February 25th, 2016

The Benefits of Using a PPC Agency

When it comes to getting serious about your PPC strategies, should you opt for an in-house manager or a PPC agency? Many companies opt to manage their own PPC initially. But as campaigns gain momentum, it usually becomes clear that they need to dedicate more resources to their advertising efforts.

Deciding whether you should hire someone to join your company full-time to manage PPC or work with an agency can be a challenging decision to make. Having a dedicated, in-house PPC manager may seem like the ideal solution. But for many companies, opting to work with an agency can be a better resource for optimizing PPC campaigns. If you’re weighing your options and considering whether you should hire an in-house PPC manager or use an agency, here are a few key things to keep in mind.

1. PPC Campaigns Don’t End After Office Hours

The major perceived benefit of having an in-house PPC employee is that the person managing your campaigns will be available at all times. In reality, this assumption doesn’t always hold true. Employees often have set hours and don’t work weekends, even if your campaigns continue to run after hours. Additionally, even the most dedicated employee will eventually need to take vacation days or sick days. If you’ve focused all your PPC management in a single person, your campaigns will have to adhere to that person’s schedule.

With an agency you don’t need to worry about these things. Agency representatives can be on-call around the clock, giving you all the attention that an in-house employee would give. While it can be cheaper to hire a PPC manager in-house, the amount of experience and expertise you gain from working with a PPC agency far outstrips the value of a single employee.

2. Exposure to New Ideas Breeds Better Campaigns

On one hand, being able to focus in on a single company’s campaigns can seem like the ideal approach for optimal results.  However, it’s easy to get stuck in a creative and strategic rut when you’re managing your own. By not managing multiple accounts, PPC managers aren’t exposed to new ideas as easily. Even if they are exposed to new ideas, they don’t know if they work or not until they try them on your own campaigns. Many organizations lose valuable ad spend experimenting with new ideas on their own. 

At an agency, we try new products and features from Google on one or two accounts first and see how they perform. This allows us to adequately test new features before we advise our clients on how to use them. Because of the volume of campaigns we manage, we have a large bank of experience to draw from and can bring a fresh perspective to your campaigns on a continual basis.

3. A Safety Net Against Change

In-house PPC managers can hold a lot of important knowledge about your particular PPC processes and needs. But what happens if they quit tomorrow? Even planned, relatively short-term absences can have an impact on your campaigns.  Who will manage your campaigns if your sole in-house PPC manager is out sick or on an extended vacation? 

At an agency, you’ll always have someone else ready who is sourced, trained and prepared to take over. With many accounts at Webrageous we crosstrain our account managers on multiple accounts. In general, we have two people working on the account and are familiar with the account’s particular needs. That way when one person leaves on vacation, someone else can take over. If your agency account manager quits tomorrow, your accounts will go through a seamless transition to their new manager.

4. Tap the Insider Knowledge of a PPC Agency

If you’re considering hiring a dedicated PPC manager, chances are you don’t have expert-level knowledge of the PPC industry. But without being an insider to the world of digital advertising, it is very hard to know the questions to ask of a candidate. It can be very easy to hire the wrong person in-house. Hiring someone who doesn’t have the required experience to be successful can spell disaster for your PPC strategy at worst, and cause delays or wasted money at best.

PPC agency professionals can dedicate much more time and resources to staying up to date on the latest PPC strategies and trends. Because of our intensive work with platforms like AdWords, PPC agencies are often able to optimize campaigns more quickly and effectively. When you work with an agency, you’re working with a team of experts with a proven track record of success.

The Benefits of Webrageous

Convinced that a PPC agency might be a good fit for your advertising needs? Webrageous has an experienced team of PPC managers ready to help you transform your campaigns’ conversion rate. For qualified clients, Webrageous offers a 60-day, risk-free trial of our PPC services. If you’re ready to start getting the most out of your PPC campaigns, contact Webrageous today and we’ll walk you through our process and show you how big of an impact we can have on your advertising strategy.

