How are you going to manage your creative process?
Ultimately, potential customers are interacting with your creative assets. Response is directly tied to how deep this interaction is. How are you going to manage your creative process? This important question must be considered, answered, and decisively acted upon in order to have a successful paid search program.
Consistently testing your creative is key. Before we discuss creative testing, let’s take a look at the types of ads that can be employed to drive engagement and response.
- Text Ads: Usually a 25 character headline and 70 characters of body text.
- Image Ads: Found on display networks, the ads are usually visual with minimal wording.
- Video Ads: Primarily used for brand engagement. Ad is usually a short video that piques interest.
- Extensions: Extensions provide additional information to ads. For example, sitelinks link ads to different landing pages or areas of a website. Call extensions allow for ads to show a phone number.
- Shopping Campaigns/Feeds: Providing product information and attributes, allows for marketing of individual products in a very visual way.
Implementing a formalized testing strategy will keep the creative process alive and moving forward. Out of every task a PPC manager performs, the only piece visible to prospects is the creative. Do not ignore this critical area as success or failure depends on how well ads perform.
Read more in the full white paper: 10 Questions to Ask When Building Your PPC Program
What’s your landing page strategy?
Often, PPC managers meticulously are building campaign and executing optimizations according to best practice, yet results lag behind. The problem could be poor landing pages. Make sure to ask and consider the question, “What’s my landing page strategy. Do I even have one?” If the answer is no, its imperative to devise and implement a plan for testing pages to increase conversion rate.
Why do paid search managers need to implement CRO?
- Convert More Traffic: Buying traffic is expensive and needs to convert at the highest possible rate. Consistently testing landing pages to increase conversion rate can make the difference between success or failure of the PPC program.
- Increase Profits: Increasing conversion rate drives an increase in revenue or lead volume for the same cost output, which in turns increases profits and margins.
- Lower Acquisition Costs: Increasing conversion rate decreases overall acquisition costs. If conversions rise and costs stays the same, you have lowered the total cost of each conversion.
Often, CRO has been referred to as a force multiplier. Typical issues in PPC accounts stem from not enough conversions. Increasing conversion rate can help alleviate these issues and allow for reaching goals faster.
Develop a scheduled routine for testing landing pages. There are applications to assist with this. If you cannot afford to purchase CRO tools to automate the testing process, make site changes manually. Most importantly test, test, test! It has been proven time and again that frequent testing of web pages leads over time to an increase in conversion rate.
Regardless of whether your program is in-house or working with an agency, be sure to factor conversion rate optimization into the PPC workflow. The potential increase in performance will far outweigh the cost of time and resources to perform the testing.
