Marketing isn’t what it used to be. In the digital age, it can be outright overwhelming! If your idea of marketing is to open the front door and turn on the lights, you might be in trouble. How will your business ever grow if you don’t get serious about your marketing? Don’t worry, we have answers to help you out.
Pay-Per-Click is one of the key aspects of today’s success online marketing, and an increasingly necessary – but often overlooked – process. What is Pay-Per-Click and how can it benefit you?
What is PPC?
Have you ever searched on Google and seen an ad pop up at the top of the results page? If you click on the ad, you are participating in a company’s Pay-Per-Click campaign. The company will be charged for each time the ad is clicked. PPC campaigns have a set target and budget, and when that runs out, the ads stop showing to users searching for those targeted products or services. Ensuring that ads are showing to the right people at the right time is the key to success with a PPC campaign.
What The Heck Is a PPC Campaign?
Google
Within Google, there are four primary kinds of campaigns: Search, Display, Video, & Shopping.
- Search: According to the experts at Autoshop Solutions, the most important step is to have a Google Search campaign. As a well-known, red-headed mermaid once said, “I want to be where the people are.” Well, the people are searching on Google. According to data collected from the Global Web Index, about 98% of Internet users utilize a search engine every month. 63% of users were likely to pick Google over other search engines.
- Display: These ads are extremely visual and are great for remarketing purposes. The goal of these ads is to stand out on a page that has a lot of other noise. Typically, these are for users who have been to your site but may not have made an appointment. Your goal is to serve them something that is visually appealing enough to make them notice the ad, and secondly, bring them back to your site to make that appointment for their vehicle. If you keep your shop top of mind, your customers are more likely to choose you when they are ready to bring in their vehicle.
- Video: A growing majority of American adults use YouTube, and video is a growing trend in marketing. Having content that is engaging & targeted correctly is the best way to see results from video ads. Part of a successful campaign is to make sure that the right people are seeing your ads at the right time.
- Shopping: Pay-Per-Click ads are great if you are selling a specific product. If you would like to feature specific tires you are promoting and selling online, shopping ads might be a good option for your shop. These highlight the features and offer easy-to-use “Buy Now” options right on the ad.
Does PPC Really Make a Difference?
It’s hard to tell the impact of PPC until you take it away. In the example shown here, data shows a massive dip call in call volume from a client during March to May when they stopped running their Google PPC ads. Once the client’s ads began running again in May, their call volume picked up again.
Facebook Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Though it is the biggest and most successful, Google is not the only provider of Pay-Per-Click campaigns. There are a variety of PPC campaigns that can be run through other social media and search platforms as well. Facebook, for example, has a robust series of advertising programs you can participate in as well.
What Kinds of Facebook Advertising Are There?
Facebook ads work similar to display ads (explained here), but are a little easier to target and appear exclusively on the Facebook Website (they also appear on Instagram, since it’s owned by Facebook). One of the more common misconceptions regarding Facebook ads is the difference between a boosted post and a Facebook ad. More about the specific differences can be found on Facebook’s Business Help Center page but here are some basics
Boosted Posts
Likes May Not Mean What You Think
A post on Facebook will primarily show to the people who follow the shop that makes the post. Yes, you can spend money to get it in front of more of your followers — and even pay for additional audiences to be shown — but a boosted post like that rarely gets substantially more notice than the number of people already following the shop that made it. Essentially, this won’t reach new users who don’t already know and follow your business.
The unfortunate truth about Facebook posts specifically targeting page likes is that clicking the “Like” button very rarely correlates to investment or commitment. It doesn’t require a lot of time or effort from the user, and it might not even mean they’re interested in your business. For example, some of your likes might be from family members who live too far to visit your shop but support your business because they support you!
Facebook Ads
Infinite Ways to Reach New Customers
It wasn’t that long ago that people would see the same product over and over in their Facebook news feed. Even after they bought it, the same ad would appear. Though it still happens from time to time. Facebook recognized this and made some changes so that people could opt out of poor ads, but the updates only fixed part of the problem.
If you have ever gotten an advertisement for a product or service in which you have zero interest, then you have been on the receiving end of poor Facebook advertising.
You don’t want to subject your potential customers to the same treatment! Paying attention to engagement from your posts (not just likes!) as well as detailed audience targeting for your advertisements are the best ways to utilize social media in today’s marketplace. Facebook ads are a great way to do that and have seemingly infinite combinations of ways to direct your ad to the consumer who will most likely be interested.
Facebook does this by leveraging the immense wealth of data it has about its users. It would be underselling it to say that Facebook’s targeting capabilities are exceptionally robust. You can target based on interests, behaviors, demographics, age ranges, connections, locations, or languages. You can even target your competitors’ fans. The targeting capabilities can dig deeper than any other platform, and you can layer them and combine them to make sure you’re eliminating users who aren’t your target market.
If this already seems overwhelming, don’t worry. Setting up Facebook Ads for success can be complex, but there is a science behind how it can be done effectively. Help is out there from experts who know just as much about Facebook ads as you know about vehicle repair.
Let us help you use Search and Social to your shop’s benefit! Some of the setup can get complex but the concept of being active where your customers regularly visit, is a basic part of marketing. Get back to the basics using Search and Social PPC advertising the way it was intended: getting cars into your bays.
For more information, visit autoshopsolutions.com or call us at 866-210-1839 today!
This article is sponsored by Autoshop Solutions.
