You are nailing it with your PPC programme – sales are flowing – what should you do – it is so tempting to sit there and enjoy, why mess up a good thing!
This can leave you exposed – you need to understand where the value is coming from – particularly if your PPC success relies heavily on one factor, such as a single keyword.
If the situation changes – say more competitors come into the market or Google Ads changes its algorithm – those wonderful returns may drop off dramatically – then you’ll be stuck in a quandry!
SO then … what to do?
A great approach is to reinvest some of those awesome returns back into your PPC program to future proof it, not by spending more on performance-based campaigns, but by creating campaigns to build your brand, seek out new markets and new customers.
Now brand building in PPC seems to be a bit counter intuitive – after all isn’t PPC the definition of performance based marketing?
Lets look at implementing this for a B2C business.
An Example: When PPC Success Relies on a Single Keyword
One of our clients is getting great traction on Google Ads, in fact, they are tripling their ROI, so for £1 they are putting in they are getting £3 at the moment- So they are raising their budget to capitalise on this from £3k to 9k per month.
Even so, they are vulnerable (even with these great results) right now.
The problem lies in how they’re getting those results, they are achieving virtually everything through one keyword – ONE.
This keyword is THE hot product in their sector right now, so they are getting fantastic traction from that word.
Whilst everybody is thrilled, this makes us nervous because the company can lose their advantage quickly if the competition gets their version onstream.
And we need to prevent that.
Here, our advice would be to take some of the return and put it into spend on the Google Display Network (GDN) and YouTube, allowing us to implement a process of testing and learning to find new audiences and grow brand awareness.
Why use Google Display Network?
Well, it’s a great tool for building brand awareness and it’s usually cheaper than Google Ads, because its further up the funnel – we just need to decide what we want to test for.
It just so happens that the product aligns with a whole bunch of relevant areas, that we can test against eg Spirituality, Reality Shows, Self-help, Alternative and natural medicines,Mental health,Health news, Troubled relationships and on it goes
It’s great to have so many options, and this doesn’t even touch on custom audiences or in-market options yet!
Using a small daily test budget, we can’t test all of these at once, but we can over time, so we are planning it in, testing each option over a two-week period and keep winning options going, pause losers, and test new ones.
A B2B business most likely won’t have nearly as many testing options. But the approach would remain the same: identify relevant GDN areas and lay out a schedule for testing.
And we often start with custom audiences of competitor URLs and keywords for B2B.
YouTube as well?
GDN is not your only option,
YouTube campaigns are a good fit for B2C clients where customers are younger and most purchases are made on mobile.
How much should I budget for testing
We would normally recommend dedicating a percentage of your PPC sales revenue, however, some companies prefer to establish a set monthly budget.
There is no right or wrong.
How do you know what worked?
Google Analytics will give you some insights for these campaigns, metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, and pages viewed are good indicators for engagement.
Of course, also look at the shift in brand traffic and sales, as if your brand-building campaigns are a success, you should see your brand traffic and sales move up over time.
To wrap up..
Just remember, good performance today doesn’t make you bulletproof.
Especially if you are over-reliant on one thing, put some money back into testing now and give yourself some options for the future.
