4 Ways to Take Your AdWords Spend to the Next Level

AdWords spend sucks up a chunk–in many cases, a massive chunk–of many marketers’ budgets.

PPC, despite its downfalls, is a quick and relatively cheap way to drive significant amounts of traffic in a hurry.

It’s also a way for a growing company to appear on page 1 of Google immediately. And, not to mention, appear when and where you want to appear. AdWords is awesome, but how do you take your spend to the next level? What can you do to improve your ROI?

Here are 4 tactics to try:

1) Use Call Tracking to Analyze Which Ads Generate Calls

Are you getting credit for every lead your AdWords campaigns generate? If you’re not using call tracking you’re not.

Call tracking for PPC allows marketers to track the precise keywords, campaigns, and even ads that are generating phone calls. Convirza uses a tool called Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) to dynamically display a phone number to a web visitor dependent upon the parameters you set. In other words, different phone numbers can actually appear on the same landing page dependent on the campaign, ad, or keyword. So, for example, if you’re A/B testing ad copy for a specific ad, the people that click on ad A would see a different phone number on the landing page than the people that clicked on ad B.

This allows Convirza to know which ad generated any subsequent phone calls.

So, whether you’re using call tracking DNI for high level AdWords metrics like the total number of calls generated by PPC; or, if you’re using it to A/B test keyword effectiveness, ad effectiveness or even ad copy and offer, call tracking is a way to take your budget to the next level.

How many phone calls are you driving via your AdWords efforts that you aren’t getting credit for? In most industries, FYI, about 10% of your total AdWords leads will be phone calls. That’s a ton of revenue you’re not getting credit for. (Because, remember, callers are more likely to buy than web leads).

2) Try Mobile PPC

Mobile search will surpass desktop search this year. If you’re not taking advantage of the massive mobile PPC opportunity, you are leaving money on the table. Don’t be left behind by the mobile wave.

Conducting pay-per-click for mobile will take your AdWords spend to the next level.

3) Use Call Extensions for Mobile PPC

Call extensions are different than mobile Pay-Per-Call from Google. Pay-Per-Call forces you to use a random phone number that Google provides.

They bill you every time the call is clicked.

Call extensions are different. Call extensions can be used with any phone number–your current phone number or a tracking phone number from Convirza . This means that you can get advanced metrics from the call like Conversation Analytics, demographic data about the caller and even more advanced data.

These metrics are utterly unavailable with Google Pay-Per-Call. There is literally no advantage I can think of to using Pay-Per-Call over call extensions.

And it will take your spend to the next level. You’ll be able to drive mobile callers to your business. And keep in mind what Google’s own research shows: over 70% of local mobile searches result in a phone call. And the average smartphone owner conducts 15-20 local searches each month. Long story short: you’re going to get a lot of phone calls if you use call extensions.

That’s a good thing. Callers are 10x more likely to buy than someone that fills out a web form.

4) Change Your Offer

We were doing some AdWords competitive analysis recently. And we found that some of our competitors have vastly different AdWords offers. Some of them offer a demo. Others offer a Free Trial of their call tracking service. Still others offer content like White Papers or eBooks.

The pros and cons of these various offers are obvious. Conversion rates will be higher for White Papers and eBooks than they will be for demo requests and especially free trials. But, obviously, more demo requests and free trials will convert to accounts.

Long story short: modify your offers to see what works and what doesn’t. If you’ve always offered one thing, change it up and see what happens. In our experience, the majority of AdWords marketers have had the same offer for weeks, months, or even years with little modification. Well, change it up and see if something–good or bad–changes.