MARKETING
PPC Marketing: How to Reach Quality Leads and Prospects
Business owners always want to gain more customers and win back the old ones. After all, growth is impossible if you just rely on your existing customers. That’s why marketers are always looking for ways to gain more leads to become clients. You can do that using numerous lead generation techniques, including PPC or Pay-Per-Click marketing.
What Makes PPC a Fantastic Technique for Lead Generation?
PPC is an excellent technique ideal for any website or company doing online lead generation. Lead gen is what businesses use to determine who to do business with, which includes a period of pre-qualification and exchange of information. The goal is for the lead to get into the funnel or the lead-tracking system.
Compared to other sources of leads, PPC is great because it continually appears on the search results page one. It means it is always in front of people who are looking for a solution to a specific problem. The more people who are aware of you, the more leads you can feed into the funnel that can become clients.
You Are Getting Lots of Leads, But What’s the Problem?
Though you’ve earned a significant number of leads, have excellent conversion rates, and a reasonable cost per lead, you found one problem. Most of the leads you get are “junk leads.” While you did gain lots of leads, only a few of them turned into opportunities and customers. It means you are not getting a healthy ROI, so what can you do?
How can you improve the quality of your leads and prospects with PPC marketing? Start by learning more about your competitor. If you check out this article, research tool SEMRush review, you will see that by mastering competitor analysis, you can drive more traffic to your site and boost your sales. Of course, you don’t just stop at analyzing your competitor.
Make use of the following strategies to reach high-quality leads and prospects.
Target Relevant Keywords
The core of any paid search campaign is keywords. But you can’t just use any keyword. It must be relevant, the best ones that are suitable for your business. So, make sure to target the most focused keywords. Make use of keyword research tools to find the best keyword ideas. It will be a crucial step to attract quality leads to the funnel system.
The kind of keywords you are looking for here is more specific. That is, it must indicate the intent of the searcher. For instance, someone searches “web design.” These keywords are vague, but if the searcher types in “web design services” or “New York web design,” the intent is more evident. It is the kind of keywords you need for your PPC ad.
Research through Websites and Social Media Platforms
Market research is essential in any marketing campaign, including PPC. Your lack of it could be why you don’t see healthy leads and prospects. Two of the best ways you can do research is through websites and social media platforms. With market analysis, you can gather as much information you need to create the best PPC marketing campaign.
It will provide you with insights that help you learn things such as:
- How many prospects you have?
- Who are your customers?
- Why do they buy?
- How do they buy?
- Why do they buy from you?
- Why do they buy from your competitors?
- Where can you find more opportunities for leads?
You can find the answers to these questions by doing research. The Internet is a good place for this, given there are plenty of good sites that can help with analyzing the market. Moreover, you can utilize social media through real-time pulse checking, social listening, social segmentation, polls, and more.
Create Customized Landing Pages for Your Ad Groups
When a prospect gets to your landing page, that’s when the click has already been paid. But that doesn’t mean that you are done. You can improve the quality of your leads by optimizing the elements of your landing page based on the needs and challenges of your customers. If possible, develop landing pages that are unique for each of your ad groups.
If it isn’t possible to create unique landing pages, keep your headlines and subheadings dynamic instead. Don’t forget about the best practices on designing landing pages for that help ensure only quality leads remain. Make it look great by keeping it uncluttered, with clickable buttons, has the conversion tracking turned on, and with excellent design just like the image below.
Separate Campaigns into Groups
It’s common for companies to set up campaigns for every product or service they offer. But there are plenty of ways you can target your audience besides this. Segmenting your campaigns in as many groups as possible is one of those techniques. Carefully plan your campaigns, then separate them in different categories related to your product or service.
Some of the categories you can segment your campaign include:
- Sub-category
- Feature
- Target industry
- Benefit
- Geographic location
After separating your campaigns, you can begin setting them up with the related relevant keywords, personalized ads, and customized landing page based on the segment. By setting up your campaigns this way, you can focus your PPC marketing efforts. With that, you will have higher quality leads that in turn increases your conversion rates.
Use Your Competitors for Keyword Inspiration
You have plenty of tools and resources to use in improving your PPC campaigns, including your competitors. Use SEMRush and other research tools to learn about your competitors, such as the keywords they use, especially if they are doing well on the search engine result pages. Don’t deliberately copy them, but you should try using similar keywords and CTAs.
Test Your Keywords and Ads
Just like in any marketing campaign, don’t forget to test your keywords and ads. It’s crucial to know which of your offers are getting the most traction and which don’t. Knowing which of them are making the most opportunities allows you to change and improve your tactic. Don’t just test the keywords and ads, but also your landing pages for an overall analysis of your campaign.
By performing ad copy tests and keyword tests, you can drive massive improvement in both your CTR and conversion. Before doing the test, make sure you have ample data with your goal being statistical significance. Also, don’t forget that the tests should have a time frame, which allows you to earn valuable data.
Conclusion
If your PPC campaign is doing great but isn’t closing sales, you can give these techniques a try. While not a 100% guarantee, they can give your lead quality a boost. By utilizing these tactics, there’s a good chance you can finally stop wasting money from poor quality leads!
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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