If you’re a small business that wants to build a PPC strategy but doesn’t have endless funds to invest in the project, don’t be scared away from playing the game, says Larry Kim.
The founder and CEO of MobileMonkey, the world’s best chatbot marketing platform for marketing and customer support on Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, and SMS says that small business owners should not assume that just because a big brand has an in-house team dedicated to search or a fancy agency who handles their campaigns for them, that they have a decisive advantage.
“We recently did some research and found that EBay’s paid search team was completely incompetent, despite being one of the largest advertisers on Google,” he says. “The reality is that a little bit of creativity and effort can go a long way!”
Larry checked in with us to offer some additional insight on PPC trends and best practices.
Can you tell us about WordStream? What services do you offer?
WordStream launched in 2008 and is the provider of PPC Advisor, a PPC management platform featuring the 20 Minute PPC Work Week that lets advertiser optimize and manage their AdWords account in just a few minutes, without having to be a PPC rocket scientist. We also offer PPC management services for clients who are super busy and don’t even have 20 minutes per week to spend on PPC management.
What sets you apart from other search marketing companies?
1. Our blog covers insanely great topics on Internet Marketing — It does more than 600k visitors per month – it’s by far the most popular PPC blog out there.
2. We offer free tools such as our AdWords Performance Grader Plus andAdWords Landing Page Grader and various free keyword research tools, which have been used by over a million marketers worldwide.
3. We work with thousands of customers and have $10 billion dollars of paid search that we use internally to figure out how AdWords actually works, what kinds of results are possible and what strategies work, etc.
What are savings alerts and why do you think they are a game changer?
Savings alerts in WordStream are a tool that employs various computer algorithms to analyze and identify wasted spending in your AdWords account. It will then suggest specific negative keywords to add to your account, or keywords to kill. It’s pretty different from most of the tools in AdWords, which are more geared around spending more money and raising bids, etc.
What is the state of PPC today with regard to how businesses of different sizes handle their campaigns?
Larger accounts tend to be managed by big ad agencies or dedicated internal teams. A challenge arises for smaller businesses that are too small to hire a dedicated PPC manager or to be signed up as an agency client. These struggling small businesses don’t have a ton of options to choose from in terms of how to manage their campaigns. It can be very challenging for these small businesses to find the time to learn about new features and functions and manage their accounts.
What do you think is the future of PPC? What are trends that brands should be aware of?
Here are a few key trends to think about:
- No More Free Lunch: Platforms like Facebook and Google are increasingly monetizing their search results and news feed pages. This means near zero reach for organic social media posts, and more prominent ad placement in search engine result pages for commercial searches.
- Mobile Overtaking Desktop: Organizations must think about how to convert calls into sales rather than clicks to landing pages, etc. Many still don’t realize that calls to a business are worth up to three times more than clicks to a website.
- Display is Becoming More like Search: Display ad targeting is getting so targeted that it’s possible to get better ROI from display ads than search in certain verticals like travel and automotive. What’s exciting here is that there is a hundred times more ad impression inventory available on display vs. search.
- Google is Innovating like Crazy: They released more than a thousand features in AdWords in the last year alone, and the pace keeps accelerating.
What are the biggest mistakes you think brands make when kicking off a PPC campaign?
The biggest blunder by far is laziness.
Conversely, what are the best practices for launching a successful PPC campaign?
The most important best practice is to set the expectation that success at PPC isn’t an overnight thing, but rather takes some time and effort. Beyond that, my view is that AdWords is essentially just a game wherein you just need to clearly understand how the AdWords algorithm works and work that to your advantage.
What tips do you have for improving quality scores?
It’s essentially just a matter of getting better than average click through rates!
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