, ,

Rosewood’s Top Five PPC Best Practices

Alex by his laptop smiling.

If you’ve been looking into or set up online ads or have already setup ads for your business, you should be familiar with pay per click (PPC). PPC ads are the main kind of ad on the major advertising platforms provided by Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram). These ads are great for small businesses because they appropriately scale the cost of your advertising. Are you just starting with online ads for your business or maybe you’re hoping to improve their performance? Here are the top five best PPC practices for getting more clicks and conversions.

Specificity is King of PPC Best Practices

Specificity is critical for small business’ PPC ads. Broad keywords and search terms can potentially include your ads in more common searches, but they come with certain drawbacks. These keywords will be more expensive since they are more popular and often purchased by larger businesses who are casting much wider nets. They are also less effective because they are not focused on your customers’ more specific searches. Instead, choose specific keywords that are pertinent to each ad. This will make each one more effective and generate more responses.

Picking the Right Targets  

Along with specific keywords, defining your ads’ targets is a PPC best practice. Google and Meta both track data about their users to get a sense of their interests, age group, gender, and other demographics. All of these can be used as target criteria for your ads. For all these possible targets, don’t just use a general sweep of interests for every ad your business runs. Different products or services your business provides will appeal to different interests. Ensure your ads are specifically targeting the ones that are relevant to garner interest and clicks. 

One criterion that can be important for specificity is location. Most small businesses operate in their local area. Targeting certain ads towards your business’ area will ensure locals see your ads. Another factor to consider is that different services, including Meta’s different platforms (Instagram and Facebook), will have different audiences for your business. Ensure you are targeting your ads to how they are performing on each service.

Running Tests

Some provisional research can help you start creating some initially effective ads for your business. However, the best information comes from running ads and getting results. After some time, begin to run tests to identify potential areas of improvement for your ads. Both Google and Meta allow for A/B testing, where two versions of an ad with different copy, call to actions, etc. are run simultaneously to separate members of your target group. A/B testing is a standard PPC best practice and provides a direct indication of which aspects proved more effective at generating clicks. 

Use the Tools Provided 

Both Google’s and Meta’s ads managers put an incredible amount of tools and data at your disposal to track and improve your ads. Use these for some immediate indications for where you can improve your ads. Along with extensive tracking on both platforms, Google Ads provides recommendations for each ad and a quality score with an optimization breakdown. Meta provides its own optimization tool to identify aspects that can be changed to improve outcomes. Along with these tools, both platforms also provide their own detailed list of best practices specific to their services. These tools and lists won’t necessarily provide immediate fixes, but this will help locate potential areas of improvement for any ad. 

The Right Landing Page

The settings, stats, and information on Google Ads and Meta Ads will help you improve your click rates. The final goal, however, is to convert those clicks into purchasing products or services from your business. Ensure the landing page for each ad is relevant and specific. Linking your home page or a generic landing page is not always the best practice. You’ll want to provide anyone clicking on an ad to arrive at the thing that interested them. Ensure an ad takes a visitor to the page with the specific product or service they clicked on with that same product or service. 

The Best Practice is To Keep Improving

Following these 5 best practices will undoubtedly improve your PPC ads, but the best practice is to keep improving. Continue to (re)specify your keywords and targets, test ads, and monitor the information and optimizations that the platforms provide. Just like your business, its ads will keep changing and need updating and maintenance. If you want even more suggestions or want help updating and maintaining your ads, contact Rosewood’s advertising team for even more PPC best practices.

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , , , , ,

Getting Results with “Calls to Action”

Typewriter which has written "call to action" on a page

If you have even only dipped your toes into online marketing, you will have come across the term “call to action” (CTA). They’re ubiquitously mentioned because of their efficacy. Calls to action display a click-through rate (CTR) of 4.23%. That’s more than double the average CTR of Google search ads at 1.91%, and more than ten times the rate of 0.35% for display ads. A single CTA in an email can improve click rates by a staggering 371% and purchases by 1617%. Including well-crafted CTAs in your digital marketing is essential, so Rosewood’s digital marketing team has put together everything you need to know about calls to action to get you results.