 

September 21st, 2015

How to Create Lead Conversions

Inbound marketing is a relatively new term in the marketing community and marketers are still fine-tuning their systems to fully use it to their advantage. The most essential element of the inbound marketing toolkit is the lead conversion process.

The conversion process is the bread and butter of any inbound marketing program. Without a seamless and fully-integrated conversion process you are basically wasting your time and money on efforts that will never convert into revenue. So it is essential that you take the time to convert those leads that you work so hard to bring to your landing pages. Once you get them to the web page that you want them on, this brings them to the conversion process so you can capture those lead conversions.

There are various methods you can utilize to bring your prospects to your desired landing pages prior to getting them to complete the conversion. You will want to subscribe to this blog as I will go in depth on each marketing channel in the weeks to come. For now, let’s make sure you understand how to complete the conversion process so you can capture those leads when they visit your landing page!

  1. Create an offer that is relevant to your contacts. Pay attention to where your contacts are in the funnel. Are they cold contacts? Then an eBook would be good to gain interest. Are they a current customer that you are trying to upsell? A relevant checklist would be good. Have they already showed interest in your product offerings? Offer them a demo or a coupon for enrollment!
  2. Host that offer on a thank you page and/or with a follow-up email. You must deliver the promised content once they submit their information to you. You can host your content on a thank you page or deliver it in a follow-up email. You could also deliver the content upon conversion by including a content link in the associated form in step 3.
  3. Create the landing page with an integrated form. There are many programs that you can create a landing page with, but the most important part is to integrate a form with the landing page that will capture those submissions! This submission form will direct the contact to the content whether it is hosted on a thank you page, delivered automatically through a content link, or delivered in an automated email.
  4. Then you will want to segment your acquired lead lists for email marketing purposes!

Now that you have completed and refined your conversion process you are ready to begin driving traffic to your website to generate those leads you worked so hard to convert. Webrageous can help you maximize campaign performance and avoid wasting your ad spend on ineffective keyword techniques. Our team of search marketing experts stay continually up to date on the latest advancements with both Google AdWords and Bing Ads, so you can be sure that you’re getting the best results possible from your ad campaigns under our management. Contact us today for a consultation to see how you can grow your PPC advertising efforts successfully.

September 14th, 2015

Why Running Broad Keywords on Bing Ads is a Bad Idea

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For many advertisers, their PPC efforts begin and end with Google AdWords. But as the most popular search advertising platform, AdWords can end up being costly and time-consuming, especially in competitive markets like the legal and insurance industries. With up to 20% of U.S. search traffic coming from Bing Search, savvy marketers know that diversifying your PPC campaigns to serve ads on different browsers other than Google can help you reach an untapped segment of the market.

Running search ads with Bing Ads isn’t just a matter of recreating your Google AdWords strategy on a different platform, but many advertisers make the mistake of treating the platforms as interchangeable. By gaining a better understanding of how Bing Ads differs from Google AdWords when it comes keyword matching, you can help compensate for some of Bing’s shortcomings and improve your Bing campaigns.

Keyword Matching 101: Know Your Type

Let’s back up and review the different keyword matching types available on both Google and Bing’s PPC platforms. Knowing how the various keyword matching options work and how you can best use them is an important step in developing a comprehensive PPC strategy.

