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Discover the power of PPC to drive sales and bring in new business fast
If you’re a regular search engine user, you’ll have noticed those results that come up at the very top of the page discreetly marked as ads. This is pay-per-click advertising in action. When you search for something online, especially if it relates to a specific product or service, companies which offer those products can bid to appear in those results. If they’re lucky, you’ll find their ad relevant, click through to their website, and make a purchase.
As the name implies, you pay each time someone clicks through to your site via an ad – whether or not they actually buy anything from you. With more than 3.5 billion searches conducted per day on Google alone, there’s an enormous amount of competition for the most-searched keywords.
This means that companies who don’t choose which keywords to bid on carefully and strategically can get burnt in a big way. In a nutshell, our PPC marketing service is about considering all the data, all the competition, and focusing a campaign on the keywords that are going to bring in the most revenue for you.
Another way to look at PPC marketing is as ‘buying visitors’ to your website. Once they’re there, you hope you’ve done a good enough job at designing a compelling site or landing page that they make a purchase, sign up to your email list, or leave a contact number, for example. If not, the money you’ve just spent on that click has been wasted. If your ads aren’t attracting visitors who are genuinely interested in what you have to say, again, you’re throwing money away. As one of the most trusted PPC companies in South Africa, it’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen!
To draw new potential customers to your website, you’ve essentially got two options:
Option one involves SEO (search engine optimization) – and it should definitely be a core element of your online strategy. SEO is all about growing your organic traffic, or visitors who end up on your site because you’ve made the effort to post lots of in-depth articles, helpful videos, infographics and the like.
This is a great way to build your traffic in the long run. In fact, it’s hands-down the best way! However, it takes time – sometimes a very long time – and that’s something a new business, startup or product may not be able to afford.
If you’re in a highly competitive industry, sometimes you have to spend money to make money. You may not have the resources to compete with a big established brand with a website that contains hundreds, or even thousands, of pages. This is where a carefully crafted, well-targeted PPC campaign can give you the advantage you need.
Tools like Google AdWords allow you to focus your efforts towards the customers who are most likely to convert. Why? Because you’re only displaying your adverts to people who are actively looking for what you’re offering, in the areas where you’re offering it.
By attracting enough revenue to continue investing in your website, products and services, you’ve got the resources coming in to keep growing your business. Done in this way, PPC is an extremely effective and sustainable strategy. You need an expert PPC agency on your side to do it right, though – and we’re confident that’s us!
Some of the many benefits of pay-per-click advertising include:
Because your ads are aimed at people actively looking for what you’re selling, every click through you receive has already been validated. Additionally, because we focus on ‘ready to buy’ keywords, you’re more likely to attract traffic that’s looking to make a purchase right now.
It’s important to note that PPC also offers free advertising in the form of increased exposure. Even if a search engine user doesn’t click on your ad, they’ve been made aware of your brand name and what you do. Over time, this builds brand recognition and helps establish you as a ‘familiar face’ – which makes potential customers more likely to trust you.
This is particularly valuable if someone is still in the phase of researching a product or service. Even if they’re just seeking more information about something, they’ve been exposed to you as an option – even if they haven’t landed on your website.
There are a surprisingly diverse number of ways a PPC company can use the platforms and tools at their disposal – which means they can find different ways to align with your business goals. For example, we might employ a mix of specific audience demographics, target keywords through text ads, or even use past behaviors for remarketing efforts.
Compared with traditional media like TV or radio ads, advertising online costs a fraction of what you’d expect to pay elsewhere. This is true of PPC in South Africa and globally. Additionally, PPC advertising is unique even among the online marketing world in its flexibility:
With many forms of advertising, there’s at least some kind of waiting period between realizing you need to change and edit an advert, and actually being able to make that change. With pay per click advertising, you can run different tests and new wording every single day if you want to. If you realize something isn’t going to work the way you hoped, or get inspired with a better way to get your message across, you can tweak it (or even completely redo it) straight away.
While it’s most well-known for reaching out to consumers looking to buy a product or service, this is actually only one of the ways PPC can be useful to a business. If you have a message you want to get in front of a particular audience at a particular time, then PPC is one of the simplest ways to do so. Here are just a few possible examples:
Essentially, if you have something to say, then PPC can be employed to bring your desired audience to you!
If you’re a little late to the world of online marketing, it can feel like an insurmountable challenge to stand out from established brands with a big digital footprint. If your competitors all have well fleshed-out, high-ranking websites and a league of followers on social media, how are you possibly going to get your slice of the pie? The answer is PPC, of course. (Even if those competitors run their own PPC campaigns!)
Companies like Google want to make buying ads easy, so they’ve engineered the process to be extremely quick and simple to get up and running. This means you can get your brand out there, to a large net of potential new customers, virtually right away.
The trickier part is knowing exactly who to target, how to attract their attention, which keywords are worth spending your money on, and exactly how to tweak a campaign to get the most for your money. Additionally, you want to try and target keywords and selling points your rivals and competitors aren’t aware of, or aren’t bidding high enough on. Luckily, that’s where Ruby Digital’s expert paid search team comes in!
