PPC Blog

To my delight, more and more businesses are grasping the value of building their brand via Google Ads.

For too long, the emphasis has been on performance (“How many sales are we getting? How many leads?”) while ignoring the fact that brand building is a critical contributing factor to performance success.

Brand building is an investment in your company. Because, everything else being equal, prospective customers are more likely to buy a product or service from a brand that they know (or have at least heard of) as opposed to a brand they don’t know at all.

However, brand awareness doesn’t happen on its own. You need to put some of your budget behind it.

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For years, people in this industry debated the merits of paid search advertising versus organic search marketing.

Which was better?

Which one should you put your resources into?

Honestly, I thought we’d settled this argument a long time ago:

You need both!

But recently, the topic came up again amongst some of my clients.

I can see why. If you weren’t part of the original discussion, this conclusion might not seem so obvious.

Therefore, allow me to use this article to express a few forgotten truths in the SEO versus PPC debate.

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Many of my clients have questions about their PPC program goals.

Should they only set goals that are directly related to leads and sales?

Or should they also set goals that are related to brand building?

And if they’re doing well with leads and sales, wouldn’t it make sense to put all of their focus there?

Not necessarily.

When you consider the health of your PPC program (and your business overall), you need to take a balanced approach.

And to explain what I mean, I like to use financial portfolio management as a metaphor.

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Video advertising continues to grow in popularity. And indicators are that it still hasn’t reached saturation point.

According to some studies, 87% of businesses use video as a marketing tool – up from 81% in 2018!

But still, some advertisers hesitate. They worry about investing in video ads and then not getting the results they want.

They have a right to worry. It’s entirely possible to create a “bad” video ad (i.e., an ad that fails to support your marketing objectives). So you need to do your homework.

While every business is different, there are some rules of thumb you can use to make your video ads better. Here are some of them:

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When Google rolled out responsive search ads in 2018, they were met with skepticism and resistance by many PPC managers.

Responsive search ads were another instance of Google applying machine learning to the paid search management process — and this made some people nervous.

After all, many managers had had less than great experiences with Google’s other automated tools. And they worried that this tool wouldn’t be any different.

At Group Twenty Seven, we shared these concerns.

These concerns were confirmed when we tested responsive search ads and didn’t get the results we were hoping for.

But a couple of weeks ago, Google invited the Group Twenty Seven team to a customized training event, and responsive search ads were part of the discussion.

And in light of what we learned, we’ve started to reassess this ad type.

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If you’ve never worked with a PPC agency before, you might wonder what to expect.

What questions will they ask? What will they want you to do?

And what can you do to make the relationship go more smoothly?

As the manager of a PPC agency, I like to think I have some insights into the client-agency relationship.

Here are six things you can expect from your new PPC agency.

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In my last article on this blog, I described how brand awareness in PPC is sometimes viewed as less important than PPC performance.

Unfortunately, too many companies put all their attention on the performance of their paid search campaigns — and undervalue their brand awareness campaigns.  

Which is unfortunate because brand awareness is often a major driver of performance!

Why is this the case? Because when your product or service is expensive and/or complex, you have to lay some foundation before you can get a conversion. You have to give potential customers the opportunity to get to know you and what you bring to the table.

Brand awareness lies at the heart of this kind of foundation building. But by the time you get to the end of your conversion process, you’re too busy celebrating to remember all of the groundwork that went before. So your performance campaigns take all the credit.

Therefore, in the first part of this blog post, I will highlight some of the metrics that will help you see how you’re doing with brand awareness.

In the second part, I’ll look at a real life example.

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When businesses are new to video advertising, they often have a lot of questions.

And one of the most common questions they ask is how they can achieve their video ad marketing goals.

How can they use video advertising to build brand awareness? Reach a certain demographic? Target customers of their main competitors?

Or maybe they just want to know how to get started.

As you might expect, the answers to these questions will vary.

This article will focus on five different goals you might have for your video advertising – and how you can achieve them.

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If you’ve spent time in the PPC world, you know that performance-based marketing gets all the attention.

After all, “performance” is what most clients want. They’re interested in PPC performance metrics, such as leads, revenue and ROI.

But some PPC pros have a dirty secret: We believe brand awareness is just as important! 

Allow me to use this blog post to explain why brand awareness doesn’t get the attention it deserves—and what can happen when you cut it.

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If you’re relatively new to PPC, you might not think much about website design.

Instead, your focus is more likely on things such as ad groups, ad messaging, and conversion tracking.

After all, what does the design of your website have to do with PPC performance anyway?

Quite a lot, actually.

It isn’t just about how your website looks.

It’s also about performance.

While getting qualified users to click on your ads is a crucial first step in any paid search program, everything that happens after that click is equally important.

And if users don’t like what they see or experience when they’re on your site or landing pages, then your PPC campaign performance will suffer.

This post will outline just some of the ways your website design can impact your PPC program.

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