Do you have an absolutely gorgeous website designed to appeal to the key influencers in your industry, yet you aren’t getting any interest from these people? If you’ve invested in paid advertising, such as Facebook ads, PPC campaigns, or other paid traffic sources and aren’t reaping the benefits, it’s time to slam the breaks on your current strategy and reevaluate before calling it quits.
1. You don’t have the budget
In order to have paid advertising campaigns, you obviously need to have the dollars to put into them. But there are a number of reasons why you may need to adjust your budget because the money has to come from somewhere. For example:
- You’re a startup searching for the best and quickest strategy to get you customers – but you can only try one.
- You’ve had a rough year experiencing significant losses and need to cut costs – from somewhere.
- You think you’re just spending too much on marketing without seeing results and need to reallocate.
Whatever the reason, you need to reevaluate your budget or still need time to be convinced online paid advertising is worth the investment.
Even some of the most affordable marketing strategies require an investment. That being said, it’s crucial that you’re smart about where you’re spending your dollars.
2. You aren’t getting traffic from current paid sources
If you’ve been using paid advertising campaigns, but aren’t getting website traffic from paid sources, then you need to figure out why by evaluating your current campaigns. This starts with establishing key metrics. Web Marketing Today recommends the following:
First, you need to establish key metrics. Ideally, you’ll take this step before you launch your PPC campaign. What are you trying to accomplish with PPC? Are you trying to sell more products, generate leads, create awareness, or a combination of all these?
A surprising number of advertisers forget this step, and that makes data evaluation nearly impossible. If you don’t know what your goal is, how will you know if you’ve achieved it?
Take the time to decide what your key metrics are, and make sure you have a way to measure them. You’ll get a lot of that data right in the PPC engines. All major PPC platforms will provide the following information:
Impressions. How often your ad is shown. Each appearance of your ad equals one impression.
Impression share. The percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
Clicks. The number of times a user interacts with your ad by clicking on it.
Cost. Total cost, calculated by the number of clicks times the cost per click.
Cost per click. How much you actually paid for each click on your ad.
Click-through rate. Expressed as a percentage, this metric is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.
Average ad position. A statistic that describes how your ad typically ranks against other ads. This rank determines in which order ads appear on the page. Position one is the first ad on the page.
The next step is to find the right tool to help you measure and evaluate, such as WordStream, Raven, SEM Rush or Google Analytics.
3. You aren’t getting conversions
The digital marketing world has become saturated with content. As companies compete in an increasingly crowded space, it’s easier and easier for your content to be missed. You might have people coming to your website, but then they quickly leave. If your website doesn’t have any content to consume, then you need to refocus your energies from paid advertising campaigns to creating quality content.
In other words, you’re using the wrong strategy. What’s the point of sending people to your website if there is nothing for them to consume? Shifting to a content marketing strategy means doing a website audit, starting a blog if you don’t have one, researching the key terms your audience is searching for, and creating personas of your ideal customers.
For example, if your audience is single working moms with kids under the age of 12, you can probably assume that they are busy, tired, multitasking, and have a tight budget. Therefore, your content needs to be simple, visual, easy to digest, get to the point, and provide exactly what you say it will or you’ve lost a potential business opportunity.
You very well may need to slam the breaks on the paid traffic to your website, but first evaluate your efforts to see where you can improve.
If you’d like to better understand paid advertising campaigns, content marketing, and how it all works together as a holistic strategy to get you more customers, contact us Half a Bubble Out.
Since 2002, Half a Bubble Out has been dedicated to providing marketing, advertising and small business consulting that meet the needs of our clients. We specialize in powerfully telling stories through Inbound Marketing to grow your business filled with more passion and provision. Based in Chico California, we serve clients throughout Northern California and across the country to New York.
