Congratulations, you have a website!
But did you know your site joins 4.49 billion other pages on the internet? Desperate times call for desperate measures, and you need PPC metrics to help you stand out and reach that target audience.
It’s not enough anymore to just open a page, post some text and images, and hope for the best. You don’t just want to exist, you want your site to be found by the people who are buying what you are selling.
Well, the companies that produce those other billions of pages are also trying to target those people. It’s a fight to the finish.
The good news is, you can actively make your page more accessible and available to the people you want to reach. It does take some effort but read on to find out how to make those big numbers work in your favor.
What Do We Want? Leads! But Wait…
Hooray!
Your website got over 10,000 leads last month.
So why aren’t your salespeople, executive team, and marketing staff celebrating? In fact, why are they groaning at the numbers and slipping out the side doors before you can assign them hits to follow up on?
Because most of those leads are junk.
It turns out that only about 4% of leads are good ones.
The rest are just squatters, who take up your time and resources, and don’t “convert” or turn into business for your company. Or worse, are possibly even competitors scoping you out and stealing secrets.
It’s like that old saying that if you throw enough spaghetti against the wall, a couple of strands will stick. (Why would anyone throw spaghetti against the wall? We’re curious how this statement even came to be a stereotype.)
This isn’t to say you don’t want leads, you just want good leads.
And you have to adopt certain kinds of activities to hone down that massive lead pileup or your entire business may go down with the flood instead of celebrating the “wins” of bringing in the qualified leads that will keep you in business for a long time.
Defining SEO
Chances are, you’ve heard the little bitty alphabet term, SEO.
It’s not just a string of letters!
SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is all about refining your website, and links to and from your website, to help it rank better and help it be found more easily by that segmented target audience.
It’s a really good practice, sometimes called “white hat marketing,” which merits an entirely separate blog article (or ask us about it!).
There are several supporting strategies that are used to supplement SEO efforts, and one of the ways you can increase your site’s likelihood of being seen is through paid advertisements.
Paid Advertising Is Not Spam
Oh no, did we lose you there?
Hold on, please, we promise, it’ll all make sense (and then cents! Lots and lots of cents).
If you cringed at the idea of buying ads, you’re not alone.
But things are changing, and paid advertising can actually be a smart choice for you and your marketing plan.
Sure, there are ads that give paid advertising a bad name (we’re looking at you pop-ups that won’t go away!) but if you choose wisely, you could see a nice increase in site visits.
Introduction to PPC Metrics
Paid advertising also goes by an acronym, called PPC, or pay-per-click.
It’s a process of creating advertisements that (usually) appear above and below search results.
You know you’ve seen them.
Go look right now – but promise to come right back! Run a Google search and check out what’s above (and below) the regular search results.
What you see are carefully-crafted advertisements. When you click one, the company who placed the advertisement pays for your click.
You may be thinking, “Why should I pay? Won’t my site show up in the regular Google search results?”
Sure it will.
It may show up on page 93, but yes, it will probably appear. Can you take a chance on your target audience scrolling through 93 pages when your competitors are on page one?
In fact, a paper published at Stanford University noted that most search engine users only look at the first ten or so results. We’re pretty sure that casual searchers may go a couple pages in, but it’s really tough to have your site be “found” by Google’s crawlers just on its own behalf.
There’s too much going on behind the scenes and you’re up against people who are doing all sorts of good and not so great practices to get their websites found.
Meaningful Metrics
The benefit of PPC metrics comes to you after the person clicks.
Unlike any other type of marketing campaigns, which require long waits for the results of funnels, workflows, and surveys, you get PPC metrics information right away.
Even if you have just one PPC ad, you get to start monitoring it and receiving its data right away.
At any point, you can navigate to your pay-per-click dashboard and see a lot of information, including:
- How many times your ads have been clicked
- Details about who clicked the ad and visited your website (varies, but may include what site the person viewed last, an IP address, how long they stayed on your page, what else they clicked)
- A comparison of this click to other clicks you have paid for (either currently or previously)
- How well this type of link/keyword is ranking for competitors
- Whether you have gotten “conversions” (i.e. form fills, phone calls, e-commerce transactions) from people clicking the ads
And once you have that information, the world is your oyster!
OK, well, you get the idea. It is access to instant information you can then use to tweak.
You can’t manipulate a print ad if you find out people just aren’t relating to it.
It takes time to publish a new white paper or eBook if people aren’t converting from it.
PPC metrics take zero time to refine.
PPC for You and Me
Are you getting what we’re saying but thinking maybe this isn’t for your company?
Think again – PPC metrics can benefit any business big or small, one and all.
After all, everyone can use a little boost, right?
Insights from PPC metrics can help you better refine your advertising. For example, let’s say your product is a middle-grade study tool. Since you started your pay-per-click advertising, your website is getting tons of hits. Yay!
But no one is buying anything – they’re just looking and leaving.
Without PPC metrics, you’d be running blind, trying to figure out what went wrong. However, with PPC metrics you can look at what you’ve got and see what’s happening.
In this example, your pay-per-click ad is attracting parents of high schoolers (or high schoolers themselves) because you didn’t use the word “middle-grade” in your advertisement, only “study tool.”
Once the students and parents see your website advertising a study aid for younger children, they leave.
Higher numbers aren’t better if you’re not selling.
So after a quick evaluation of your PPC metrics, you know to refine your advertisement to include the keywords that your target audience is searching for!
What PPC Metrics Can Tell You
Some of the things you can learn from a PPC metrics report include:
- Keyword relevance (if your keywords are bringing in the target they’re supposed to)
- Whether you need to refine the quality of your landing pages (that’s the page people are taken to after they click a link)
- What Google thinks of your site
- If your campaigns are optimized efficiently
- What competitors are doing (this information may be masked/filtered)
- What type of traffic you’re getting
- Your actual cost per click
There’s no longer any shame in the PPC game.
In fact, you can look at it as a cost of doing business.
Yes, it costs money, but so does most other advertising and those older methods may not have as much return on investment for you.
Plus, we don’t want to say, “If all your competitors jumped off a building, would you…” because that’s a stereotype and it doesn’t fit with the competitive online advertising market.
Sometimes, you just have to pay to play.
Improve and Grow Your Site Today!
Hey, don’t go! Let’s SEO!
We’re just getting started.
Yes, there’s a lot of acronyms and alphabet soup in the world of online marketing, but there’s one thing to know: This stuff works. Just take a look at how one company experienced 913% increase in leads through online marketing!
And it can work for you.
Let us show you just how simple it really is to implement PPC, SEO, and other best practices for your website.
Click here and give us a short description of your current website and any marketing activities you’re already doing. We offer a free one-hour review call because we really do want to help.
We’ll even give you a free Google Ads/AdWords Audit. You can use this free report immediately to start improving your Google Ad campaigns. Start today!
