Perfecting PPC: What you need to know

 

Tim Langley is CEO and co-founder of CANDDi, an innovative marketing platform that gives companies real insight into their online interactions.

In his latest .rising leaders piece, Tim draws on his wealth of commercial marketing experience to give you the tools you need to implement a strategy full of PPC returns, with IP identification and blocking.

 

 

Perfecting PPC: What you need to know 

Since 1996 businesses have been using pay-per-click advertising (PPC) to drive targeted traffic to their website. With their monopoly position, the majority of this money has gone to Google.  Over time the way that PPC works has become steadily more sophisticated, and more expensive. What was once a cheap way of generating traffic is now big business with some of the most popular ad words commanding a cost per click in excess of £75 ($100).

Businesses are looking for ways that they can minimise wastage in their PPC campaigns and improve their quality score with good and relevant page content that helps to lower the cost they have to pay for each click.

Quality not Quantity

Unfortunately, businesses are still bleeding cash when it comes to the quality of traffic actually clicking through from their paid for links. Guaranteeing that PPC budgets get spent on directing ‘true prospects’ to a website seems challenging given the tools and level of insight available through Google analytics.

Our analysis of B2B businesses’ PPC generated traffic shows that a relatively small proportion is actually from potential new business prospects.

We categorise PPC traffic into the following:

1. The Unwanted

This group is made up of a business’s staff and competitors – individuals who should not be generating PPC costs as they offer no prospect of ever converting into a sale. We all browse our competitors’ websites, but do you really want to pay for your competitors’ clicks? This group can also include companies trying to sell you something – the ultimate insult is that their (often unwanted) attention could be costing your business in PPC charges.

2. Wrong Stage Prospects

These may be existing customers or prospects who are already aware of, and engaging with your business. We had an example of an existing customer who was using their Chrome toolbar to navigate to the CANDDi site, thus clocking up more in PPC charges than the revenue that we generated from her business. Paying for people who already know how to find you can be costly.

3. True Prospects

These are the visitors worth paying your PPC dollars for. They are searching for your key terms and clicking through to your site for more information. This is the audience that you want to identify and invest in engaging with. I have a whole raft of information on how you can do this using marketing automation tools – but that is a whole different article!

Of course there’s no such thing as an “average B2B company” but we estimate that in general up to 52% of clicks could be coming from the Unwanted and Wrong Stage Prospect groups. That’s potentially a lot of PPC spend going on getting staff, existing customers, sales people and other timewasters to your site.

 

Four Steps to Better PPC

Once PPC spend is above a level of around £1000 per month, it is worth investing time and resource to cut out as much wastage as possible – this means that more of your budget is being spent on the True Prospects group. To do this, businesses must deploy a more intelligent layer of data to enhance the data provided by Google, with context specific or offline specific information.  

Follow these four steps to make the most of your PPC budget:

 

1. Identify the IP address pool. This is the list of people who have already, or may land on your site. There are tracking tools available that give you an insight into who has landed on your website
2. Identify the registered owner of these IP addresses so you can distinguish the company names – again there are tools that enable you to do this
3. Work out which IP addresses/individual machines you should block. This is where you identify the staff, competitors, existing customers and timewasters who are eating into your budget
4. Create an aggregated list that you can upload to Google’s AdWords platform to stop your advert appearing in paid for searches undertaken by those on your list

This may look like hard work but companies can automate the process up to a point – some data resides in the heads of staff members and there is always a need for sense checking.

The number of times a business needs to refresh their blocked list depends on the level of their website traffic, dynamics of their customer base and their PPC spend. The busier the site and the higher the frequency of changes to their customer base, the more regularly the list will need updating.

Block-Busting Success

Taking the time to identify and filter out unwanted and unnecessary paid for clicks pays dividends, enabling PPC budgets to go further and be more successful in generating traffic from new leads, rather than known or unwanted entities.

Typically, the companies that we work with see 15-20% efficiency improvements in their PPC performance. The number of clicks that they are generating doesn’t increase, but their quality and chance of conversion is greatly improved.