Now that we have discussed the basics of PPC advertising, it is time to dig deeper into what to consider before you begin your campaign. Pay Per Click advertising for kitchen exhaust cleaning businesses is not a hard and fast science, but you can use scientific methods to focus each campaign on the most efficient way to drive conversions.
Before you start the actual campaign, you need to take preparatory steps. Without adequate preparation, your campaign will only have mediocre success. However, if you do the preparation, you will be amazed at how much difference it makes in your success rate.
Understanding Your Target Market
The foodservice industry includes a wide range of types and sizes. As a company that serves that industry, it is important to narrow your ad focus to your ideal customer.
Not all commercial kitchens need hood cleaning on a regular basis. The best way to start your campaign is to figure out who your ideal target customer is, and really hone in on their needs. After all, you want to appeal to that particular person in your ad campaign. The best practice is to come up with a customer profile before you start your PPC ad campaign.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a critical component to your PPC campaign. While you may think you know how people search for your products and services, keyword research takes into consideration many factors that you may not have considered such as regional colloquialisms and spellings. Even if you only service a small geographic area, keyword research will give your PPC campaign a boost in conversions.
Categories of keywords to consider:
- Brand names and generic names
- Geographical location names
- Product and service names
- Brand name of products
- Unique word groupings for your industry
- Seasonal needs
- Setting Up Your PPC Campaign
Once you have devised your ad content, keywords and target market, the next step is to set up the ad. Your research into your ideal customer will help in making these selections. You will need to make choices to focus your campaign in these areas:
- Language – should you show ads only to English speaking people or are other languages appropriate as well
- Location – where should your ads show? If you service only certain cities, states, or zips… your PPC campaign should advertise only to people in those areas
- Device type – more and more people today are shopping on their mobile phone and tablet… is your website optimized to provide a good shopping experience for these devices. If not, get started on that right away. Until that optimization is complete, don’t waste your money on shoppers using these devices.
- Placement of ad – there’s one constant in PPC advertising… the higher your ad is placed, the likely it is to be clicked. On average, ads positioned as one of the top 3 will get clicked on 20 times more often than an ad in positions 4 through 10. The higher your ad is placed, the more likely you are to get a click.
- Budget – What can you afford to spend on PPC advertising? Many people are shocked to learn just how often people use the internet to shop for the product or services that they themselves offer. It can be overwhelming to think about the potential cost to reach all of them. It’s best to start small. What can you afford to spend today? If you start with a limited budget, you must also limit the audience that you’re trying to attract. Go back to the keyword research effort and subdivide all keywords into multiple layers of relevancy. Some keywords are inherently more relevant to your business than others. For example, a website selling restaurant hood filters could find that people looking for “hood filters” and “restaurant hood filters” both are good potential customers. But if you have a limited budget, I’d spend all the money I could on those looking for “restaurant hood filters” first. If money is left over, then go after those looking for “hood filters”. We call it the bullseye approach. Capture all of the success that you can from the most relevant terms first (bullseye keywords), then expand the budget a layer at a time with terms that are a little less perfect and then again to those that are even a bit less relevant.
- Delivery options (under advanced settings) – Opinions differ on whether to use Standard or Accelerated delivery options. Standard delivery means that the search engine (Google AdWords) will show your ads occasionally throughout the day so that ads are showing all day. This however does not guarantee that everyone looking for your product will see your ads (they try to make the budget last throughout the day).Accelerated delivery means that the search engine will show your ads to every person looking as quickly as they can. With a limited budget, this could mean that the daily budget is exhausted early in the day and ads don’t show later that day. What’s best for your business is often dependent on the specifics of your business. The benefit to using the Accelerated delivery option is that you can easily see when ads stop running and know at a glance that when/if you’re missing out on traffic. It’s a bit less evident with Standard delivery.
When choosing device type, consider that many businesses are now using tablets and smartphones as tools. Placement of ad includes search engine and content network. Budget generally works best if you divide your total budget by amount of days in your campaign and split it evenly. Most companies rotate their ads evenly for delivery options as a best practice for testing effectiveness.
Writing the Ad
You don’t have a lot of text to write the ad; therefore it is important that you choose wisely. Once you subtract the characters for your link, you should use the remaining characters to focus on your keyword phrases and the emotional punch that will induce the prospect to click. Testing will help you refine the wording.
Prior to writing the ads, it’s important to group like keywords into “ad groups”. An ad group is a set of similar keywords (i.e., restaurant hood filter, filters for restaurant hoods, restaurant kitchen hood filters, etc.).
The ads should then be written in a manner that talks directly to what the shopper was looking for. Since all of the keywords in this example are for people looking for a restaurant hood filter in one way or another, the ad should talk very specifically to that. For example, the ad might say something like “Best Prices on Restaurant Hood Filters”.
PPC campaigns have proven to be highly successful in driving prospects to convert. If you take the time to select the best choices for your kitchen exhaust cleaning company, you will be thrilled at the results.
In next week’s post, for the final part of this series we’ll dig deep into conversions with tips on tracking and monitoring results, A/B split testing, and how to measure success.
Did you miss the first installment?
Pay Per Click Advertising for Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning Businesses Part 1