What is a call to action?

Calls to action are a staple of effective marketing. They are the main way to motivate and direct your potential customers and clients to complete a certain task that’s being promoted in your marketing. An ad, email, or social media post may show an enticing product, service, discount, or piece of content to pique their interest. It is the call to action’s job to then rouse someone to click and follow their curiosity. 

CTAs are found in every kind of digital marketing. They are prompts in the text of blogs, posts, and ads. They are buttons on websites and ads. Even email subject lines can have calls to action. You may have followed a call to action to reach this blog from Rosewood’s own social media and you’ll find them in this article. They are everywhere because they are an essential conversion method of digital marketing. The ability of effective CTAs to convert marketing into revenue makes them integral to increasing your marketing’s results and return on investment. 

What makes an call to action get results?

There is precision to creating an effective call to action with impressive click-through rates. Here are the staples for crafting successful CTAs that get results.

Intentional – Know the results you want

To create any call to action you need to have a clear intention, a defined goal and result for that piece of marketing. The CTA will result in a click, but it needs to be associated with another action attached to that click. It could be a specific purchase, redeeming a promotion, or contacting for information about a service. Establishing that precise goal allows you to set the impetus of the CTA and where it leads.

Directional

CTAs are meant to guide someone, and that is only possible if it provides clear direction and guidance. Most call to actions include a simple command or suggestion. Some common examples include “Read more”, “Check it out here”, “Buy now”, or “Follow the link in our bio”. All of these make it clear where they are steering a user. That direction also needs to continue beyond just the written prompt. Every call to action should be linked so that it leads to the relevant page or contact method. The last thing you want to give a viewer is the first direction and then leave them lost on your homepage wondering if they need to take the next right or left. They are more likely to just leave from confusion.

Clear and Concise

That direction should be clear and concise. Short and sweet is the standard practice. Simple commands like “read more” or “buy now” explicitly and concisely tells a user what they need to do. Providing longer or more complicated CTAs reduces clarity and clicks. 

CTAs should also be visually clear. Hyperlinked text should be visible so that it is immediately recognizable that it leads to the relevant page. Even better are button CTAs with strong colours and text. These make a call to action more visually prominent and so they have better click-through rates. The average CTR of a button call to action is more than 1% higher than average at 5.31% with the highest performance at 70%.

Personalized

As with most marketing, the most effective calls to action are personalized. These identify a person by name, their location, language, or interests. A Hubspot study of over 333,000 CTAs found that personalized ones perform 202% better. Such personalization isn’t usually possible in social media, but Google and Meta ads and email marketing can utilize user information to create personalized marketing that speaks directly to your audience.

FOMO

Calls to action are about motivation. One of the most effective motivators is the “fear of missing out” (FOMO). This is not actual fear or anxiety but an incentive. FOMO incites someone to make an action a priority rather than forgetting and not following through later. Create this excitement by indicating time sensitivity. Identify clearly there is time limit on a promotion or that stocks are limited. Pair this with a call to action that creates urgency with words like “now”, “soon”, “today”, or a phrase like “don’t miss out” to inspire that click. Avoid making every CTA evoke FOMO, or users will soon become numb to its effects. If everything is urgent, nothing is.

Restraint and Focus

Lastly, calls to action are a crucial aspect of your marketing, but practice restraint. Don’t flood every piece of marketing with multiple to try to generate clicks. CTAs turn from motivating suggestions to tedious, overwhelming commands if they are a constant stream. Every piece of marketing should stick to a clear focus. Longer pieces of marketing like emails or blogs can have multiple CTAs; however, they should still be restricted to a thematic few that fit the overall piece of content. 

