Have you ever heard of a “SMART” goal? If not, here’s a quick synopsis: SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
This criterion can help you clarify your wants, focus your efforts and improve your chances of success.
Generally, “SMART” goals are applied to things like weight loss. For example, want to lose inches off of your waist. You’re going to follow a Mediterranean diet for six months and lose six inches off of your waistline during that time.
Sounds like a pretty valid way to set goals, right? It is! In fact, it’s so useful that it can be applied to other concepts—like PPC.
This kind of advertising is “SMART” by nature. It’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
Below, you’ll find more information about PPC and why it’s the best advertising choice for your company.
1) Specificity
Whenever you set a goal, you need to answer the five “W” questions. What do I want to accomplish? Why is it important? Who is involved? Where will this take place? Which resources do I need?
Here’s a powerful benefit of using PPC advertising: specificity is easy. What you want to do is improve your bottom line. Why you want to do so is to expand your company. Who is involved will either be an in-house team or a digital marketing firm. Where it’ll take place is on advertising platforms, like Adwords. Which resources you need are a knowledge of PPC and a computer that can access the web.
Seriously, guys, PPC is pretty simple to set up. What gets a bit more complicated, however, is measuring your results.
2) Measurability
If you can’t track your goals properly, there’s really no reason to get started. A major upside of PPC is that it’s easy to measure your results with the help of Adwords and Google Analytics. To start, a company can focus on measuring their conversion rate, cost per conversion and click-through rate.
The whole reason you’re running a PPC campaign is to sell more products. As such, the first thing you should measure is your conversion rate. You don’t want to pay for clicks that don’t result in meaningful action. Instead, you want to optimize your ads and invest in the right places, so the money you spend advertising will more than come back to you in profits.
If you’re paying more to gain a customer than they spend with you over their lifetime, you’re only hurting yourself. Luckily, with cost per conversion, you can understand how much you’re spending to attract customers and then you can compare this to how much they’re worth in the long run.
Your click-through rate will help you understand your Quality Score, and it’ll tell you whether or not your advertisement is relevant to your audience. If your rates are low, your advertising needs some improving. You can run an a/b test to figure out what part of your advertisement should be altered for improvement.
3) Achievability
Some goals seem to be out of reach. To stick with the previous example, consider losing weight. On a very basic level, all you need to do is burn off more energy than you consume to lose mass. We all know this, but in practice, it isn’t so simple. There’s so much information and different opinions on how to lose weight that something very simple quickly becomes complex.
With PPC, things aren’t so intricate.
To understand your achievement, you’ll want to focus on six things: campaigns, groups, keywords, copy, media and landing pages. At first, you may think that managing your campaigns is super achievable and easy. When you only have a single campaign running, it’s true, it’s pretty simple. When you have dozens of campaigns running, each with several ad groups, things can get a bit more complicated.
At any given point in time, you need to understand every campaign you’re running and what each one encompasses.
Ad groups are subsets of your campaigns. They all relate to one goal, although they are different from one another. For example, you could have a campaign that’s holiday themed. One ad group of the campaign is geared towards selling winter clothing, and the other is geared towards getting gift certificates out the door. Although they’re different, they both work for the same goal.
If you want to achieve a lot with PPC, you’ll need killer keywords. Good keywords are the foundation upon which profitable PPC campaigns are built. Pinpointing the perfect keywords for your brand’s PPC campaign is very achievable with the right know-how.
Your advertisement’s text should incorporate your keywords while remaining unique and targeted for your audience. Copywriting for advertising takes time to understand, which is why many companies decide to outsource this step of their marking process.
Once you have the right words in place, you’ll need the right image. Choosing media is part emotion and part science. Fortunately, you have a lot of research at our disposal that can help steer you in the right direction.
Last, but not least, landing pages are critical. To convert your leads quickly and reduce your bounce rate, you need a top-notch landing page.
4) Relevancy
Two of the most beautiful things about PPC are its relevance and adaptability. It’s one of the best ways to convert customers, and it’s a helpful tool for businesses of all sizes.
SEO is still important, don’t get me wrong, but PPC is king in the modern marketing landscape. Look at the example below for a second. This image tells you a few things … Number one, Sweet Phi has pretty good SEO. Number two, advertisements are placed above Sweet Phi’s “prestigious” placement. To get to her content, you have to scroll past four other advertisements.
Needless to say, if you want to be relevant today, you need an above-the-fold placement.
PPC also helps you target the perfect audience, ensuring your relevancy. Google is always adding new targeting methods and tools advertisers can use to find their ideal consumers. PPC allows you to can create hyper-focused advertisements that are directly applicable to your target audience so you can sell more products.
5) Timeliness
Few things in life provide instant gratification. It often takes time and effort to find something worth having.
With PPC, big results can happen overnight.
You can create and ramp up a PPC campaign in a short amount of time. When it comes to getting in front of customers quickly and efficiently, there’s no faster way than PPC.
Go Forth and Conquer
Advertising can be tough. Competition is fierce, and it’s harder than ever before to get the results you need.
To stake your claim as a presence to be reckoned with online, you need a “SMART” method. PPC can help you claim more online real estate for your brand because it’s specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.
