How to Save Money on PPC Ads

Many businesses come to us with poor advertising results. They say “oh, we tried Google Ads, it didn’t work, oh we tried Facebook ads also, didn’t work, we got no return on our investment.”

In pay-per-click advertising, you must make the user experience as seamless as possible. Make the user have zero doubt when going through your online sale funnel. Achieving this is quite simple, but also very unknown within this large industry of digital advertising. This is why Google & Facebook are cashing in on your poor performance.

The US Digital advertising spending on mobile is expected to hit a whopping $83 billion by the end of 2019, according to eMarker.

Google and Facebook make up 57% of U.S. mobile spend.

Question:

What happens when your pay-per-click ads suck?

Answer:

The costs get so prohibitive that you stop doing it. And no number of free $100 coupons will save your bad marketing practices.

Bad marketing will always fail. But if you’re doing good marketing for a good product or service, yet not quite achieving the success you want, then you will be ahead of 98% of the marketing world by the time you finish this post.

Why?

You’re not applying the two rules of a successful PPC campaign:

Rule One – Attention Ratio

Rule Two – Message Match

I don’t care how good you are at AdWords or Facebook management or ad writing.

If you don’t understand attention ratio and message match, you are doing it wrong, and your ads are underperforming as a result.

Attention ratio is the ratio of links available other than your primary CTA. On a homepage, this is regularly around 40:1 implying that there are 39 diverting actions and 1 desired action. A focused landing page has an attention ratio of 1:1. One focus to convert traffic into leads.

A homepage can have up to 57 links on the page. If the campaign you’re promoting with your PPC ads is “Promo 2” (highlighted in red below) then not only will it be hard to find amidst all the clutter (the attention ratio is 57:1), there are so many competing elements that your prospect will either hit the back button or click on another promo.

Attention ratio of a homepage:

What’s wrong with them clicking another promo? Surely a sale is a sale. NO. If they don’t interact with the campaign you’re promoting your AdWords statistics will reflect a failure as “Promo 2” wasn’t the one that converted.

Next, let’s take a look at the landing page below. It’s very clear that there is only one thing to do here, so the attention ratio is a perfect 1:1.

Using a campaign-specific landing page for your ad campaigns is the first step to success, but in and of itself, it will only improve the attention ratio. If you don’t improve the message match you will still fail, just not as much.

Message match is a measure of how well your landing page headline matches the call-to-action that was clicked to arrive on your landing page. For paid ads, this is the headline of the ad.

Another aspect of message match is what’s known as design match. If your ad is visual, such as a display ad or a Facebook ad – that has a graphical component to it, you need to follow the design of your ad through to the landing page. The stronger the design of your landing page matches the design of the ad, the stronger the design match will be.

Follow through on your ad’s promise. Maintain the scent. Match the message.

The 2 Impacts of Good Message Match:

1. More successful campaigns: Sounds overly simplistic to say “more successful”, but when visitors are instantly reaffirmed that they can get what they came for – because the headline matches the link (or ad) they came from – they are more likely to remain on your page. Think of it as an elevator pitch. Your headline is the foot in the door you need to allow you to pitch your product. If it’s a strong match to your ad, your visitor will proceed past your headline and on to the rest of your page content: the elevator pitch itself. This will lead to higher conversions and, as a result, a higher return on investment (ROI) for your marketing campaigns.
2. Better UX: User Experience is positive, meaning better ad price and position. The success of your campaign also leads to lower ad prices and better ad positions. This is because Google starts building a history of success. With a poor message match, there will be a higher bounce rate which is interpreted by Google as a poor user experience – which you get dinged for. The stronger your message match is, the better the user experience is – making your account history more positive, lowering your costs.