5 Tips for PPC Advertising

The following post was created with various purposes in mind. The first being that 5 tips for PPC advertising is useful information for our readers. Now you might not need any more reason than that but if you do, organic rankings can be another leading reason for posting regular content to your website. These organic posts can be picked up by various organisations and only recently formed part of a qualification criteria that allowed Spotlight Studios to earn “Top Website Status” in the Global Economics Awards. The final reason is that it can form part of “Tip #3”, designing a specific landing page for PPC traffic.

So, let’s get into why you’re actually here…

Tip #1 DO NOT USE any Express Ads

Both Google and Microsoft offer an “automated” setup of their Ads platform which simply put, gets you up and running within 5-10 minutes. It’s so easy it can even be set up by accident with just a few clicks. This might sound great at the time, and you begin thinking to yourself “why I would ever pay for help or spend time to learn anything more”, but just because they offer the service it doesn’t mean they have your best interests at heart. It’s essentially the same as rocking up to an advertising company saying “This is my business and here’s my money…. spend it”…. and they will, with pleasure!

Tip #2 DO NOT Listen to a Google Account Manager

This may be a controversial point, but I can recall at least 5 occasions over the past 3 years where they have called a client during an active campaign and got them to make detrimental changes to an ads campaign under our management. On one occasion we weren’t aware for ~10 days and factoring in the time to fix cost the client money and put the campaign behind nearly 1 month! Now, in Google’s defence it may be useful to take a call IF (and only if) you’re going it alone, they may provide some improvements to a non-optimised campaign, but if you have an agency on board DO NOT take that call seriously if you receive one.

Tip #3 Invest in Yourself OR an Agency

In life or business everything has a cost whether you’re talking time, money or a bit of both. So, in our list of 5 tips for PPC advertising our 3rd point is that if you’re doing this yourself, you need to decide how much time and money you are prepared to invest into your learning curve and what this looks like for you. As a helping guide it might look something like this…

• 40 hrs & ad spend (1-4 weeks) – In this bracket you can probably kiss goodbye to 100% of your ad spend as you’ll be “paying” for your education only.
• 100 hrs & ad spend (1-3 months) – You now have a few dedicated weeks on your chosen platform; you probably have acquired a lead or two, received some actionable data but you’re probably not that sure how to process it or determine how well it’s going.
• 250 hrs & ad spend (6-12 months) – You’re probably at least 6 months in now and you’re probably quite comfortable with your chosen platform. You’ll be happy with the dashboards, determining the amount of traffic, creating ads, ad groups, but tracking, optimisation and ROI still kind of eludes you.
• 1,000 hrs & ad spend (1 – 3 years) – This would be the level we believe an in-house employee capable of managing an ads campaign would fall in. At this stage you should be comfortable building/managing the creation of effective landing pages, designing ads, optimising campaigns, tracking conversions, determining your ROI, comfortable scaling the campaign and may have even been able to transfer your skills onto other platforms.
• 10,000+ Expert Territory (5-10 years) – Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000hr rule” to become an expert is believed to be the magic number. However maybe that target is a little extreme. I certainly do not fall into this category myself for PPC, but my agency collectively (founded in 2011) I would expect to be very close.

So, what would this be when translated into financials when you consider going it alone using an individual within your organisation earning ~£35,000 salary running and running ads in the region of ~£1,000 per month over 12 months?

Go it alone plus learning curve

* Assuming the employee worked the specified time period over the 12m campaign with no prior experience.

Using an agency like ours

An agency will be considerably cheaper than learning from the ground up and more likely to provide a positive ROI on your campaign over a shorter period. Admittedly this is a selfless plug of our services but we do offer free consultations and work 100% in your ads account so you can see everything we do.

View PPC Services

Tip #4 Direct Traffic to the Correct Page OR Design One Specifically

Just imaging you clicked on an advert that said “Tips for PPC” then you landed on our homepage (https://spotlightstudios.co.uk/). You wouldn’t stay on our site very long would you (even if somewhere on our site were the tips you wanted)? That’s essentially how the express ads from Tip #1 work. Readers need to instantly relate with the page they land on. You have 1-2 seconds to ensure this has happened otherwise you have lost them.

This page was designed solely with this purpose in mind and will act as an active example of a dedicated PPC landing page to answer questions around “Tips for PPC Traffic” at least for ~3 months (so we can assess the performance). Now landing pages can also be “squeeze pages” rather than a news article, where you design something with the sole purpose of converting a higher proportion of traffic. These are more commonly used for more expensive keyword terms where you don’t want to distract the user with numerous links and routes away from that page. However, for low value keywords and for campaigns we’re hoping to acquire readers from as well, sending them to an article is our preferred route.

Tip #5 Start by Locating Low Hanging Fruit

Often you can find a keyword that provided 10-20 visitors per month. Amalgamate 25 – 100 of these keyword variations into a campaign and you could easily find yourself 250-1,000 visitors a month richer for a relatively small cost, we call these terms “low hanging fruit”. These are example figures only and we’ll attempt to keep the numbers simple. So, let’s say the average Cost Per Click (CPC) was £0.10 and we receive 1,000 visits per month to a page, this would cost us ~£100 every month we ran this campaign. Out of those 1,000 visitors, let’s say we get a 3% conversion rate, 2.5% (25 readers) signing up for our newsletter as they liked our content, and 0.5% (5 readers) people asking for a quote on PPC Services.

• Cost Per Click = £0.10
• Cost per Conversion = £100 / 30 conversions = £3.33 (25 x newsletter signups + 5 x Quotes)
• Cost per Lead = £100 / 5 = £20

Out of those 5 quotes let’s say we were able to convert 1 of them:

• Cost per Aquisition = £100 (1 lead out of the 5 quotes)

There is of course a time factor for creating 5 quotes and liaising with 5 customers. We would of course hope to convert more than 1/5 but for this example it serves a purpose and demonstrates that this would be a successful campaign. In fact, we would only need to convert 1 client every 3 months to make this campaign viable once you factor in the lifetime value of a client and taking into account the additional people joining our mailing list.

Final Words

There is no problem starting out on your own, but don’t be disillusioned into thinking PPC is something anyone can pick up very quickly. If you’re keen to learn, then go for it, we hope these 5 tips for PPC advertising really help you in that journey. But if you do get into the 100+hrs range and things aren’t where you imagined, maybe consider reaching out to us and discuss a 6-12 month package and see if we can get your campaign profitable and your learning curve sped up in the process.