Achieve Advertising Greatness with Paid Search
(Part 1 of 4)
Working with Jack Porter-Smith and the team at WSI paid search has been a real eye opener.
One of the best ways I’ve seen of articulating why brands fail in the paid search arena, has been the concept of 10 main blockers. These blockers inhibit client progress and get in the way of getting the most out of their online advertising.
These are not tactical items; they stem from executive-level decision-making and habits.
The WSI Paid Search team sought to understand why failure kept occurring… in the beginning, it was a seriously long list of reasons and issues.
Through analysis, they’ve been merged, deduplicated and trimmed this list down to ten core reasons – tied back to the root cause, rather the symptoms.
We’re sharing the list to encourage you to read this list with an open mind, and to take appropriate action if you are inadvertently making any of these mistakes.
We’re all human and make mistakes, and sometimes it just takes a clear mind from outside to point things out to us so that we may improve.
Hope you enjoy
Peter
Blocker #1 – You’re Advertising, But You’re Not Marketing
Often times when a business thinks that their PPC (SEM, pay-per-click, online advertising, paid media) campaigns aren’t working for them, the truth is that they skipped a step in the marketing process, forgetting that advertising is one small sub-set of the marketing strategy, and have leaped in to the ad campaigns too hastily.
A few of the things usually skipped are:
- dedicated landing pages,
- target persona development,
- great content,
- compelling ad creative,
- research with forecasting,
- budgeting and target setting,
- conversion tracking with CRM attribution,
- engaging the sales team,
- readiness and operational readiness.
If you cut these corners and skip crucial steps, can you really expect your advertising to succeed?
Take a deep breath, start at the beginning … by developing an online marketing strategy first and set up the advertising campaigns as the last step.
Blocker #2 – You Don’t Know Your ROI
If you don’t know what Return on Investment (ROI) you are making on your marketing activity, you won’t continue or scale your advertising activities with confidence.
Most businesses don’t know their ROI because they’re not tracking everything properly between their ad platform and their analytics, and, they’re not connecting PPC campaign and cost data to their CRM, so they don’t know what true business results came from what campaigns – not just immediate sales.
For any online marketing strategy to be successful, you require predictability, repeatability and scalability in that order.
You can’t get past the first step of predictability if you don’t know your ROI.
So take action….
- Figure out where the broken link(s) in your process is and fix it.
- Track everything on the PPC side (calls, forms, orders, etc…) and
- Make sure those transactions reach your CRM or accounting package with source attribution.
Keep watching you’ll see the next set of “Blockers to Success” shortly.
Find out more about WSI Paid Search at https://wsidigitaladvisors.uk/wsipaidsearch/
