The customer journey often begins with search and online advertising so, not only is providing the best possible customer experience vital to attracting and retaining customers, but aligning your PPC strategy with this is essential for prolonged success.
So, what are our top tips for aligning your PPC strategy with customer experience?
Know your audience
The most important step is knowing exactly who your audience is and using this data to understand which steps you need to take to customise each digital touchpoint in order to improve each user’s experience with your brand.
Google’s advertising channels allow you target in granular detail so, once you know who your audience groups are, where they go and what they’re looking for, there really is no excuse not to target them in the right way.
RLSA and Google Display Network
You should use both Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) and the Google Display Network (GDN) to remarket back to users based on their previous engagement with your website such as basket abandoners or product page viewers.
You should tailor your ad creative and landing pages for these users, based on which category is most relevant to their stage of the funnel.
In-market audiences
In-market audiences are a great way to reach users who are in the market for your product or service who may not have any previous affinity with your brand.
Utilising these across search and GDN can help increase your reach but also generate more user focused and customer experience driven traffic.
Similar audiences
Similar audiences are similar to the people who have already converted on your site. Again, this is great for reaching new users and generating more user focused and customer experience driven traffic.
2. Relevance is crucial
Making sure your keywords, ads and landing pages are as relevant as possible to each customer will help you to improve the customer journey.
Optimising your keyword quality score and tailoring all avenues to the most granular level possible will enhance your activity and provide a much more customer centric approach.
Landing page
Make sure you send your traffic to not only the most relevant page from a search term perspective but also use audience overlays to find a way to customise your landing page content or creative based on the stage of the funnel the customer is in.
If your landing page fails to fulfil the promises you make in your ads, the tone of voice doesn’t match or it’s not clear what the customer needs to do next, it is highly likely you will lose the customer to a competitor.
Aligning everything with your ads and ensuring relevance will maximise your chances of converting more customers.
IF statements in ad creative
IF statements allow you to change your messaging on the SERP based on the device the user is searching on or what audience they fall into.
This means you can display messaging that is most relevant to each audience group. For example, you could base messaging on the time since their last visit to your site, or if they’re a basket abandoner offer them a hot discount to encourage them back to site to complete their original purchase. Maximising the intent of each user in isolation is key to this.
Ad creative
This may seem to be a bit of a no brainer but it’s important to ensure that your ads are always relevant to the search term and your messaging is consistent with what’s on your site in order to provide a more seamless experience.
3. Take your relationship with Google Analytics to the next level
Analysing the top paths taken to conversion (both from a channel and website navigation perspective) and optimising your findings is crucial.
From this, you can implement new CRO tests to improve the general website navigation or look at customising messaging to drive users to the next stage of the funnel more effectively.
4. The A word, Attribution
Advertisers still using last-click attribution as their sole model for activity need to ask themselves why. We live in a vibrant world of data science and an attribution model such as data-driven will really help to enhance your understanding of each keyword’s part in the overall customer journey, helping you to push users from the top to the bottom of the funnel more seamlessly.
This opens the door to using…
5. The second A word, Automation
Although automation (or smart bidding) may not be relevant for every organisation or campaign, it can really help you to eek a few extra percentage points in conversion every now and again and shouldn’t be overlooked.
Smart bidding uses millions of signals and customises your bidding for each auction, which can be very important for refining your approach.
There are a strong handful of strategies you can deploy, most of which can help you to better optimise user experience and understand how customers engage with your brand.
6. CRM
It’s important to use your existing customer data to make more informed decisions on how and where to spend your media budget.
Customer Match is an amazing way of not only retargeting high value customers (higher Average Order Value or Lifetime Value, perhaps) but Similar Audiences are also a great way to reach new users deemed similar to your existing customers.
7. YouTube advertising
This can be a great way to grow your audience list for a relatively low cost. Use YouTube to educate new users about your brand, product or service offering and then retarget those who have engaged with your video content through search and GDN.
8. Improve CRO culture
Our final tip is to improve the CRO culture throughout your organisation by continuously improving:
- Site speed
- Search functionality
- Mobile friendliness
- Page content
It’s important to challenge the norm to find new ways to increase your website performance in conjunction with refining your PPC strategy as these work hand in hand to lead to the best results across the board.
Using these tips and tools to deliver targeted and relevant ads to the right audience at the right time will help you to ensure success not just with your PPC strategy, but with your website overall.