple of different points that need to be considered.
Please take the following into consideration:
1. What are the actions that you will measure that determine progress towards success?
2. Do you assign a specific value to these actions?
3. What defines your overall success?
For some businesses, the ultimate objective of their PPC campaigns might be to add more names and emails to their email list. For another company, using PPC marketing to sell products and services might be the ultimate goal that they are trying to achieve. And still other businesses might just be looking to get their name out there in the world.
Consider all of the information that we mentioned so far to help determine the overall goal of your advertising campaigns. Because once you have the goal set in place, then you’ll have a much easier way to determine your measurements for success.
Can You Handle the Traffic When You Get It?
Sometimes companies jump the gun and begin an elaborate online pay per click marketing campaign way before they are ready to even handle the traffic. A company could potentially spend thousands of dollars on traffic and have no idea what they intend to do with it. This would be a crying shame that could actually cause more harm to your company than you might expect.
Here are some key points to consider:
1. Is your website capable of handling all of this traffic?
2. Do you have a well-designed website and have you built your PPC landing pages?
3. Is your content organized and easily digestible?
4. Do you have a clear way for customers to enter your sales funnel?
5. Do you even have a sales funnel?
6. Can your payment processor and checkout process handle all of the additional sales?
7. Do you have an email auto-responder company ready to capture all of the new email addresses that this additional traffic delivers?
At the end of the day, only you know the goals for all of the additional traffic that you intend to bring in through PPC marketing. Just make sure that you’ll be able to handle this traffic before blowing through thousands of dollars of your hard-earned marketing budget. Because if you do not have the structure in place to handle all of this additional traffic than all of the money, time and potential customers will typically end up amounting to nothing. No sales. No email opt-ins. No new customers. This could become a serious waste of time, effort and energy.