In the digital age, your business needs to have maximum online visibility.
People are no longer looking at billboards. They’re not reading magazines or paying attention to TV commercials as much. They’re focused on their Facebook timelines, Instagram stories and Google searches.
As of January 2019, there were 15 million active Australian users on Facebook and 9 million active Australian users on Instagram. Add to that the growing percentage of internet subscribers that increase every year. You can all but guarantee that whatever business you have, no matter how niche, a great number of your target customers are online.
However, having a website or an online store is not the be all and end all of eCommerce. If you’re running a website for your business, lead generation is a crucial part of increasing ROI. Traffic is needed but so is high quality leads. After all, the leads of today are the advocates of your company tomorrow.
Now, you might be wondering: what exactly will help explode my website’s leads?
The answer is simple: Facebook and Google ads.
What are Google Ads and how do they work?
Paid for by businesses, Google ads are an extremely effective way of driving qualified and relevant traffic to a website, especially when people are already searching for the type of products or services a business offers. Advertisers bid on certain keywords so that their clickable ads appear in Google’s search results, eliminating the need for a website to work its way up the rankings organically.
Of course, you may not be the only company wanting to serve adverts to targeted customers using particular keywords. Competitors can bid for the same search terms, which is why you have to outbid other marketers on the amount you’re willing to pay per click.
However, Google doesn’t only take the highest bidding into account. To determine how high your ad appears on the search results page, Google uses other factors to calculate your ad’s rank:
- Quality of your ads and landing page
- Ad Rank thresholds (topic and nature of a search, device type and location)
- Search context
- Ad extensions and other ad formats (phone number or links to other pages on your website)
- Bidding Strategy
- If your bidding strategy is to maximise the opportunity for contact form conversions, Google will show your ads to people who they believe are likely to complete that behaviour on your website. The more data your campaign collects the better your ads will perform.
What about Facebook Ads?
Paid advertising on Facebook is one of the most immediate and effective ways to impact your content’s reach. While Facebook offers various paid ad options and placements, all ads can be broken down into three elements:
- Campaign – contains one or more ad sets and ads. You will have to choose an advertising objective for each of your campaigns.
- Ad set – contains one or more ads. You will define your budget, target market, schedule, bidding and placement at the ad set level.
- Ads – where you will create your ad’s content including the copy, captions and photos.
You can create paid ads Facebook using the Ads Manager. The Ads Manager includes a performance dashboard where all your campaigns, ad sets and ads are listed along with the results they drive for your Facebook page.
The Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with an objective in mind. You will need to choose an objective for your campaign, be it brand awareness, website traffic, engagement or lead generation. For instance, if you’re looking to drive more traffic to your website, Facebook will prompt you to enter the URL you want to promote. Facebook will then display the ad options that will help you achieve your objective.
Facebook also lets you choose your target audience, set your budget, schedule your campaigns and optimise your bids for pay per click (PPC) ads. Once you’re done creating your ads, they will appear in people’s News Feeds and are sometimes paired with news about social actions.
Will Google and Facebook Ads Help Your Business?
A major benefit of Facebook and Google Ads is that they have the ability to reach your target audience or people who are already looking to buy your products. As long as you don’t waste money on the wrong keywords or write weak CTAs for your ads, these online marketing strategies will increase your leads and help turn those leads into sales.
Additionally, Google Ads and Facebooks Ads can work together in your overall online marketing strategy. While paid Google search helps your target market find your business, paid social campaigns will help your business find potential customers. For instance, well-targeted Facebook campaigns will not only get you excellent results by reaching and converting a cold audience, they will also help increase the number of online users searching for your brand on Google. When this happens, you have the golden opportunity of closing the deal when they try to enquire about your brand after seeing your ads on Facebook.
How long before I start getting results?
Don’t worry if your campaign isn’t picking up on the first day. Facebook and Google Ads are huge playgrounds and you’ll need to revise your approach often. Yes, PPC campaigns will boost your visibility and raise brand awareness but a truly profitable campaign takes time to optimise.
If you take the time to do valuable research, select your keywords and locations carefully and create ads as well as landing pages that resonate with your target market, it can take about 3 months for your Facebook and Google ads to reach maturity.
What about Remarketing – what does it do?
If you spotted the sofa set you were browsing on IKEA’s site on another website that has nothing to do with sofas, that isn’t fate or coincidence, it’s remarketing.
For those unfamiliar with the term, remarketing works by following the leads you’ve generated with related offers. When an online user visits your site, they are tagged or ‘cookied.’ This means that a code is placed on the page that the user visited, which then triggers your ads to follow that tagged user around the web. Whether it’s on a website or a social media app, they’ll see your ads on the sidebars or on the top banners.
Remarketing comes in many forms. For example, Google Ads allows companies to remarket through their platform by creating lists with a set of rules. Advertisers can target all website visitors or just visitors who clicked on a specific page or completed a specific action. Google will then trigger the company’s ads to show to the same visitors across various websites.
Facebook remarketing works in a similar vein except that all the ads are shown on Facebook only.
Explode Your Website’s Leads by Investing in Trusted Professional Service
Online marketing should be an investment, not an expense.
At ZipSites, we specialise in creating lead generating pay per click (PPC) ads, be it on Google or Facebook, for all types of businesses. Since SEO is often a slow burning affair, our PPC advertising solutions will drive targeted traffic quickly to your website. We have an in-house team of experts who are highly skilled and will make sure you receive the best returns on your advertising spend.
Let’s talk about your business goals today. Contact us to request a free proposal.