SEM Done Right: Best Practices Of A PPC Campaign

People consume digital content daily. They use their computers, cell phones, tablets, and watches to collect information, find services, and buy products. Therefore, businesses need to understand how users consume information and use it to attract customers to their website and increase their revenue. 

A vital part of marketing online involves using search engines and developing a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign to bring customers to your website. In order to understand why investing in a PPC campaign is important as part of your search engine marketing strategy, it’s necessary to know what these acronyms mean and why you should consider incorporating these strategies into your marketing budget.

SEO Versus SEM – What’s The Difference?

In developing a holistic marketing campaign, it’s important to take a multi-dimensional approach so that you can reach your growth goals. The best marketing campaigns consist of a variety of different formats including search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). For most of us, it’s difficult to know the difference and why we should allocate time and resources for both. 

In previous editions of our Eguides, we have discussed the benefits of SEO, how it has changed in the past ten years, and important SEO practices. In short, effective SEO has to do with developing a professional website, filling that website with useful content, and ensuring that content is accessible across multiple digital platforms. Investing in SEO means providing website visitors with content that is interesting, relatable, addresses their search intent and worth their time and investment. 

We can invest all the time and money available into optimizing content on our website, but without people visiting this site, what’s the point? This is where SEM and PPC advertising come into play. To entice people to your website, you need to compete on the search engine results page (SERP). Though this could happen organically through the ingenious and alluring content in your website, reaching the top of the SERP this way takes a lot of time. To achieve high rankings quickly, you need to invest some money into developing an SEM campaign.

In short, SEO is woven into the content of your site. Once a user enters your website, the information inside will make them want to stay and browse. The more people explore your content and the more useful your content proves to be, the higher it’s ranked over time on the SERP. However, a paid SEM campaign will allow people to find your site quickly – it allows it to appear at the top of the SERP without the wait. SEM and SEO are both important marketing strategies. They both cater to your target audience, and, when done well, both SEO and SEM will lure visitors to your site again and again. 

SEO provides updated content that keeps readers engaged and solves their individual problem. A well-designed SEM strategy allows new visitors to find you by paying your way to the top. Search engines are designed to collect data on consumers and present them with advertisements based on their searched keywords, interests, and sites previously visited. This creates a unique opportunity for marketing experts – PPC advertising.

Why Invest In PPC Advertising?

With PPC advertising, you’re paying for premium ad space on a search engine page, on other websites, or within avenues of social media. Essentially, an effective PPC campaign guarantees visibility, and if marketed to the right audience, it will lead to more traffic to your website and generate more customers. 

PPC advertising has a lot of benefits for companies. It can be one of the most advantageous ways to advertise your product and reach the top of the SERP when done correctly. Furthermore, there are a number of other benefits associated with PPC advertising:

PPC Helps Make Your Growth Goals A Reality To develop an effective SEM campaign, you need to have growth goals. They will likely surround increasing revenue, acquiring subscriptions, and generating new clients. Once you’ve established these goals, you need to think about how to reach them. PPC helps with the how. The best marketing campaigns consist of a variety of different techniques, one of which should be PPC advertising. 

PPC Advertising Is The Fastest Way To Generate Web Traffic SEO is important, but it often takes months to start seeing results for brand new websites. With PPC, you’ll get results immediately. Additionally, more people will visit your site because PPC targets people searching for the services you provide, not just those who are existing customers or already know about your company. 

You Can Control Your Budget When deciding how much to invest in a PPC campaign, you can start with a budget that works for you, then, if you’re experiencing favorable results, you can scale up accordingly. If parts of your campaign are working and others are not, you can revise and make adjustments immediately. PPC affords you the flexibility to change strategies all the time to experiment with what works best.

PPC Is Easy To Analyze You can measure and track its success or failure through the FieldRoutesTM Compass marketing portal. This will help you see how much traffic your advertisement is generating,and the cost per lead. Plus, FieldRoutesTM Operations Suite users will see their return on marketing spending. 

Instant Feedback Informs Your Other Marketing Efforts This data will help you generate content, learn about your audience, and understand your competition. For example, impression, click, and conversion data collected through FieldRoutes Compass can enhance SEO strategies which serve as another way to connect with your audience, achieve higher rankings organically, and increase your bottom line.

