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Now that we’ve reviewed the foundations of PPC, we can move on to how to manage your campaigns once they are live. 

Done properly, these campaigns can help you:

• Drive Website Visits: Grow online sales, bookings, or mailing list signups with online ads that direct people to your website.
• Get More Phone Calls: Increase customer calls with ads that feature your phone number and a click-to-call button.
• Increase Store Visits: Get more customers in the door with business ads that help people find your company on the map.

As you move forward, our recommendation to clients is that they first set up SMART goals. That way, everything else that comes is with a purpose. 

First Things First, What Is Your Objective?

You will want to assign one goal per campaign. This choice is essential to determining which settings options will be useful to your campaigns in Google Ads. Here are example best practices recommended by Google:

• If you want to get 2 different results, then you’ll need to set up 2 different campaigns, each with its own marketing goal. For instance, if you want to get leads (like a customer filling out a form) and increase sales, then create one campaign with a Leads goal and one campaign with a Sales goal.
• If your business aims for online sales, consider choosing the Sales goal. Other goals let you set up a campaign that aims to get your Website traffic. 
• If your business aims for calls only, then set up a call-only campaign.

In short, your goals will define the type of campaign you’d like to run which will dictate where customers will see your ads. Once this is set, you will go on to select the networks that’ll feature your ads.

Next Up, Picking Platforms

The Importance of Optimization and Testing

Constant monitoring of your campaigns will help you identify when and where to make optimizations. These are tweaks made to your campaigns to improve performance and reach target goals. Two standard optimizations that all advertisers should be making are adding negative keywords and making bid adjustments.

Testing is another way of optimizing campaign performance; you can experiment with keywords, ad copies, cost-per-click, etc. Keep track of any changes to determine whether they have had a negative or positive impact.

Make Sure You Analyze Your Data With Analytics

Installing Google Analytics on your website is crucial to monitoring its performance and making informed decisions about your PPC campaigns. Tools like these can offer insights on landing pages, organic keywords for which your website is showing, which devices people use to access your site, and many more important metrics.

Track Your Conversions

What’s the point of having 100 clicks a day if you don’t know if they brought in any business? One of the main advantages of digital marketing is that you can track almost anything related to your campaigns. You will be able to define what counts as a conversion for your business, which will catch everything from phone calls made to your business to who fills out a contact sheet. 

Want a refresher before moving forwards? Check out Part I and Part II.

Stay tuned for Part IV for additional resources to managing your campaigns.