If there’s anything I’ve realized after working with hundreds of different clients and seeing what truly happens under the Adwords hood, it’s this:

Most advertisers suck when it comes to execution.

I know, pretty harsh. But hear me out.

The course you just enrolled in will only work if you follow the seven tips I’m about to lay out.

You can almost call these the “KlientBoost Commandments”.

These are the strategies and tactics we follow religiously to get our clients results, regardless of their industry.

Take advantage of them, and you’ll see yourself skyrocket your PPC potential as well (not just for AdWords).

Tip #1 – Consider The Full Picture

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients be obsessed with improving their AdWords Quality Score.

It’s not even a KPI; it’s just a relevance metric that Google helps to guide you. So, why are there almost 75 million Google search results for that metric?

Because it’s shrouded in so much mystery that Google had to put out their own guide, due to the continued misinformation out there.

But just like the 100+ other metrics you can track when it comes to AdWords, quality score is a stupid, silly metric to truly care about.

Let me re-phrase that.

Quality score is a stupid, silly metric to truly care about before:

– Average order values

– Cost per sale

– Sales volume

– Cost per conversion

– Conversion volume

And it leads me to this:

Don’t fix the sink if the well is broken. In this case, the sink is your AdWords/PPC account, and the well is the conversion or sales point.

When it comes to PPC for lead gen and SaaS, that path for you to make money looks like this:

For eCommerce, it looks like this:

Before you ever start considering trying to improve your click-through-rate, your quality scores, or your impression shares. Focus on improving the sales aspect first, then the conversion aspect, and then the PPC aspect.

Why?

Because focusing on the well first will help you create much more wiggle room for your AdWords account (search and display) to be successful.

Higher average order values = higher CPA thresholds

Higher conversion rates = higher CPC thresholds

If you don’t, then you’ll continuously have a performance ceiling you can never break through, no matter how much optimization you do in your AdWords account.

AdWords doesn’t operate in a silo. You need to pull levers and push buttons further down your funnel to truly scale your performance.

Keep that in mind as you go through this course.

Tip #2 – Research Is Overhyped

That’s a dangerous thing to say coming from an agency, but it’s true.

We’ve seen a ton of other agencies scope out keywords, placements, or audiences before starting a new campaign.

They do this to get a sense of competition levels, traffic levels, and costs. But most of the time, that research is a complete waste of time.

And even worse, they’re looking at average aggregated data.

And that data is already outdated.

Average data doesn’t do you any good.

You don’t pop the champagne when you’ve gotten a lower CPC compared the average, or a better conversion rate compared to the average for your industry.

‘Cause that shit means nothing.

You pop the champagne when you make more money.

And when your keyword match types, ads, landing pages, and sales process is unique to only you, nothing you research around competition levels can help you out.

It’s not apples to apples anymore.

Instead, focus solely on this when you conduct your PPC research: Expansion.

Here at KlientBoost, the only PPC research we look at revolves around:

• Keywords we’re not currently bidding on (not their average CPCs)
• Placements we’re not taking advantage of
• Audiences we’re not targeting

Since CPCs don’t matter if you have high enough conversion rates to offset the CPA costs, your next focus is scaling your AdWords account.

Don’t get stuck in research mode. Start launching, start doing, and then adjust.

Tip #3 – All Campaigns Can Provide a ROI

I’ve heard too many times that the AdWords Display Network is great for reach, visibility, and brand awareness.

It’s insanely great for direct response conversions too.

But like I’ve heard from advertisers who say that LinkedIn, Facebook, AdWords, or Twitter doesn’t work, it usually comes down to their crappy execution that looks like this:

First time running an ad to a poorly targeted audience with the expectation of getting them to convert on a CTA that asks them to either buy or commit to something, after the first impression.

It’s like you on the beach with your newly-bought pair of Speedos, expecting people to come over and start making out with you.

Your confidence has you believe that you can swing for the home run right away and get people to convert on your ad after the first impression.

But that’s not how reality works.

Not online, and not in person.

It’s like you trying to ask for your spouses hand in marriage, through a text message, without ever meeting them first.

