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How To Use PPC Advertising In Order To Gain Market Intelligence

One of the biggest benefits pay per click advertising offers marketers is a fast entry point into the digital marketing world. Setting up campaigns are relatively easy and within a few hours of going live, performance data already begins to trickle in. Conversions are automatically attributed back to the individual keywords, ads, ad-groups, and campaigns the conversion originated from. The speed at which ppc operates quickly provides marketers a vast amount of performance data that they can leverage.

Another big benefit of ppc is its ability to provide market intelligence. For instance, the variety and depth of data paid search campaigns offer can be used to help marketers better understand things such as user behavior, purchase intent, or how potential customers respond to various types of messaging. PPC data provides so many valuable insights that it can be used to inform overall digital marketing strategy. 

This article will explore 3 ways PPC can provide the market intelligence you need to better position your product or service in the digital marketplace.

Geo-Targeting

PPC campaigns provides insightful market intelligence through geo targeting. Careful analysis of performance by location can inform both messaging strategy and how to position your products or services. In a hyper connected world, it’s imperative for businesses to create a 1 to 1 connection with customers and acknowledging where your customers are and understanding how to communicate with them based on geography improves the chances of generating brand loyalty. 

I manage an account in the education vertical that uses PPC to generate leads for their portfolio of campuses. In the education vertical, it’s typical for campaigns to target a radius of a few miles from a school’s physical location. However, by analyzing location reports I could review performance by individual municipality, town, and city. By leveraging geo targeting data it created an opportunity to tie messaging, bidding, and targeting based on the conversion rates of individual geographic locations.

Using your account’s geographic based data can also lead to success in other marketing channels. For instance, instead of blindly buying TV media across every market, use the geographic performance data from paid search to inform your media purchasing strategy. PPC can be an effective conduit for determining how to form your media buying plan.

Leveraging PPC to Drive SEO strategy

The age-old question surrounding keyword based advertising is whether to focus on SEO to drive free traffic through the natural listings or pay for traffic through use of ppc ads. PPC campaigns provides the best of both worlds. PPC can be used as a testing ground to quickly learn what keywords convert and which one’s don’t.

As previously mentioned, all conversions are tied back to individual keywords. Based on this information, marketers can make the decision regarding whether there’s any benefit for optimizing a keyword from an SEO perspective. Since SEO optimizations can take a long time before yielding results, having proof from ppc regarding which keywords convert and ones don’t can save time and money by only optimizing for SEO the keywords that have already performed well in the ppc campaigns. Analyzing ppc keyword performance to determine SEO strategy greatly improves the chances of your SEO program succeeding.

Content Messaging

Another way to gain market intelligence and drive content strategy is through the ability to easily A/B test ad copy. For instance, Adwords ads contain two 30 character headlines and an 80-character description line. The ability to constantly test different ad copy combinations means marketers can learn a great deal about which messaging is most successful in terms of response and ability to drive conversion. 

Ad testing is only limited by one’s imagination. Common ad testing strategies include A/B testing headline copy, calls to action, and benefits. Analysis of traffic metrics like click thru rate provides valuable insights into how well users are responding to your message. Conversion rates are an indicator of how successful an ad is in terms of driving a positive result based on your goals.

Another way to gain market intelligence through ppc ad testing is its ability to segment performance by device. (smartphone, laptop, tablet). Users spend most of their day on multiple devices, exhibiting different behaviors based on the device they’re on. Understanding performance variations by device can provide valuable intelligence to determine how to position your message based on the device they’re on.

Conclusion

PPC advertising allows businesses the dual benefit of making money while collecting marketing intelligence.

Creating campaigns based on the type of information you’re trying to gather not only provides the benefit of quickly collecting insights, but also drives revenue and profit along the way. 

Leveraging data from across all your digital marketing initiatives is key to a successful program. The insights takeaways, and key learning’s each advertising medium supplies can be applied cross channel. Use all ppc data available to you to craft messaging, optimize targeting, and better understand your competitors advertising tactics so you can develop the necessary strategies to turn prospects into paying customers.

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