Last Updated on 2020-12-30 by ppcguybklyn
Since the blog opened, my articles introduce a lot of PPC advertising and digital marketing-related tools and tips, so that beginners who want to enter the industry can learn more about these things. After so much introduction of related basic content, it is time to apply this knowledge to the problems that are likely to be encountered in real life. In this article, I have selected five questions that I often encounter when operating accounts, or digital marketing and PPC advertising issues that are commonly seen in the industry, and sort out the most appropriate solutions, and the most suitable marketing tools to solve these problems.
Question 1: My competitors use my brand name as keywords. What should I do?
This is considered to be one of the most frequently asked questions by companies or customers when operating ad accounts. This is a very common PPC advertising technique. If the company’s brand has a certain degree of popularity or has clear competitors, the other party is very likely to choose to add our brand name to their keyword list. This way when consumers search for our brand, their ads will appear in the search results, and have the opportunity to get conversions from these ad traffic. Many business owners or customers are very nervous when they see competitors using such a strategy. They think it will have a great impact on the sales of websites and advertisements. So how should we deal with this situation?
Solution:
I think that when this happens, we are indirectly authenticated by our competitors, because competitors will choose to use our brand words as keywords, which means that they think our brand awareness and scale are high enough for them to gain profit from it. So don’t worry too much. Instead, we should be thankful that they are willing to spend money on our brand name, which means that our business is moving in the right direction.
As long as the competitors do not mention our brand name in the ad copy or directly attack our products, Google Ads will not prevent the publication of such advertisements. What we have to do is to make sure that we have our own branded advertisements to protect our brand. If we are advertising brand words, the competitors must use very high bids to have a chance to beat us and get a higher ad ranking. When the competitors find the bids and CPC of these keywords are higher than their profitable costs, they may consider pausing these ads.
Question 2: My conversion rate is lower than the industry benchmark, how can I improve it?
Each industry has an industry average conversion rate in digital marketing and PPC advertising. The industry average is a very good measure of performance, and these data can be found on the Internet. if the conversion rate of our website or keyword on the ad account is lower than the industry average, what can we do to increase the conversion rate?
Solution
To know why the conversion rate is lower than average, we should ask ourselves why the Internet traffic we attract is unwilling to convert on our website. To answer this question, we must examine the conversion path of website visitors: From the process of reaching the page, adding to the shopping cart, and checking out, why choose to leave the website instead of completing the conversion.
Google Analytics provides a series of conversion path analysis functions. Couple this with other behavior analysis functions on GA, you can roughly know at which stage most of the website visitors bounce. We can adjust our website content based on this data. For example, if website visitors all bounce on the landing page or the product page, it means that the product information is probably not rich or attractive enough for them to be willing to add these products to the shopping cart. We have to test and adjust the content of these pages, and then observe whether the conversion rate has improved.
Another option that is very helpful to increase conversion rate is tools with Heat Mapping function. They can tell us where visitors most frequently browse on the landing page. We must make sure that these most visited areas are clear and have strong content to encourage consumers to consume on our website, if not, we must consider what kind of content to add to this area.
Question 3: My advertising campaign can't spend the scheduled daily budget, how can I increase traffic?
When our company or client has a relatively high advertising budget, we hope that the advertising campaign can have a way to spend all of our arranged advertising budget to achieve the maximum effect. But sometimes we may encounter the situation that the actual cost of the advertising campaign is lower than the scheduled daily budget. It seems that the search volume and bidding of the keywords cannot be spent on our preset costs. What should we do? Can we make advertising campaigns spend more money, so as not to encounter the dilemma of spending the budget?
Solution
In this situation, we must make good use of the Google Ads keyword planning tool and other keyword research tools to find more relevant keywords with high search volume. Because the advertising campaign can’t spend the daily budget, which means these keywords in the advertising campaign are not able to bring us the expected search volume. It would be helpful to find more suitable keywords.
The automatic bidding strategies of Google Ads also allow us to have better control over the budget. In particular, the two bidding strategies of maximizing clicks and conversions are designed based on the starting point of achieving the best results within the budget. This type of bidding strategy can also allow Google's algorithm to help find more and more effective ways to spend the budget.
Question 4: Will the advertisement of brand keywords affect my SEO organic traffic?
If our keyword advertisements use brand words, sometimes some customers may think that brand word advertisements overlap with SEO keywords, which may affect their own SEO organic traffic. The profit generated by organic traffic will decrease because of this, but is that really the case?
Solution
Don’t worry, SEO organic traffic will not be so easily divided by PPC ads. If SEO search results appear at the same time as keyword advertising results, most Internet users will still choose to click on the organic search results. The reason why brand keyword ads are necessary is because when matched with SEO keywords, we have ways to maximize the exposure of search results. When the top half of the first page of the search results is filled with our PPC ads and SEO search results, we can ensure that we get more traffic.
So when we find that SEO’s organic traffic and sales are beginning to decrease, we should not point the problem to brand advertising in the first place, but should use SEO tools to check the ranking and search volume changes, and arrange to produce more high-quality content to increase SEO authority and traffic.
Question 5: The conversions recorded by Google Ads are different from e-commerce platforms and Google Analytics. Which number is the most accurate?
This is also a problem we often encounter when evaluating the effectiveness of advertising. Because Google Analytics and Google Ads record clicks and conversions in different ways, we often find that there are three different numbers of conversion recorded among these two platforms and the e-commerce platforms. So which number do we need to look at in order to correctly measure the effect of PPC advertising and digital marketing?
Solution
First of all, we need to check the installed conversion code to determine whether Google Analytics and Google Ads have the correct conversion record. Generally, if you install the conversion code according to Google’s steps, there will be no major problems, but if you want to be safe, you can consider installing these two conversion codes through Google Tag Manager to ensure that there will be no omissions or misplants.
After there is no problem with the conversion code, we need to make sure that the two platforms use the same attribution model and conversion window, so that we can be sure that they are recording conversions on the same benchmark. One thing to note is that even these are the same, the conversion value of Google Analytics and Google Ads still may be different because the two record user interaction in different ways. Confirming that the same attribution model and conversion tracking period can only minimize the gap between the two.
So the most important question is, which number is the most accurate? I don’t think there is a standard answer to this. If you want to evaluate the performance of the PPC ads themselves, then the numbers on Google Ads should be the main ones, because this directly reflects the impact of ad copy and keywords on conversion. if we want to evaluate the usage and consumption behavior of visitors, it should be based on the numbers of Google Analytics. Knowing what number to use at what time is one of the very important abilities in digital marketing.
(Original Post inShelly's Adventure)
