Pay Per Click Management & Return On Investment

Pay Per Click Management And Advertising

The online advertising industry is currently facing some major challenges and pay per click management is a big part of it. Though it isn’t all that old in the grand scheme of things, it has been around since the earliest days of the internet, and many aspects of it haven’t changed in that time.

Today, a combination of options for blocking or skirting online ads and an increasing unwillingness to deal with them has significantly reduced the potency of staple on-page ad options such as banners or pop-ups.

To change with the times, many top businesses are placing a lot of emphasis on native advertising and the pursuit of viral campaigns, but the classic PPC model still has a lot of fuel left in the tank — it just needs to be used correctly. Smart PPC- heavy strategies can achieve outstanding levels of ROI that would probably shock those who like to say that PPC is dead.

In this article, we’re going to cover the things that every e-commerce website brand needs to know about PPC and ROI in order to figure out the extent to which it should work PPC into its marketing.

Let’s get started.

Pay Per Click Remains Strongly Effective

Through their largely unobtrusive presence in the ever-popular Google search rankings, AdWords ads haven’t suffered in the way that on-page ads have. Not only do plenty of people still click on AdWords ads, but they also generally do so intentionally (whereas many of the relatively few clicks picked up by banner ads are inevitably accidental), and there will always be great value in appearing at the top before any organic results.

This is easy to see from looking at the stats. Instead of getting more expensive, AdWords traffic has actually become a little cheaper across the board in recent years. Anyone concerned about the future of PPC can rest assured that AdWords isn’t going to lose any of its efficacy until Google discontinues it or loses its position at the top of the search mountain (neither possibility being at all likely to happen in the foreseeable future).

As ever, the key with AdWords is an iterative improvement. You need to get the balance between natural and promotional language exactly right for the context, and for that you must understand searcher intent. Is someone searching using an urgent buyer term like “buy now”? You can be strongly promotional in your copy. Are they instead looking for information from a trustworthy source? You can draw them in and then sell to them on your website.

Advertising Allows Extensive Customization Fee

When smartphone messaging and app ecosystems started to get mainstream traction, there were likely concerns over what the future of advertising would look like — but like liquid filling a container, digital advertising has simply changed to suit its new environment. Today, an advertiser has so many options to choose from in the form of free-to-use apps.

Whether they’re social media platforms, media players, or schedule organizers (to name just a few types), free-to-use apps must be monetized somehow, and since people don’t like paying for software, allowing ads is the default option. This approach is so powerful for marketers because it allows for remarkable segmentation.

Here’s how: When you install an app (or use a free-to-use piece of desktop/laptop software), you’ll likely be asked if you can be served targeted ads — if you agree to it (and there’s generally little reason not to since you’re going to be served ads regardless), then your personal data collected through the app and your associated user account can be used to determine which ads are best suited to you.

If you’re advertising an accessory for the iPhone 5, for instance, then the opportunity to specifically target people using an app on an iPhone 5 will be highly valuable. The impact on ROI from niche segmentation should be obvious.

The more room you have to cut away the ads that don’t get results, the less money you’ll spend on wasted clicks and the more PPC scales quickly and effectively money you’ll make relative to your ad spend.

PPC Scales Quickly And Effectively

PPC scales quickly and effectively. Marketing campaigns have different requirements and intended durations — having the time to slowly build up organic traffic is ideal, but sometimes you don’t have that kind of time, particularly when there’s a specific product to advertise within a set period (or a busy retail time to target, such as a public holiday).

E-commerce brands that want to take full advantage of such time-sensitive opportunities need to understand the instant impact of a good PPC campaign.

Once you’ve written your ad copy, set your budget, and configured your parameters, you can go live almost immediately (there will generally be a small lag from the platform provider checking your ads for inadmissible content). Within an hour, your listings can be at the top of the Google results page, or prominently positioned within social media feeds — you wouldn’t be able to make a dent with unpaid advertising in that kind of time.

This kind of on-demand rapid turnaround is a core ingredient of the increasingly popular dropshipping approach to e-commerce. An entrepreneur will pick up a pre-built store at an appropriate time of year — typically drawn from websites integrated with Oberlo, a popular product supplier — then run ads for a few months to earn a profit before stopping the campaign and selling the website for a small profit (the recent success will allow a higher asking price).

The success doesn’t last, of course, because PPC traffic is fully campaign-dependent. When the campaign ends, the traffic dries up instantly. But as long as you’re aware of that pitfall, it isn’t really a problem, and it mainly means that you’re in total control over the ROI you achieve.

Analytics Value Attribution Is Vitally Important For Return On Investment (ROI)

Analytics value attribution is vitally important for ROI The notion of ROI perhaps used to be fairly simple: the amount you made in sales versus the amount you spent on ads. But with modern analytics technology, we have the ability to see that things are considerably more complicated than that.

For instance, imagine that someone clicks through to your website and likes what they see but isn’t in a position to buy at that time. They leave your site, and then, a couple of days later, get paid for the month and head back to your site to place an order. How does ROI work there?

You might want to attribute the order to the very first ad they clicked on, but since they didn’t use that ad when they returned to your site, you could easily miss it. That’s why digital marketing now requires a much broader assessment of visitor metrics with complex attribution models, tracking them across the entire customer journey and thus finding where the value lies.

Why Is This Significant For E-commerce?

We want to ensure converting clicks into sales. PPC advertising might be a great fit for product pages because it’s easy to judge ROI going by conversion profits, but it’s also worth investigating for other promotional purposes. You might have a product brochure worth advertising, for instance — through Google Analytics, you can attribute a value to a download of that brochure that corresponds with its impact on conversions.

If the average conversion were $100, and users who downloaded the brochure were 20% more likely to convert, you could give the download value of $20 (or start with $10 to see what kind of click-through rate you got).

If you allocate appropriate custom values for every part of your customer journey, you can then accurately assess the return you’re getting on your investment in a much broader sense. Sometimes a PPC campaign can seem ineffective but actually be performing normally, with some other part of your process losing the customers.

Pay Per Click Management Return On Investment

To recap what we’ve covered, here are the four vital things you should keep in mind if you’re thinking about using PPC for your E-commerce brand:

• AdWords remains the best overall choice for a steady return on investment (ROI).
• Mobile advertising lets you get very targeted.
• You can ramp up effective PPC traffic very quickly.
• There’s more to ROI than just conversions.

In the long run, PPC management can’t beat the ROI of a dedicated SEO-focussed organic traffic campaign, but it doesn’t need to. PPC is a reliable option to keep on your toolbelt, ready to be rapidly deployed whenever you see value in it, and the consistency of the ROI means that you should never overlook it.

All The Way Up Media is an internet marketing company. We help companies to get the best possible return on investment with pay per click management campaign.

Victoria Greene writes about the complexities of the online retail world on a freelance basis and for her Victoria Ecommerce blog.

She’s particularly fascinated by the complex tools today’s sellers have for attracting and retaining their niche audiences.