Analytics technology has been invaluable to modern marketing. The market for web analytics is projected to be worth $9.11 billion by 2025. The utilization of analytics and big data in the marketing industry has played a massive role in this robust growth.
One of the most important benefits of analytics in marketing is with PPC marketing. More companies are using analytics to expand the reach of their PPC campaigns and improve their ROI. PPC marketing would be infeasible in 2021 without analytics.
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Companies that intend to use analytics in PPC can find that it drastically reduces the CPA of lead conversions, while also increasing the number of leads as well. Lead generation is one of the most important roles that marketing plays in your business strategy, so you shouldn’t overlook the benefits of using analytics to accomplish it more effectively. Existing customers on their own won’t help you to grow your brand: you need to find new customers and leads to keep your business in motion.
Most (if not all) marketing activities can be effective ways of generating leads, but in this blog, we’ll be focusing on using analytics to improve your strategy for generating leads through Pay-Per Click (PPC) advertising.
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Is an Analytics-Driven PPC Strategy the Best Approach for Lead Generation?
One of the main goals of marketing is to generate leads, so it stands to reason that most marketing channels are effective methods of lead generation. Those with a lengthy customer journey might find content marketing to prove particularly effective, as it creates more touchpoints to build up a relationship with a new lead. Many retail brands see great success on social media, as it gives them the chance to show off new items in a format that can be creative and fresh when done right.
PPC on the other hand, can prove to be a highly effective lead generation strategy for any business or budget. You’re ensuring that you’re appearing when users are searching for things you offer, and you can more easily control your message for different stages in the marketing funnel, helping to ensure you’re generating qualified leads. However, as with any marketing strategy or campaign, your success will be dependent on how well you’ve thought through your activity before beginning.
This is why analytics is so important in PPC marketing. You have a lot at stake, since you are investing such a large amount of money. Therefore, you are going to need to use big data and PPC together to get the best return on your investment.
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5 Ways to Use Data Analytics Ensure Your PPC Campaign is Generating Leads
So, how can you ensure your campaign is doing everything it can to give you the most lead generation opportunities? Can data analytics help you get more out of your PPC campaigns? Below, we explore 5 key ways you can guarantee success.
1. Campaign Organization
Setting up your PPC campaigns for lead generation success means that you need to have a real handle on your campaign organization. For those new to PPC, structuring paid search ads can be quite daunting. With multiple layers of the campaign to work through and various targeting metrics to consider, it’s easy to get it wrong and waste your budget. Luckily, there are plenty of online tools, and of course experienced marketing agencies, to provide you with a helping hand.
For those starting out, the simplest way to structure a PPC campaign to ensure that it generates leads is to organize it in line with your goals. This means creating ad groups that are specific to the results you want to achieve. For example, you may want to drive traffic to a specific landing page, in which case you would use a targeted PPC ad group linking solely to this page. Setting up your campaigns in this way also gives you greater control; allowing you to adjust your budgets on a micro level and thus see incremental improvements to your ROI – especially if you use multiple groupings.
Data analytics is going to be very important for this stage. You are going to need to outline your overall strategies and make sure that they are backed by data analytics. Analytics technology will help you better organize customer demographics and estimate the profitability of different market segments, so you can decide which to focus on.
2. Extensive Keyword Research
Another way to ensure you’re generating leads through PPC is by completing extensive keyword research to identify as many relevant opportunities as possible. Keyword research is a crucial part of any PPC campaign; you want to ensure that you’re appearing whenever someone searches for the products and services you offer.
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As you’re evaluating target keywords, make sure that they are both relevant to your business, and achievable. This way, you make sure you’re appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) whenever someone is searching for things related to your business, but you aren’t pushing yourself into more difficult and competitive waters.
Part of your keyword research will also involve highlighting the keywords that are irrelevant and perhaps even harmful to your brand to highlight as negative keywords. There will naturally be searches you don’t want to appear for: a business in another sector with a similar name, harmful terms, or even highly competitive keywords. Knowing which keywords to avoid is as much a part of your keyword research as knowing those you want to go for is.
New advances in analytics technology have made keyword research much more effective. You can use analytics tools that work with third-party keyword research platforms to estimate the monthly search volume of various keywords. You can also use analytics to evaluate trends to estimate the future cost of various keywords and gauge the potential profitability of given keywords based on projected conversion rates.
3. Draw Attention with Catchy Copy
Nothing draws in new leads like powerful copy, and the same is true in PPC. Eye-catching, interesting headlines and descriptions for your PPC ads help you to stand out from the crowd in the SERP, bringing you more clicks and generating quality leads. Consider what your USPs are compared to your competitors, and be sure to detail any special offers you might have on. This (alongside audience insights) will help determine the content you should be including.
Writing effective ad copy can be a difficult task: you’ve only got a limited number of characters to get all the key information across in a way that draws in new leads. A full-service digital marketing agency will be able to support your copy creation, and will also bring expertise, audience insights and industry best practices to support your lead generation strategies.
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Analytics can be surprisingly useful in developing better copy. A lot of marketers are now using AI technology to automate content creation. This is a lot more effective if you merge your AI content generation technology with analytics tools that can see how various content has performed in the past.
4. Develop Highly Targeted Landing Pages
The ad experience doesn’t end when a user clicks on your PPC ad. To generate leads from your ad campaign, you’ll need to make sure the landing page users are sent to is tailored to the ad group you’re targeting.
Consider your landing page your big opportunity for converting visitors into leads. Your ad entices visitors in, but once they’re on the page, it’s the ultimate chance to seal the deal. Where possible, you want to be tailoring your content to the wants and needs of the audience you’re addressing. Try to keep your pages short and sweet, without too many distractions: the sole goal of these landing pages is to get visitors to complete the desired action, so don’t include anything that could prevent that.
Last, but certainly not least, you’ll want to maintain standard landing page best practices. Not only will this help push users to convert by giving them a great experience on site, but it will also satisfy search engines when it comes to determining your quality score.
This is one of the most important benefits of analytics in later stages of PPC campaigns. You can use analytics to see which landing pages have performed the best and optimize them for better ROIs.
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5. Testing & Reporting: The Road to Continuous Improvement
Another major benefit of analytics is with testing your campaigns to make incremental improvements. With your PPC campaigns set up, you might be tempted just to leave them be. You’ve spent all that time researching and building, now should be the time to sit back and watch the leads flow in, right? Sadly, the work of a PPC manager is never done, and you’ll want to be monitoring your results and running A/B tests if you want to see continuous improvement.
Be sure to set up analytics reporting so you can see what activity is working, what’s bringing in new leads, and what isn’t performing as well. This information can then be used to optimize your campaigns to drive greater success. You can also add in new iterations of ads to be tested to see what gains you can make with tweaks in your copy or CTAs. To continue bringing in new leads, you need to continuously invest time and effort into testing and optimizing your campaigns.
Generating leads through PPC can be a highly effective strategy, and with these tips, you’ll be set to create and deliver well optimized campaigns. The most important things to remember are to keep an eye on your budget, and to keep testing to find the best ways to attract your target audience and bring in those leads.