Start Creating Your CTAs Now

Now you have the essentials to start crafting effective calls to action to see more directed results from your marketing. Want some assistance in creating or honing your CTAs for social media, blogs, ads, and emails? The best time to start is now. Talk about CTAs and the most productive for your business with our digital marketing team today. See? Urgency, clarity, and direction. 

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , ,

Google + Facebook Ads: Where to Start

Fingers tapping on a tablet with technological icons floating

If you’re getting started with online advertising, the two foundations are Google and Facebook (or Meta) Ads. Google Ads allows you to have ads appear in searches and on any of Google’s services, e.g. YouTube. Meta’s ad platform lets you put ads on the two social media juggernauts: Facebook and Instagram. Naturally, ads on these two have major online coverage. This is why they hold more than 52% of total ad spending worldwide and over 64% in North America. That online advertising is essential for your business’ growth. Creating effective ads with strong leads turns into conversions and sales. Today 65% of people click on an ad before making a purchase. You’ve probably looked at and maybe even begun advertising on both. Are you wondering where to start making those ads, or maybe you aren’t seeing great conversions? Here are three important things to consider when starting any ad on Google or Meta.

Targets

All your advertising should have certain targets in mind. That doesn’t just mean a single general audience. For example, some products or services you provide may have a typically different target customer or clientele than others. Any demographic information may be important, such as gender, age group, location, etc. Certain advertising or communication tactics are going to resonate better or worse with these different groups, so you will want to tailor ads accordingly. If your business’ services are primarily for women around Aurora, ON, there is little to no tangible benefit that a man living in Vancouver, BC see your ads. Use audience segments to ensure your ads are targeting those they are most likely to convert.  

Platforms and Ad Types

Both Google and Meta provide a set of places to present your ads. Google Ads can appear in various kinds of searches such as web, shopping, or maps. They also have ads that appear in Gmail and video ads for YouTube. Meta provides a whole suite of ads, with different kinds for Facebook and Instagram. On these platforms ads can appear as stories, reels, videos, posts in timelines and feeds, etc.

To start creating impactful ads, you need to know where you plan to put ads because that will tailor what kind of leads you need to create. For example, search ads are primarily text. Google shopping promotions will be specific product listing recommendations. Instagram and Facebook promoted stories, however, are primarily visual with an image, graphic, or short video. You will want to focus effort in creating ad content that will reach its target audience on the platforms they use, especially for the Meta suite. For example, Facebook’s userbase is predominantly between the ages 25-54, while Instagram skews younger at 18-34. 

Experiment

Both Google and Facebook Ads provide an incredible amount of data and metrics for your ads’ viewership, conversion rates, and overall performance. However, those numbers will not be especially informative if you have nothing to compare to. It’s best to experiment by running at least two ads to get a sense of how they perform differently. This kind of testing will provide you with a lot of valuable information for identifying what qualities create impactful ads and resonate with customers/client. This is so essential that both Google and Meta Ads provide tools to make experimenting easy and informative.

When running multiple ads for experiments, try to minimize differences. For example, if you change copy and target demographics, and the ad performs differently, you will be left wondering if it was because of the copy, its target, or both. One effective method of testing is to split a similar audience into two segments that each see different versions of the ad (otherwise known as A/B testing). This should provide an informative comparison for discovering what kind of ads best capture and convert.

Once You Start Making Ads, Never Stop

Creating ads on Google and Meta or Facebook is a continuous process. They should be repeatedly updated and/or changed to reflect your business and home in on the developing interests of your own changing audience. Once you start making ads, you shouldn’t stop or settle. Keep targeting, identifying the right platforms and ad types, and experimenting. Remember, if a certain ad doesn’t do as well, that can be just as informative as one that transcends. If you’re looking for help to start your Google or Facebook Ads, Rosewood’s marketing team are virtuosos. They can help you create and improve your ads and identify and interpret key metrics

/0 Comments/by