Every PPC marketer aims to deliver improved performance month after month.
But once your Google Ads account is well-managed, optimized, and humming along, where should you turn to keep improving on performance?
Often, your next area of focus should be content—and everything that happens after a prospect clicks on your ad.
Who are your ideal customers?
If you’re an agency, this is the time to return to your client onboarding materials. Reacquaint yourself with the client’s goals and the types of customers they want to target.
Often, this is easier said than done. When we ask new clients about their ideal customer during our onboarding, it’s not uncommon to get these (and similar) responses:
“Every manufacturer should have our product.”
“Customers don’t really understand our products at first, but once they see they know they need it.”
“Any company with 50+ employees could benefit from our tool.”
These types of answers are red flags. Targeting everyone is targeting no one.
Helping clients define their ideal customer
When a client hasn’t fully defined their ideal customer, all is not lost.
You can use Google Ads to test to find out the keywords and types of content that work best for your client, and then your client can use those findings to define their ideal customers better.
So, in this kind of scenario, our Google Ads program strategy is often to:
- Lean into more general keyword terms.
- See what surfaces when we review search queries.
- Share those findings with the client.
At the same time, we will:
- Do a deep research dive into competitor landing pages and content to get ideas.
- Continue to talk with the client to identify new themes and angles to test.
- Keep asking questions, digging, and learning.
Eventually, through this process, you’ll arrive at a clearer view of the client’s ideal customer.
Then you can use that persona to hone in on good, specific keywords, ad messaging and content for those customers.
Identifying the best terms to describe products
You can follow similar strategies to identify the terms your client’s ideal customer would use to describe their products.
Again, you can use research and testing to come up with some good options to test.
You need to do all this legwork—identify your client’s ideal customer and best product description terms—because it’s impossible to create a good “post-click” experience that continues the customer journey otherwise.
If your pre-click messaging and post-click content don’t align, ads are less likely to get impressions and your conversion rates will be low.
This can lead to a poor Google Ads quality score, increasing your costs per click and decreasing your ad impressions even more.
Example: ‘Any lab can use our robots’
Let’s look at an example of how these strategies for defining keyword terms and post-click content can play out in practice.
Say you ask your client to describe their product and ideal customers, and they respond: “Any lab could use our robots.”
You can go two ways with this. (Or, more likely, both ways at the same time.)
Go broad for demand gen
One option is to start broad and make demand generation your goal. So you bid on a broad keyword phrase, such as “lab automation.”
This term could resonate with end users (people working in the lab who use the equipment) and those responsible for purchasing systems to support the lab.
Both parties want to improve lab efficiency and cut costs but may not know what type of product will help them do this.
In this case, you should support this type of broad keyword with educational content, such as videos and white papers that showcase how lab automation can work in different applications and industries.
With this approach, you may not get many immediate leads, but you’re creating important brand awareness at the top of the funnel.
Go narrow for demand capture
You may find that a broad term like “lab automation” is expensive. In that case, you can experiment to get more specific. So you could test more precise terms, such as:
- robotic arm for labs
- intuitive pipetting robot
- robotic liquid handler
You could also qualify “lab automation” with a branded term. So, use something like “COMPANY NAME lab automation” or “BRAND NAME lab automation.”
This strategy is good for capturing leads with a pretty good idea of what they need.
But for this approach to work, you need post-click content that delivers value to that type of prospective buyer and aligns with this stage of the funnel.
So, for example, this content could showcase exactly how a pipetting robot can improve workflows and saves time. Or how a robotic liquid handler can minimize human error and increase precision.
In other words, you provide content that gives leads the confidence to take the next step, connect with you, and eventually purchase the solution they need.
Optimization doesn’t stop at ‘click’
The work of paid search marketers is never done. There’s always room for improvement. In many accounts, new or mature, that improvement is often achieved by creating valuable post-click content.
Even if your client isn’t 100% clear about their ideal customer or how those customers would describe their products, don’t give up.
You already have the tools you need to test different ideas – and help your client to reach their paid search and business goals.
This article was originally published on Search Engine Land.
