At the start of your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign you would have done a lot of research to create powerful PPC adverts, including:
Research into your audience
Which keywords to target
Focusing your advert message
Devising a strong call to action
But that’s not where the hard work ends, because if you do start to slacken off and don’t regularly review the performance of your adverts you could start to see problems.
Reducing number of impressions or clicks
There could be several reasons for your number of impressions or clicks to be on the decline.
First of all, check out your daily budget; it could be that you’ve reached it. If so, you can either increase it to get more impressions, or reduce your Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for some of your keywords to see how they perform at a lower position.
Secondly, it could be negative keywords causing a problem. These are words that can help you reach the most interested customers by ruling out potential related searches. For example, an Optician selling glasses could use negative keywords such as ‘wine’ to stop people searching for ‘wine glasses’ being shown their ad. But, if you use too many, your ads may not be reaching many people.
Low quality score
Your quality score is a measurement of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are to the person seeing your ad.
If your score is low, or it’s declining it could be due to:
Your ads not getting enough clicks, so refresh them and consider using negative keywords to limit unrelated searches
Your landing pages may not be relevant enough to your ads and keywords; it’s always best to have a landing page for each ad group
Your keywords not being relevant
Average position
Your average position statistic describes how your ad typically ranks against other ads, determining which order ads appear on a page.
If your keyword bids are too low this will result in a low position. Another factor is if your quality score is low, because if Google thinks your ads (keywords and landing pages) are not relevant, it will cost you more to keep a higher position.
CTR dropping (click through rate)
If your click through rate is dropping it’s time to review your ad’s wording. Give it a refresh and make sure it’s highly relevant to your keywords. This would also be a good time to rethink your call to action to make sure you choose something that’s commanding and effective.
Running a PPC campaign is not a one-off deal – you have to constantly monitor your results and refine your ads if you want them to preform for you.
Facebook is a great marketing tool through which you can engage with your customers, but it’s important to make sure your presence is as eye-catching as possible.
Coming up with fresh ideas can be a challenge.
As social media users become more savvy, the expect more. It’s no longer OK just to have a static page with a few posts, polls and videos. Now your fans demand more engagement, they want to get something out of the relationship they are building with you; they want innovation.
And that can leave you with one hell of a headache.
Thankfully, those guys over at Social Media Examiner have come up trumps again.
They take a look at a few fun Facebook page examples to help spark your creativity. Each of the Facebook pages they review has a novel way of engaging with their fans – perhaps having a look through will help you come up with some great ideas for your page.
Follow the link above and see if it can get your creative juices flowing.
Yes, Psy was the phenomenon of 2012 with his global hit Gangnam Style.
What can we learn from it other than it encourages terrible dancing at Christmas parties and that, after a few glasses of wine, everyone thinks they can do the dance (you can’t, no really, I’m being serious, you can’t).
To be honest, not a lot – I just love the song and wanted to add it to this blog and use it to wish you all a very Happy New Year!
The New Year is almost upon you, so it’s time to take stock and stop kidding yourself.
You’ve been working like a Trojan all year and your marketing efforts are starting to pay off. But because your activities have been pulling in more customers, your workload has increased making keeping up with the marketing really difficult.
Every week it’s the same; day after day you’re the one working late desperately trying to get all those blogs scheduled and articles written. You’re the one eating lunch at your desk as you try to keep up with your Twitter feed and Facebook comments.
Why?
Because either
You are the business owner and don’t trust anyone else to do it, or
You’re the only one daft enough to have shown a bit of gumption about content marketing and social media and knew enough about it to give it a go
Well now’s the time to stop – get off that eternal hamster wheel.
You have a perfectly good team around you, so it’s about time they started pulling their weight too.
Marketing a business has to be a team effort, so don’t be put off by their ‘but I won’t know what to say’, or ‘what shall I write about?’ excuses – if you can do it, so can they.
Yes, it’s time to delegate.
Blogging
The most common reason not to blog is not knowing what to write about.
Tosh – for a start, anyone in your company that deals with customers should have a shed load of stuff to write about. Just think about all those queries and questions that come their way – instant ‘how to’ guides.
What about all the advice they offer – perfect ‘top tips’ material?
How about issues customers have and the way you, as a company, resolve them – ideal case study material.
See, there’s no excuse – everyone in your team should be contributing at least one article a week.
Social media
Before you delegate your social media activities, make sure you have a social media policy in place so everyone knows how they should react to comments, what they can and can’t say etc.
Then you just need someone to monitor your Twitter and Facebook accounts so that all comments are responded to in a timely manner.
But make sure they understand the importance of building relationships and that they engage with your followers and fans; providing a stream of interesting and relevant tweets and status updates will boost your company’s visibility.
By the way, if you think by delegating all this stuff you can take the year off, sorry, it doesn’t work like that.
All this regular activity is going to be driving more business your way, leaving you to do what you do best – sell.
Remember, no one is Superman or Wonder Woman – by spreading the workload you’ll achieve your goals much faster, you’ll be less grey, far calmer and will also get to enjoy lunch away from you desk.