PPC advertising is an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. Not only will it effectively bring people to your website and generate more business, but it will also supply essential data to inform other parts of your marketing efforts

Developing An Effective PPC Campaign

Understanding the importance of a PPC campaign is the first step in deciding that its worth your investment. After realizing the potential of a well-designed PPC campaign, it’s time to develop strategies to encourage your potential customers to click on your advertisement, visit your website, and ultimately take action. You want customers to fill out a form, speak with a customer service representative, and purchase your services. The experts at FieldRoutes can work with you to develop a multi-dimensional PPC campaign that targets customers across a variety of digital channels. Our specialists can closely monitor your account and make regular adjustments and optimizations to ensure your PPC campaign is as effective as possible. 

At FieldRoutes, our team develops PPC campaigns that utilize a variety of different strategies. 

Google Ads: Search Engines As a Google certified partner, we understand how this search engine works and the strategies needed to successfully run a Google Ads campaign. We build advertisements from scratch and customize your campaign to align with your business philosophy, products, and services. That way, when a potential customer uses the keywords we identified as having the highest likelihood of generating a quality lead in a Google search, your company will appear at the top of the SERP. 

Google Ads: Google’s Display Network And Remarketing In addition to ranking high on Google’s SERP, our team will develop advertisements that will show up in Google’s Display Network. This means that, after a potential customer visits your site, they will continue to receive advertisements for your services while browsing their favorite websites. Google’s Display Network affords exposure to 90% of Internet users as they browse publisher websites including YouTube, weather.com, and a myriad of news services. By having your advertisements display in websites targeted through Google’s Display Network, customers will have multiple opportunities to interact with your content before making a purchase. These remarketing ads will continue to attract attention to your company and your services as potential customers browse websites across the Internet. 

Other Search Engines Though Google ads target most Internet users, people still use search engines such as Bing and Yahoo. With 25% of users interacting with alternative search engines, it’s important to target those users as well when developing an effective PPC campaign. Therefore, FieldRoutes will advertise your services on a variety of different search engines to make sure its accessible to all Internet users.

Facebook Advertising Facebook has over 1 billion users, and PPC advertisements hone in on the visitor’s intent and their previous searches to target potential customers through their Facebook pages. Users provide a lot of personal information when setting up and interacting with their Facebook account, allowing advertisers to display content to a broad audience or a unique niche market. While browsing Facebook, advertisements and articles are integrated into newsfeeds or appear on the right-hand side of the page. That way, as people peruse their Facebook page, your advertisement will appear naturally allowing current or potential customers to interact with your content again and again. 

YouTube Advertising (Pre-Roll Ads) Millions of Americans consume video content through YouTube daily. A 15-30 second pre-roll advertisement shown before a YouTube video will allow you to communicate a longer message about your company, your image, and the services you provide your customer. 

Custom Landing Pages After a user clicks on your advertisement, they will arrive at a landing page. Our team of experts specialize in creating landing pages that communicate your desired message to your audience. Unlike the homepage of a website, these landing pages will encourage visitors to interact with your services in a specific way rather than browse your entire website. Landing pages have a call to action aimed to increase lead conversions. Depending on your growth goals, the landing page may ask users to fill out a form or call a customer service representative.

Comprehensive Reporting Through FieldRoutes

Effective reporting helps you understand your return on investment (ROI) so that you can make informed marketing decisions in the future. FieldRoutes offers real-time reporting on everything from costs to clicks, conversion rates, and more. Furthermore, our team of professionals will discuss these reports with you, offer recommendations, answer your questions, and work with you to help you make marketing decisions that benefit your business. 

FieldRoutes Compass is our online reporting tool that consolidates all of your marketing data from Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and CallTrackingMetrics. It is also integrated with the FieldRoutes Operations Suite so that you can see which marketing channels generate the leads that drive your new business revenue. 

At FieldRoutes, we know how quickly everything changes when it comes to digital marketing – it’s a field that’s constantly in flux. As new devices, new products, and new strategies come into play, we do everything we can to keep up with these advancements so that we can help you beat your competitors and reach your growth goals.

Your Partner In Growth

We hope this guide has been helpful. Whether you’re looking to add efficiencies, make things easier for your employees, improve your customer experience, increase sales, or anything in between, FieldRoutes is committed to helping your business reach its full potential. 

The platform automates all aspects of field service operations for enterprise and small business customers that span office management, advanced route optimization, payment processing, digital sales, marketing, and customer acquisition solutions that accelerate growth, streamline operations, increase customer retention, and maximize revenue. Our Operations and Marketing Suites were built with your customers and employees in mind and can help you grow quickly, scale intelligently, and serve customers relentlessly.

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