There’s a 99.9% chance they’re gonna say no (and not convert).

All you have to have, is a scale of call-to-actions/offers that can attract different prospects in various parts of the decision making cycle.

Which leads us to…

Tip #4 – Traffic Temperatures, They’re Really Important

It sounds super complex, but hear me out.

You don’t have to know your buyer personas.

You don’t have to know your PPC customer journey.

Because the truth is, you can create the journey.

When it comes to any business that wants to use PPC, you’ll eventually find that your ultimate optimization isn’t the ad testing, bid optimization. It isn’t even your landing page testing.

It’s the CTA you’re using in conjunction with a specific set of traffic.

And we have hundreds of client tests to back it up.

What we’ve found is that most of the time, it comes down to these equations:

Cold Traffic + Hot Offer = No Conversion

Cold Traffic + Cold Offer = Conversion

Hot Traffic + Cold Offer = Conversion

Let’s say that you’re an injury attorney (you sue the crap out of Walmart when someone slips in their aisle or when someone is in a car accident), and your goal with PPC is to drive “Free Consultations” that turn into lucrative cases that you can close and make money from.

When it comes to AdWords Search (warm to hot traffic) you can make the CTA of “Free Consultation” (hot offer) work well for you.

But if you try to target people on AdWords Display or direct Facebook traffic (cold traffic), your hot offer won’t work anymore because you’re asking for the visitor to do too much.

Instead, the best PPC advertisers who can make PPC work on any platform have a wide range of CTAs/offers that they use to get people’s feet in their door.

Let’s go back to the attorney example.

Your end goal is to make money, but before that, you could (in order of difficulty):

• Drive in-office consultations
• Drive free phone consultations
• Allow visitors to take a quiz to see if they have a case
• Offer an ebook on injury lawsuits
• Offer a whitepaper/checklist on what a person suing needs to consider
• Offer a blog post on injury lawsuits

Right there, you have seven different CTAs/offers you can try in different formats to drive more conversions, regardless of the type of AdWords or PPC traffic.

This “CTA arsenal” is what helps us get faster results for our clients as it truly unlocks some serious scaling potential.

Tip #5 – Mini Micro Conversions & Why They Matter

I know your goals are to get conversions, but what if that doesn’t happen right off the bat and you’ve followed everything else above?

If that happens to you, don’t fret.

You’ll now want to focus on improving your micro conversion rate to push people closer and closer to your actual macro conversion (like a “Free Consultation”).

What are micro conversions? They’re smaller metrics you can track that show engagement and intent, like:

Things like time on site, scroll depth, and partial form field completion can tell you where your bottlenecks are and where you should focus your optimization efforts.

Like you read earlier:

“Don’t Fix The Sink, If The Well Is Broken”

Tip #6 – Granularity = More Control

Right now, there’s a big discrepancy between your search terms and keywords.

You might not think it’s a big deal, but it is.

Because when your search term volume outpaces your keyword volume by 100:1, you end up with something we call The Iceberg Effect.

You can click the link above to learn more, but the jist of it is this:

If you can granulate your campaigns, do it.

More control = better relevance = lower costs

Tip #7 – Track All The Monies

Last but not least, don’t just track money being made back to your AdWords account.

Track it all the way to the keyword, placement, and audience.

I see accounts too often that could be saving 50% of their ad spend and still get the same amount of conversions and sales.

If you’re an eCommerce advertiser, then you’re already covered with eCommerce tracking. But if you’re a SaaS or lead gen business, then you MUST plant the seed early enough to track sales down the most granular level.

Even if you don’t have enough conversion or sales volume today, you’ll eventually start seeing patterns that allow you to adjust your strategy behind certain types of traffic.

The fastest way to do this is to manually track with UTM parameters or use ValueTrack parameters in your AdWords account.

Over To You…

As you start to learn over the next six days from super smart people, keep these seven tips in mind.

They’re going to save you a ton of time and a lot of headache as you start to truly use AdWords as a predictable source of business growth.

I’m excited to hear your feedback when you’re done.

Enjoy!

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7 Things You’re Gonna Get Wrong appeared first on KlientBoost.