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For many small business owners, strategizing and managing PPC campaigns atop all of their other business responsibilities is unfeasible. Too often consistent monitoring, campaign testing, and budgeting get sacrificed for more pressing operational needs, resulting in campaigns that are eating up marketing budgets and driving flat conversions. Luckily, for small business owners, there are simple and effective strategic tweaks that can be made to re-energize PPC campaigns.
Go Mobile
Think about how often during the day you reach for your mobile device; when you want to chat with friends, post to social media, look up directions, or find product information, you likely use your smartphone. In fact, U.S. consumers now spend 5 hours per day on their mobile devices. Any company that wants to stay competitive in 2017 has to adopt a mobile-first mindset, or else risk irrelevancy.
Mobile is steadily dominating PPC campaigns as well, with 60% of searches stemming from these devices. With more consumers searching for brand information in the palm of their hands, companies must optimize their ads for mobile to create the best experience possible and encourage clicks. Google AdWords offers an array of extensions to help brands offer as much information within one ad as possible including site links, ratings, and location extensions. But another feature local service providers should consider including in their AdWords strategy is call extensions. With this add-on visitors can contact the business directly from the ad, thus creating an easier user experience that encourages searchers to connect directly with a business representative.
Segment by Service
Often, searchers are looking for a specific brand service or offering; they want to know (as quickly as possible) that a local niche business provides the service they need. To create more engaging ads that answer searchers’ immediate questions, small businesses can segment their ad groups by service. Creating service-based ad groups allows the search engine to immediately match serve the appropriate ad to a user based on the keywords they used. In other words, if you run a hair salon, your ad groups will be divvied into categories like women’s highlight, women’s haircut, men’s haircut, blow-out, etc. When a consumer searches for that specific service in their vicinity, an ad highlighting, not just your salon, but your matching service will surface on the SERP, thus creating a more streamlined search experience for the consumer.
The Rose Rock Veterinary Hospital in Norman, OK recently implemented these strategies in an effort to lower their conversion costs and increase qualified leads. Prior to re-strategizing with the guidance of White Shark Media, Rose Rock received irrelevant traffic, couldn’t track results on AdWords, and failed to offer mobile extensions and bid adjustments, despite 65% of its traffic stemming from mobile devices. The Veterinary Hospital was missing out on valuable customer opportunities as a result of poor campaign structuring and management.
However, once they re-focused their efforts around mobile searches and re-structure their campaigns to include strategic ad groupings and negative keywords across the search network, Rose Rock was able to drive qualified, relevant traffic.
In addition to restructuring and implementing mobile extensions, Rose Rock also incorporated an all-inclusive traffic system covering conversions and calls. Through tracking, Rose Rock is able to conduct data-driven analysis to help them better understand how each campaign ad group is performing and which updates might be needed to drive more traffic and conversions.
Within one month of these PPC updates, conversion costs decreased by over 50%, and qualified leads rose by over 152%.
By improving the mobile ad experience and segmenting by service, Rose Rock was able to better relate to consumers’ needs. Through these updated ads, consumers immediately learned of Rose Rock’s full suite of services-prompting the right searchers to take the next step by clicking through or calling. The more relevant, high-quality traffic brands drive, the less costly conversion will be.
If you’re interested in learning more about Rose Rock’s road to success, you can download the full case study by clicking on the image below.
