Several misunderstandings persist around paid advertising. You can spend money on Google campaigns in small amounts to begin with, but it all adds up. It makes sense to understand what the returns are for the money invested.
Multiple ad options may be created and uploaded. Once approval comes through, they run until the budget is exhausted. Then, most of the trackback is to check the number of leads obtained and the conversion percentage. Not too much attention is paid to which ads worked better and why. Or how long it was before a contact was initiated with the lead. Maybe the organisation simply does not have the staff strength for efficient follow up.
There is a defined process that should be followed. It is equally important to determine which campaigns got traction before budgets are increased. Large ecommerce companies do this well, since their profitability depends on it. But small and medium companies end up hiring from a limited talent pool which may be able to get the mechanical aspects of scheduling and running campaigns right. But that’s not the solution.
Good landing pages are the beginning
It is the second link in the chain. The first are the Google ads that prospects see. When an ad is clicked, the landing page should take the prospect to the next step in the process. It cannot be disconnected from what the ads have promised.
Are your campaigns optimised to get results and advance your understanding of customers?
Customers have also got smarter over the years. They will not believe claims made right away. They seek validation and need proof. So, the longer the landing page and the more information provided, the better the chances of getting a form fill in the first place.Allow for prospects to read more or see more. Trying to get them to commit before they are ready actually turns them away. Building trust is a step-by-step process, even though the steps are not laid out. No customer can tell you exactly when they began to favourably consider your brand, but advancement is a definite plus.
And if the landing pages aren’t mobile-friendly, you’ve already lost most prospects. It is surprising how so many campaigns are designed, approved and seen only on desktops or large screens even today. Maybe that’s the point at which change needs to happen – workflow and approval on mobiles. It may look trivial but if 60-70% of your audience is going to see the ad or landing page on a mobile screen, that’s where the effort should be directed.
With HubSpot, creating multiple landing pages across all devices and testing what works is easy.
What keywords are your customers using to search?
Most preliminary keyword research focuses on search volumes and the popularity. It sets you going in the wrong direction. Find out what your customers use to search for products and what they are familiar with. Validate this by doing small keyword experiments and gauging the results.
Popular keywords in a category may not be the best performing for your brand – that nuance is essential
By choosing the ‘most popular’ keywords, you end up spending more – and it may not be directed to your audience at all. This is what the development team inside Google noticed early on. That ‘homes’ and ‘houses’ mean the same thing but in certain parts of the word, real estate ads got different responses for the same word.
Speak the language your customers understand. That is more difficult to do, since it may not appear in the typical lists that show up. The preliminary work involved in finding what customers look for and then creating the ads around them gets far better results.
This is also driven by geographies. While creating a campaign for knee replacement surgery for a hospital, the difference in search volume for ‘knee replacement surgery’ and ‘knee replacement operation’ varies vastly between countries. So, when you’re geo-targeting, make sure the keywords are aligned to the customers from that geography. It’s on these nuances that the results depend. One size does not fit all.
HubSpot helps you go deep into understanding lead conversions
HubSpot has built one of the best UTM trackers in the industry to help understand which campaigns generated the most leads – and the ones that have led to the highest conversions.
Since this can be integrated with the CRM, it creates a clear picture of the customer journey from the starting point and track at every stage if the campaigns and workflows are performing as expected.
Without this, there is no iteration of promises and benefits. New directions and insights for campaigns gets difficult. Once what has been working is established, the campaign budget can be fixed and a certain amount of predictability ensured for the future.
Returns On Advertising Spends (ROAS) is only possible when these parameters are tracked consistently and teams instructed on creative changes must be made.
This gets tedious at times because it means diving into the trends to figure out what customers intended with a certain action and how they have responded to the next set of communication.
For example, when a company discovered that one particular email resulted in higher numbers of customers unsubscribing, that email was dropped from subsequent promotions.
This level of detail is only possible when each of the steps involved in set up, landing pages, lead generation and conversion tracking is aligned from the beginning.
HubSpot lets you manage all of this easily, once it is set up. The best performing landing pages rise to the top automatically. HubSpot shows you what keywords competitors in your category are driving traffic.
To setup and manage workflows for large paid campaigns on HubSpot, talk to our consultants who will be happy to help.