One of the things we emphasize here at Ruby Digital is that relying on pay-per-click advertising alone is not the ideal strategy. Driving people to a website that doesn’t give them the right information or user experience they need to make an informed decision (and result in a sale for your business) is foolhardy.
Imagine for example someone is looking to buy a new laptop. You’ve dedicated all of your marketing budget to getting people to click through to a relevant product page. They like the laptop, but there’s no other information on the site. What is your returns policy? What warranties do you offer? Where are you located and who handles your deliveries? How do they reach you if something goes wrong or they want further details? If they can’t find any of this vital info on your website, they’re just not going to take the risk of buying from you – no matter how good your product is – and your marketing spend has been squandered.
On the flipside, combining PPC services with other marketing efforts (such as email campaigns, social media marketing, content marketing and the like) creates something much bigger than the sum of its parts. Ensuring that all your marketing efforts present a unified, polished picture, and then driving new traffic to those pages through PPC, is extremely effective. This is where Ruby Digital excels – considering every aspect of the customer journey and experience.
This also helps build trust and credibility. Even if someone doesn’t buy from you now, you’ve created a great first impression of your brand. Once they’ve done their research and are ready to buy, they’re that bit more likely to choose you. This is another big benefit of PPC in South Africa and around the world.
Ranking in the top for Google search results is hard, but that’s where you need to be in order to get the amounts of business you want. This is where Ruby Digital, a leading pay per click agency in South Africa, can assist you.
PPC marketing is one of the greatest ways to drive high quality/targeted traffic to your site immediately. PPC marketing allows you to have complete control over your marketing efforts, letting you target customers based on factors such as; keywords, location, time and date etc. ensuring that your paid search ads are seen by the right people, at the right time. PPC marketing gives you measurable results from the get-go, enabling you to monitor and ensure that you are getting the ROI you want.
A lot goes into creating a successful PPC marketing campaign. Ruby Digital has positioned itself as a leading pay per click Cape Town agency with many years of experience with PPC marketing, giving us the ability to offer the highest quality pay per click service available.
If you want to start a truly effective pay per click campaign, choose Ruby Digital, the premier PPC company in South Africa.
Ruby Digital offers a complete, end-to-end pay per click service. In addition to all of the below, we offer ongoing advice on how to tie PPC in with your other digital marketing efforts. We are always open and transparent with our clients about what to expect. Every one of our PPC campaigns is tailored uniquely for the needs of that particular client. We’re after the best results possible – it’s a point of pride for us – so we never use ‘cookie cutter’ techniques.
Market Research
Utilizing our specialist research applications allows us to deep dive into your customers search behaviours and interests. Knowing this allows us to establish what price we should be paying and what is going to drive the best value for the campaign.
Campaign Setup
Ensuring your campaign is structured correctly will make all the difference. A well-structured account will lower your cost per click, provide more clarity around what is working (and what isn’t) and also make the campaign scalable and efficient.
Bid Optimizations
We believe that a campaign is pointless unless you can track everything. This is why we only use the latest and best technology and code to track visitors’ behaviour and actions. We even can do call tracking – allowing us to establish which phone calls came from which campaign! This is a first for a PPC agency in South Africa.
Graphic Design
Bidding on the best terms or targeting the right customers will only take you to a point. We ensure you not only have great ad copy, but a great design too – moving each of your customers one step closer to the desired destination.
Pay Per Click Strategy
There are many digital marketing platforms that utilize the Pay Per Click model. These include the likes of Facebook, Google AdWords, LinkedIn, Google Display Network, Instagram and Twitter – all with different data points to market to your customer. Based on an in-depth understanding of your target market, Ruby Digital will ensure that we leverage the platforms that are going to best achieve your company goals.
The realm of PPC (and digital marketing as a whole) is a place where things are always changing. The ways people search, where they look for recommendations, and how they compare different products shifts and evolves constantly. Trends come and go – and for all these reasons, pay per click is not a ‘do it once and forget about it’ kind of exercise.
It’s easy enough to find one strategy that seems to deliver okay results, and then just stick with that. In order to keep getting better and better results, you have to be continuously refining and building on your tactics. As a PPC company, we enjoy being kept on our toes!
We’re passionate about staying on top of the latest trends, tools, and industry advances. However good your returns are, we want them to keep getting better! It’s this approach that has helped us become one of the most respected PPC services in South Africa, and beyond our borders.
In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is about drawing unpaid traffic to your website by increasing your organic ranking in search results. PPC or paid search lets you jump the queue, in essence – but you need to pay for any traffic you receive as a result.
SEO also involves the strategic use of keywords, but instead of using these in ads, you make sure they appear naturally in the content of your website. You get closer to the top of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) by convincing search engines your website offers the most relevant, most useful, and most in-depth answer to a particular question and its broader topic.
SEO also involves combing through your site for any potential technical errors, and ensuring it offers a great user experience. You can help boost the credibility of your website by trying to earn backlinks to your site from high-authority domains. These are like votes of confidence from other sites that you know what you’re talking about.
