Lead generation is critical to growing your business. Every industry faces a cluster of competition. Companies need to be creative when finding leads that ultimately will turn into a conversion.
Paid search (Google Ads) is a key lever focused on finding potential leads raising their hands, literally searching for your service. The goal of every paid search campaign is to drive relevant traffic to your site to ensure the highest probability for a user to convert. Our philosophy at Xcite is to leverage our clients’ existing audiences to help find new ones through consumer engagement, behavior tracking, and location targeting.
In this blog, we will discuss the benefits of PPC, the metrics you should be aware of, as well as the considerations when hiring an agency.
Benefits of PPC
There are many benefits of using paid search for your business including brand awareness and visibility. By creating these touchpoints, your company will see more online leads and overall conversions.
In addition, paid search campaigns also help to build audiences for future remarketing efforts. This allows you to stay engaged with the audience you have already interacted with through your paid ads. Remarketing ads can consist of static images, animated images, videos, and text ads. The goal of an effective remarketing campaign is to stay in front of your audience and create multiple touch-points so they become familiar with your brand. The average consumer needs to interact with your company at least four times, across different channels, before they take action. As a result of this, remarketing is a great way to stay in front of them and be present in their moment of need.
Important Metrics
One of the most important parts of running a PPC campaign is the ability to understand and adapt it to the data along the way.
Xcite Head Optimizer, Erick Rudolph, suggests “While every business’ goals include being more profitable, there are many ways to get from A to B. The ones that are successful find different ways of doing this that don’t always fall in line with the way everyone else does things. Figuring out your goals is the first step. The rest is expanding on those by testing and listening to what the data is telling us. Do not be afraid to do something different. Even when things are working, ask yourself if they can be better. If we aren’t trying different things and studying their impact, what are we truly learning?”
While running a PPC campaign for your business, here are some of the metrics to keep an eye on:
- Increased Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the number of individuals who click on your ad divided by the number of people who see it. An increased CTR will give you more opportunities to be found online.
- Cost Per Conversion (CPC) is important in determining how much you have to spend to gain a new client. Keep track of your CPC to learn how to improve your campaign. We can use the data from this metric to adjust your strategies and reinvest in what works.
- Quality Score is Google’s measurement of the quality and relevance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages.
- Impression Share is how often your ads are displayed for a keyword. It is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get.
Monitoring these metrics and learning from them will enable you and your marketing agency the insights needed to improve and push your campaign to its fullest potential.
How to Choose an Agency
When finding an agency to represent your business online, it is important to make sure that they will fit your needs. Using referrals from your friends is a wonderful option because you are more likely to find a good cultural and communication fit.
While doing your research, be sure to have your goals defined and a list of the most important items ready. Erick Rudolph implores business owners to take a deep dive into their business and ask themselves these questions before deciding to hire an agency:
- What metrics are most important to you and why?
- How do those metrics fit in your business model?
- What type of conversion is more important to you? Quality or quantity?
- What is your investment-to-value of a customer?
- What kind of cost per conversion (CPC) makes sense to you?
Once you have narrowed down what your company needs and you have created a shortlist of agencies that you are interested in, schedule a consultation to get to know them better.
Here are a few examples that you may consider asking, similar to the questions you asked yourself above:
- What is the range of SEM services they provide?
- Who will own your data, website, and accounts?
- What are the buyer personas that they are most familiar with?
- How do they approach leads? Is quality or quantity more important?
- What is their process for data enrichment and optimization?
Like all things in life, the more information you have the better! Understanding the inner workings of an agency can be a daunting task, however, asking the right questions to yourself and the agency can confirm whether or not it’s a good fit.
Why Work with Xcite?
Xcite is a Google Agency Partner and has many software partners that give our clients a huge advantage over the competition. We will design, deliver, and execute a strategic paid search plan to help you reach your goals and objectives. We work with business owners to educate them on all aspects of their marketing strategy, enabling you to see the results and the progress made along the way.
If you are looking to start a paid search strategy, reach out to Xcite for a free consultation.
8055 E Tufts Ave Ste 240
