Why Is PPC Not Working For Me? 
As a pay per click advertiser I have often read stories about how PPC advertising was not successful and that it doesn’t work well, and that just got me thinking about PPC in general. In truth whilst the advertising platform is great, in doesn’t work for every product just as it won’t work if it is not implemented correctly. In my blog article today I am going to discuss, why PPC isn’t or hasn’t worked for you.
When it comes to Pay Per Click advertising it is imperative to devise a well thought out marketing strategy and carry out extensive product research before actually implementing your campaign. It is important to choose keywords that are directly related to your product or service or else you will generate high traffic volumes with low relevancy. Many PPC agencies out there today will promise you success but I advise you to be wary. When searching for a PPC agency to handle your online marketing it is important that they are a Google Accredited company, meaning that the people who will be marketing your product are qualified to do so. A good PPC agency will discuss your business goals and explain how they plan on helping you reach those goals by devising a relevant marketing strategy.
Now it is all fine and dandy if you have a good PPC agency but what if you find that the results your PPC Adwords Campaigns receive are still unsatisfactory? Well in truth PPC is not a glove that fits all. Before you decide to try Pay per click advertising you should ask yourself these questions:
- Is the product or service something that people will search for online?
- Would I be able to get a good return on my investment?
- I have tried PPC for a while and my costs far outweigh my profit, Is it time to try another avenue such as SEO?
Now if you have selected a good PPC agency, they will be able to advise you on what options are available to you after trying all they can on your PPC campaigns. Remember Pay Per Click Advertising is extremely competitive and if your product or service is still not performing well despite your PPC agency’s best efforts, it will probably be a good idea to try SEO instead. SEO is a longer process and may take anywhere from 3 to 6 months to feature well on Google’s Search Results Page but once you are there it will be beneficial to you as you don’t pay for clicks on the organic listings.
I hope you will take the above into consideration when searching for a PPC agency or when evaluating the results of your current campaigns in relation to the type of service or product you offer.
Happy Marketing!
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Why Facebook Advertising Fails, and the Case for SEO companies. guest blogger
Online marketing is a big business today. Various models are available to people who want to advertise their goods. Pay per click, pay per view and so on.
A way of gauging the effectiveness of marketing is how much traffic arrives at your site. Brand awareness is also a good way of measuring this, and social networking tools like twitter and Facebook are two very popular tools that companies use to build brand awareness.
Comparing the Different Options
As far as online marketing goes Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and Google sell adspace. While Facebook might trail the search engines on number of visitors, it is by no means a lightweight player.
If boasts over 500 million active users as of this year. Those are users that have pages there, and return to facebook regularly. 50% of those are active on their profiles at least once a day.
Let’s put this in perspective – by population Facebook has more people than the USA, 200 million more. Active users are more than the population of Indonesia – about ten million more.
Those are a lot of prospective clients.
The average user on Facbook has about 130 friends, so if you get 1000 people to “like” your product or brand, you have potential exposure to 130 THOUSAND people who know of their friends liking this.
The social aspect of this is important here too – People tend to value their friends opinions, so a “like” means a lot more in marketing value than a simple popup banner does.
Why Doesn’t it work then?
Advertisers complain that placing ads on Facebook are not as effective as placing a Google adword is. Why? Even if you even out ad impressions to negate the obvious advantage that Google has in traffic you get worse results on your Facebook ads.
The reason is actually very simple – People going to a search engine tend to be “on their way” to somewhere. Someone who is on Facebook is already where they want to be.
If you have a targeted ad in a search-engines results your visitor is more likely to visit your site. A search engine is a portal, not a destination.
If someone is on Facebook, however, they are already at their destination. Market research confirms this – people are loathe to leave Facebook. A targeted ad is mostly an annoyance, at best given a cursory glance.
If you read online you will see that Facebook advertising simply does not work for most people.
Click through rates of as little as 0.3% are common – and that is with ads who have millions of page impressions.
Does Facebook have a place in your online marketing portfolio?
Yes. If you use it right it can be very powerful. Facebook pages and groups are awesome marketing tools, but they are a lot of work.
You need to build one for a start, and getting a professional and visitor friendly Facebook Page can be a challenge. Then there is the upkeep of the page, and the interaction with your community.
Hard work, but the rewards are great if you persist.
With Facebook marketing the keyword is “presence.” If you can build an online presence and keep your audience interested there is a real possibility of business, targeted business, coming your way.
Summary
Online marketing is tricky. You have the potential of wasting a lot of money very quickly – imagine paying $0.03 per click and 8MILLION people click your ad! If your advertising is ill conceived or the clicks do not lead to enough business to cover the costs of advertising you stand to lose a lot of money.