  • Broad Match: Broad match allows you to show ads to the widest group of searchers; when you use broad match, your ads can show up anytime someone searches that keyword, regardless of phrasing of his search. Casting a wide net can be a powerful tool, but it can also backfire by serving your ads to people who aren’t really interested.
  • Broad Match Modifier: True to its name, broad match modifier is a slightly more precise version of broad match. It serves your ads for people who searched for a close, but not necessarily exact, match to your keywords. This could mean matching “run” to “running” and “runners.” Broad match modifiers give users the benefit of the scope of broad keywords, but can also help to eliminate some of the inaccurate matches.
  • Exact Match: In the cast of exact match, the search query must exactly match of your keyword phrase, which is great when you’re targeting long-tail keywords and honing in on very specific keywords. However, because there are usually many variations on how people search for products and services, relying too heavily on exact match can prevent your ads from showing up when they should.
  • Phrase Match: As with exact match, phrase match requires your exact keyword to appear in the search query, but will also show up for searches that include your keyword with words before or after it. For example, your keyword “children’s books” would match with “buy children’s books” and “children’s books for sale” but not “children’s science books.”
  • Negative Match: Negative match prevents your ads from showing up when people search certain keywords. It’s commonly used to help hone search results by telling the ad platform know when it shouldn’t show your ads.  

The Downside of Broad Keywords

Broad keyword matching is the default keyword match type, and the type that reaches the largest, most diverse audience. This method of keyword matching allows you to reach a wide audience regardless of the exact phrase they use in their search, which lets you save time building lengthy keyword lists and trying to figure out how people might try to find your business. For instance, your keyword “dog food” won’t just get you results for people who search “dog food,” but also “puppy food” and “dog kibble.” However, you can also get inappropriate airtime for your ads — “dog sitting” and “Italian food” could also potentially come up when you use broad match keywords.

Fortunately for Google AdWords users, Google has a solution. When you run broad keyword matches, Google’s algorithm is smart enough to recognize when search query and ad combinations are a bad fit, then refines where your ads show up accordingly. Eventually, AdWords can stop those bad matches before they occur, so your ads are less likely to be served to people who were searching for something else entirely. It’s not 100% accurate, but, in general you can trust the broad keywords match tool on Google to still provide you with a lot of relevant matches.

Why Broad Keyword Match on Bing Ads Performs Poorly

Unfortunately for advertisers on Bing, the Bing Ads algorithm is not as advanced as Google’s. When you run broad keywords on Bing, you’ll still “match” with a large number of highly irrelevant search terms. While your ads might be getting a lot of impressions on Bing Ads, you might end up showing ads to people who aren’t interested at all in your product or services. On Bing, running broad match keywords can disastrous; you can easily burn through your ad spend on bad matches if you only use broad keyword matching.

Alternatives on to Broad Keyword Match

Running ads on Bing has a lot of advantages. It’s a less competitive market so you’re more likely to score better ad placement for less, and Bing’s platform gives advertisers a little more transparency and control in ways that Google doesn’t. The trick is finding strategies that leverage Bing’s strengths to your advantage, while compensating for its weak points.

While broad keyword match is the default keyword matching method, and in some ways the most straightforward PPC option for inexperienced managers, it’s important to remember that it’s not the only option you have as an advertiser. The most effective PPC campaigns use a combination of several keyword matching methods to ensure that your ads reach not only a wide audience, but an audience that is interested in your product or services.

Using alternative keyword matching methods to supplement or replace broad match can be a much more effective way of honing your campaigns and reaching the right audience with search advertising. However, because they are somewhat more complex and specific than broad keyword match, they can require a little more finesse and a stronger understanding of keyword performance to be used successfully.

Getting Better Results from Bing Ads

Running ads on Bing can be a great way to round out your PPC campaigns and reach a wider audience than with Google AdWords alone. Just as with Google AdWords, running successful Bing Ads requires a strong understanding of the nuances of the Bing Ads algorithm. No matter which platform you use for PPC, it’s important to remember that the algorithms are continuously changing and improving, so what works well right now might not hold true by next year.

Webrageous can help you maximize campaign performance on Bing and avoid wasting your ad spend on ineffective keyword techniques. Our team of search marketing experts stays continually up to date on the latest advancements with both Google AdWords and Bing Ads, so you can be sure that you’re getting the best results possible from your ad campaigns under our management. Contact us today for a consultation to see how you can effectively leverage Bing Ads to grow your PPC advertising efforts successfully.

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