In the first two parts of this series we covered the basics of pay per click ads and how hood cleaners and restaurant service companies can establish a solid PPC strategy and set up an effective Pay Per Click Advertising for Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning Businesses marketing campaign that will benefit their bottom line.
Now that you have a solid foundation, it’s time to dig deep into the metrics to measure what is and what isn’t in your paid search campaign.
You have your PPC ad campaign up and running for your hood cleaning company, and now you are waiting for those conversions to come in. Isn’t it great that you have done all of your preparation, and your ad campaign will do all the work for you?
While that result would be great, ad campaigns don’t usually work that way. Here are some tips to maximize your results, monitor your success and what to do if the campaign is not as successful as you hoped.
Tracking Your Results
Once your campaign is active, tracking your results is essential. One of the best aspects of PPC campaigns is that you can change things if they are not working. You are not set into any of the decisions you made at the start of the campaign. Most PPC programs give you daily results to examine so that you can tweak your settings. While it is not recommended to change your settings daily, you can keep an eye on what keywords are getting the best results as well as if your conversion rate is hitting your goals.
Tracking Code
The best way to track results is to insert a tracking code in each ad. The tracking code is an indicator that will tell you which specific ad was clicked. You can use trackers for ad language, ad placement, ad image or any number of variables to narrow down your statistical analysis. The tracking code is a simple string of code that you include in the coding for your ad.
Monitoring Your Results
Keeping tabs on your results will make your campaign more effective. Results can turn up surprising and unexpected information.
Examples are successful keyword phrases that you did not expect, poor success rate in formerly successful placements, ad language that worked before not working this time around and an ad that was successful suddenly changing its success rate.
Success can come in different forms. Some or all of these might be appropriate for you and your business. You should measure all of these that are appropriate to you and your business:
- Sales – in a classic eCommerce website, this is the easiest way to determine success. How many widgets are being bought as a result of PPC clicks, what is the cost per sale(conversion), what is the ROAS (return on ad spend)
- Leads – you may not be selling something via your website, but instead hoping to drive leads. These might include:
– Requests for information
– Emails
– Phone calls
- Website engagement – perhaps you just want to create engagement with visitors, you could measure thing such as:
– Bounce Rate
– Time on Site
– Number of Pages Visited
- Attribution – how frequently does a PPC click lead to:
– Additional PPC clicks
– Clicks on Organic ads
– Sales coming a later click on an Organic ad
By monitoring your results, you can catch these types of results as they come in, giving you the opportunity to tweak your ads for better conversion rates.
A/B Split Testing
A/B split testing is a practice that can help you find the ultimate ad for your campaign. The concept is to test each ad combination until you find the ones that are the most effective. Testing is done with actual prospects to give you a legitimate set of data. Split testing has been proven to work as a way to fine tune Pay Per Click Advertising for Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning campaigns.
How to Measure Success
Success is measured ultimately in conversions. You need to determine what conversion rate you need for a successful campaign. Start with how many sales you need to meet your revenue goals and work backwards. If you need X number of sales to meet your revenue goals, and it takes 2X appointments to get that many sales, figure out how many conversions you need to get to 2X appointments. Once you have that figure, you will know what conversion rate goal you need to achieve.
PPC’s sole purpose is in getting the most relevant visitors as possible to your website. The old saying “we can lead the horse to water, but can’t make him drink” holds true for PPC. A well crafted PPC campaign can provide incredibly relevant traffic to your site, but can’t make the shopper buy. Once the visitor is at your website, it is the website’s job to close the sale.
If you feel that the PPC campaign is well crafted, yet you are not seeing the results that you need for success, look at the website. Pretend that you are a prospect yourself:
- Would you find the site to be engaging if you were a prospect?
- How does your site compare to your main competitor’s sites? The avg. shopper visits 4 different sites before deciding to buy. Is your site as engaging as the competitors?
- Test your website or landing page. Is it easy for the prospect to navigate and request information? Customers today have very high expectations for ease of use. If they encounter any obstacle they leave your site.
While not specifically a part of PPC marketing, Google Analytics is a tool that every website owner should become very familiar with. Analytics provides you with a tool that allows you to measure performance of your PPC programs, understand your Organic traffic and even see what other sources provide you with website traffic.
This tool allows you to drill down into every source in categories including, but not limited to, Source, Geography, Device, Campaign, Ad Text, differing windows of time, etc. There are probably very few questions about the visitors to your website that Google Analytics cannot answer.
This concludes our three part series on PPC campaigns. While there are many ways to market your company, pay per click advertising is a great addition to your overall strategy. With careful planning, it can offer considerable returns on your investment, attract substantially more leads, and increase your conversions.
Did you miss an earlier installment?
Pay Per Click Advertising for Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning Businesses Part 1
Pay Per Click Advertising for Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning Businesses Part 2