If you want to do online marketing for your business, or build an online presence, enlisting the services of a company that specialises in this would be a wise move.
Why is Internet Marketing not working for my business?
Internet marketing or online marketing as it’s more famously known is really something completely different from traditional marketing. One of the biggest advantages of internet marketing is that it is a form of marketing of which every step in the process can be tracked thus allowing you the ability to easily gauge if your campaign is yielding the results that you would expect.
Now that’s all well and good, I can go on rambling about all the benefits of Online marketing but I know that some of you out there are thinking, “Hold on mate, Internet marketing did not work for my business when I tried it”. Now granted there are a quite a few snake oil salesmen out there so there is a big possibility that you might have been ripped off by one of them. In my experience internet marketing has really worked for most of our clients. There definitely is a few examples that just isn’t suited for internet marketing but we have found that it isn’t the logical ones.
Now for most companies you need a bespoke solution or strategy. It definitely isn’t a one-size fits all thing that you can just copy and repeatedly use. If your online marketing company didn’t sit down and find out what your goals are and discuss strategies to reach them then they haven’t got your best interests at heart.
So you need to plan a strategies that will suite your company and it’s goals. You also need to plan which platforms you are going to use to reach your goals as these play a vital role in planning your marketing campaigns and how you will be measuring them.
You need to plan which platforms or forms of Internet marketing you will be using. There are quite a few from PPC, SEO, Facebook, Social Media, and Email Marketing. You need to decide which platforms will suite your goals and the nature of your business the best.
Keeping track of your campaigns is vitally important to determine if your campaigns are succeeding. We have had clients who did not understand this and as a result thought that the marketing wasn’t working for them. Only after we did a analysis did we find that most of their leads (70%) was being generated from online marketing. Planning how you will be tracking your internet marketing campaign is equally as important as planning the campaign itself, if you more important.
Keeping track of your campaigns isn’t only to measure their success but also to improve them while they are active. Because of the nature of online marketing you can quite easily make changes to a campaign to improve the results. This means you can quickly change the campaign to remove factors that might be inhibiting the success thus greatly improving your results without wasting money on a full campaign only to notice the issue afterwards.
Now we know internet marketing has been over sold by businesses in the industry but we’re going to try and show you how you can have a look at what happened in your campaign and if your company wasn’t right for online or if your marketing strategy just not managed properly. We will segment these by platform to try and touch on all factors. So please check in again soon.
Have an amazing week!
Chris
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Why use online marketing professionals to do your online marketing.
Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.
This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.
Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.
People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.
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Why Isn’t It Working For Me: Common Mistakes in PPC
So you have finally cottoned on to the vast potential the internet holds and have just started your very first Adwords campaign or you have been doing it for years without any success. Are you at a loss to pinpoint the problem? In my blog article today I am going to discuss common errors that are made in Pay Per Click marketing.
If you want to have successful PPC campaigns it is important to ensure that you have covered all the steps correctly.
Research, Research & More Research
I simply cannot stress how important this step is when it comes to developing a PPC campaign. Many people make the error of not researching their target market, demographic and most of all the product or service they are selling. Research should be the first step in developing a PPC campaign as it will enable you to plan your list of keywords. It is also a good idea to evaluate the competition and strive to make your campaign stand out from the online “crowd”.
Effective Keyword Sourcing
I would go so far as to say that compiling a list of keywords is THE most important step. Much too often advertisers don’t include keywords that people actually search for but rather what they think people will search for on a search engine. This will hamper your campaign’s performance so don’t be lazy, ensure that you have compiled and effective and relevant keyword list. You may also want to consider adding long tail keywords as they will be more targeted and will cost less than the broad matched keywords.
Include Negatives
Including negatives helps to keep your spend under control, however it is important to make sure that none of your negatives are in contrast to your keywords as that stops your ad from being visible.
Don’t Be Boring With Your Ad Copies
More often than not I see advertisers assessing their competition on the SERPS and writing their ad copies to fit in with other advertisers. This is a BIG mistake, when writing ad copies you need to ensure that it is unique and that it stands out from the other advertisers. Let the user know in no uncertain terms that your product or service is the best to choose. Experiment with different ad copies and gauge their performance at the end of a specified time period so you will have an idea what works well and can capitalize on that.
Separating Content from Search
While it does take more time, but you should separate your campaigns into search advertising and content match. This allows you to get better reports where you will easily be able to gauge the performance of each of them. You can also use different bids and ad copies.
The points made above are just a few pointers to remember when developing a PPC campaign, I hope you will keep them in mind when you are creating your own campaign.
Happy Marketing !!
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