“Pay no attention to the man behind the green curtain!”
Like the Wizard of Oz, many “gurus” like to hide behind a curtain so you are kept in the dark about what they do.
They are afraid you will learn their secrets and do the work yourself — or worse, they don’t know what they’re doing and don’t want you to know.
In my early days of online marketing, that may have been me as well.
Today, there’s nothing like transparency and honesty to build a solid foundation of trust for a client relationship.
Last week you got to read Alloy Wheel Repair Specialists’s testimonial. This week we thought it would be fun to let you see behind the blue and orange curtain that’s 8 Signal and give you a little peek of what goes on behind the scenes.
Approaching every Google PPC campaign with shoshin
Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki once said: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
Shoshin is a concept in Zen Buddhism that means “a beginner’s mind.” It refers to losing all preconceptions and having an attitude of openness and eagerness when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level. I first heard of it from Josh Waitzkin in a Tim Ferriss podcast interview. Josh was the basis for the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.
Having a beginner’s mind when we launch marketing strategies for new clients is very important. It helps us see your business from a brand new perspective; we start from scratch and can work from any angle because there are no preconceptions of what to do.
Like every project, we approached Alloy Wheel Repair Specialists with the beginner’s mind.
Setting up a baseline for their Google PPC campaign
When we first started working with AWRS, their online campaign was getting them around 10 new leads per month. We measured their success with Key Performance Indicators — more specifically, we made it our goal to raise as much as possible the one KPI that matters most to this particular business: conversions.
When defining success for your business, you have to think about your customers: do you provide a product or service that’s a one-time thing, or can you capture the lifetime value of a client?
Finding out how much repeat business you can expect from one customer will help you decide how much you would be willing to spend to “buy” that customer for your business. You will better understand how many clients you need and how to allocate your resources to keep your customers and keep them happy!
Most seasoned entrepreneurs will tell you the same thing: the number of clients you need is equal to the number of clients that will get you over that “break even” point. How many units of stuff — say, how many lemonade glasses, cookies, smartphone apps, or hours of your services — must you sell in order to cover all your costs?
Key Performance Indicators are based on desired results
As marketers, we know the importance of constantly measuring the impact of your strategies on your business. To make sure you’re getting the results you want, you must be able to track your efforts. Based on the goal you want to reach with your campaign, you can look for the performance indicators that will get you there:
KPIs to Measure Brand Awareness
- Impressions – An impression is counted each time your ad is served. Impressions help you understand how often your ad is being seen.
- Click-through rate – Click-through rate (CTR) measures how often people click your ad after it’s shown to them. The CTR is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown. It’s often used to help determine the effectiveness of an ad.
KPIs to Measure Website Traffic
- Clicks – These are the interactions that your ad gets and will tell you just how well your ads are meeting your advertising goals. Clicks can help you understand how well your ad is appealing to people who see it. Relevant, highly-targeted ads are more likely to receive clicks.
- CTR – Again. The click-through rate will tell you the percentage of people who see your ad and end up clicking on it. This metric can help you gauge how enticing your ad is and how closely it matches your goals.
Note that a good CTR is relative to what you’re advertising and on which networks. To help increase your clicks and CTR, start by creating great ad text and strong keywords to make ads that are highly relevant and very compelling to your customers.
KPIs to Measure Lead Generation
- Number of conversions – This number will report to you total conversions across every conversion action you’re tracking. With it you can see how many times your ads led customers to an action you’ve defined as valuable, such as sales or leads.
- Conversion rate – This is the number of conversions divided by all the interactions that can lead to conversions. This ratio matters because it measures how often, on average, an interaction leads to a conversion.
Your conversion rate can make it easy to track how many clicks you need (on average) to get a sale or other conversion.
KPIs to Measure Sales and Conversions
The top KPIs to measuring your sales and conversions are:
- Cost per conversion – This KPI is your total cost divided by your total conversions and shows you how much, on average, each of your conversions cost. Cost includes cost for interactions that can lead to a conversion.
You can actually assign a value for each conversion to help you measure your ROI.
- Conversion rate.
Key Performance Indicators we are tracking on this account
We were keeping a close eye on at least four types of performance indicators for AWRS:
- Their number of sales – Sales data needs to be mined often to find deeper meanings and trends.
- Number of calls and webform submissions – We like to stay on top of this because you’re more likely to win business when you keep track of your calls and webform submissions.
- Clicks to website – We made sure AWRS was getting an increase in their website traffic.
- Impressions and cost per click – How often your ad is shown and how much you pay for each click to it is something worth keeping a close eye on.
Building a landing page for Google PPC campaigns
When we first started working with AWRS we noticed that their online traffic was going to and through the national franchise site. A national, corporate-built website is hard to work with, since there’s only very limited access to it, and we needed to streamline the campaign. There was only one option: rebuild their website.
This was a win-win situation for everyone. It gave AWRS a personalized, local, and dedicated website and it helped 8 Signal by streamlining our Google PPC campaign for AWRS and giving us a bit more access to provide service continuity.
Optimizing Google PPC campaigns
Separate ad groups for each product and service – When we first started working with AWRS, their adwords account was advertising only one service, alloy wheel repair, which is only one of the services they provide. When 8 Signal noticed that, we encouraged AWRS to start advertising their unique powder coating in a separate ad group.
Negative keywords – These keywords prevent your ad from being triggered by a specific word or phrase. It tells Google not to show your ad to anyone who is searching for that phrase.
Negative keywords are a must-have for every campaign because they narrow your ad exposure so that they appear only to the people looking for what you offer. This type of control helped us increase the campaign’s click-through rate, reduce the average cost per click, and increase their ROI.
Run multiple ads – You can never be sure if what you have is working at its best. There’s always an another ad that could perform better, but there is no way to find out unless you create multiple ads and test those ads against each other.
Having multiple ads in the same ad groups allows Google to display different ads and find the best performing ad. If you already know which ads perform better and when, then you can use that for your advantage to further optimize them.
Well-planned A/B testing can make a sizable difference in the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Narrowing down the most effective elements of an ad and then combining them will make your marketing efforts much more profitable and successful.
Reporting and comparing notes on Google PPC campaigns
Leads alone mean nothing. Leads don’t equal revenue. By definition, leads are just potential customers who haven’t yet bought a thing.
Even if your successful business makes you feel like it could be running on autopilot now, should you let it? Your competition isn’t and you shouldn’t either. To keep that ball of success rolling you should be willing to stay on top of things, to change and adapt. A big part of that lies in the power of your clients’ feedback.
It’s important to stay alert and keep reviewing your reports on a regular basis and comparing your goals to the results you’re getting.
Are all your leads being followed up on? A follow-lead nurturing contact plan, like an email newsletter for your potential buyers, or listening and replying to them on social media, will make sure you reach your potential customers when they’re still looking for what you offer.
8 Signal is your outsourced marketing department. Give us a call at (915) 585-1919 or fill out our online form to schedule a consultation. Just like AWRS, we’re here to help you outsmart, rather than outspend, the competition.