There are many, many layers to a good SEO strategy – and all of this takes a fair deal of time, patience and persistence. It means crafting pages and pages of content, taking care to ensure you’re following SEO best practices at all times. If it sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is! The rewards however, are significant. Namely a steady flow of organic traffic that’s interested in what you have to say – and for free.
SEO also has a cumulative effect. Each improvement you make to your website, your connected social media pages, and every piece of great content you add builds up over time. Eventually you have a well-established, respected site that appears in one of the top slots (if not the coveted number one position) for the keywords you’re targeting. (It’s when you’re trying to compete with websites like those that PPC becomes a great solution!)
For all these reasons and many more, Ruby Digital will always suggest our clients make SEO a significant part of their digital campaign. To boil it all down, SEO is a long-term strategy, whereas PPC is a great way to get fast results.
We often get asked which is better – but unfortunately that’s a difficult question to answer! It depends on where you are as a company, what your goals are, and what kind of competition you face in your area and industry. If you have very little competition, investing the majority of your budget in SEO is probably the way to go. This will make it hard for new companies that might pop up in your niche to compete with you in the long run.
If you’re in a highly saturated industry, our PPC services will let you get your foot in the door. It will let you acquire paying customers without having to spend months – or longer – building up your website. Without focusing at least some of your energy on SEO, however, you may find that having to pay for every website visitor you get (whether or not they buy from you) becomes unsustainable.
There may be certain times when PPC is the obvious solution – such as when you’re promoting a limited time offer or an event. Here you simply don’t have time for SEO tactics to kick in.
While the mix will be different for each of our clients, we typically recommend a blend of SEO, PPC and other appropriate digital marketing channels. This way you get the best of both worlds: immediate results from paid search, and long-term, sustainable growth through SEO. This is one of the things that sets our PPC agency in South Africa apart from many others.
If you’re ready to invest in a holistic online marketing strategy, uniquely tailored to your company’s goals, then get in touch!
While the business-end of PPC can sound pretty complex at first, getting your head around the key concepts can simplify things. Pay per click advertising revolves around a few central terms and concepts:
Every time someone searches for a product or service on a platform like Google, an instantaneous auction is going on behind the scenes! Only a certain number of ads are allowed per page, so search engines have to decide which advertisers are going to get those positions, and in what order they’ll appear.
To do this, they weigh up multiple factors like each advertisers bid amount, and the quality and relevance of their advert to the user’s query. The bid winner appears at the very top, with the runners up in order below them.
Remember that because advertisers have a limited budget available, who is competing for the top spots changes all the time. Once an advertiser’s budget is used up, (because X number of search engine users have clicked on their ad) they fall out of the race – and it becomes possible for new companies whose ad spends haven’t been used up to get awarded those top positions.
Advertisers can place bids on a specific keyword, different variations on a keyword or phrase (such as buy, purchase, for sale, etc) and even common misspellings of a keyword! There are many different ways someone looking for a product or service might conduct a search online, and how they’ll word that query.
In the age of voice search, for example, users are starting to use longer queries. This means that there are ever more keywords and combinations of keywords advertisers might have success bidding on.
You can also incorporate negative keywords into bids. These are specific words or phrases you don’t want to rank for – and are helpful for reducing irrelevant traffic. An example might be an electrical contractor who only works with businesses and corporates. They might want to exclude words like “home” or “residential” from triggering their ad to appear.
If you win a bid, your ad appears in results. This is your chance to convince search engine users you’ve got what they’re looking for! Generally they include a headline, description and your URL. It’s a good idea to experiment with different variations of your ads to see what works best.
Certain keywords and phrases which have more competition cost more to bid on. At the keyword level, bids are what you’re willing to pay for a click related to a specific word or phrase. Your ad budget is the overall amount you’re willing to spend on a campaign on a monthly basis.
One of the best features of PPC is your ability to limit who sees your ad – i.e. your target audience. Some of the common targeting features you can make use of include demographics like age, gender, and location, as well as factors like the kind of device being used, and even the time of day. If you’re a takeaway pizza place, for instance, you’ll want to limit who your ad appears to based on your delivery radius and operating hours.
Over and above who’s bid the most for a certain keyword, search engines look at other factors in deciding which appears at the top of results, and how often. Remember that at the end of the day, search engines are interested in delivering the most useful, relevant results to their customers.
They therefore take factors like historical click-through rate (if lots of people are clicking on your ad, it probably means they’re finding it relevant to their query) and landing page quality into account. Your advert copy also needs to be relevant to the keywords you’re bidding on. Poor adverts, even with very high bids, won’t be shown as often as great quality adverts that point to a useful landing page.
Strategy and competitor analysis:
Finally, you have to take all of the above and come up with a strategy that will outperform your competitors, while getting the best results within your budget. You need to carefully monitor which ads are performing best, and which of those are resulting in the most conversions.
This is one of the areas where a dedicated PPC company like Ruby Digital can be of the greatest assistance. The better you track, monitor and analyze the data available, the better your return on investment will be. Spotting trends you can take advantage of can have enormous rewards. If all this isn’t something you have the time or inclination for, then give us a shout and we can handle every aspect of your PPC campaign for you!
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Ruby Search Solutions (Pty) Ltd trading as Ruby Digital
