PPC Advertising in Houston: Paid Search & Programmatic Display Ads

Benefits of Pay-Per-Click Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a hugely beneficial tool in your marketing arsenal that reaps excellent ROI when executed well.

One advantage of PPC advertising is that often you only pay for an ad if the user clicks on it. When you look at your analytics, you'll determine the success of the advertising campaign based on your set benchmarks. For instance, if the ad leads to a product page, you can easily see what percentage of those clicks convert to sales.

Other benefits of PPC include reaching potential customers who don't convert immediately, but later convert when you deliver retargeted ads or those who take other actions on your site that bring them into your sales funnel.

PPC Advertising Platforms

Google Ads are one of the most widely recognized platforms for PPC. You can also use a variety of social media platforms, such as Facebook, and other search engines.  

You may be looking to promote a single event, a product, or to improve brand recognition in your area. Your goals for the company and campaign will determine where you place your ads for the most effective investment.

Ad Networks and How They Fit Your PPC Advertising Strategy

At HexaGroup, we look at your goals, assess where your business is in the marketing space, and determine the best strategy to reap the largest ROI. PPC ads offer a great return on the investment if your goals are predetermined and the campaign is well thought-out. Haphazard campaigns can get some traction, but you can easily spend more money than you should on campaigns because of using the wrong platforms or strategies for your goals.

At HexaGroup, we often work with these key networks to meet and exceed the campaign goals for our clients:

• Google Search Ads – Google Search Ads should be a major part of most PPC campaigns. As of 2019, over 88% of online searches are conducted with Google. Google Ads are important for local and nationwide businesses to get seen by a majority of searchers.
• Google Display Ads – Display Ads are slightly different from search in that they allow you to target your audience based on criteria you've developed. The display ads can be placed on a variety of websites and the Google Display Network offers placement on more than two million websites.
• Microsoft Ads (Formerly Bing Ads) – We usually only run search ads on Bing, rather than display or video ads, which we often advise on Google. Bing accounts for far less search traffic than Google, but Bing offers a higher-than-average conversion rate and its audience is older with more expendable income, making it an excellent platform for companies whose demographic fits their user profile. The cost of advertising on Bing is also lower and there are robust tools for targeting your audience.

The Major Benefits of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as Part of Your Digital Strategy

Paid search puts your business on the first page for your search terms. It looks similar to regular search results, with a small note indicating that the listing is an ad. (Organic search is great, but a longer road to the first page than with PPC - learn about our SEO services and how they support higher-ROI PPC campaigns.)

Depending on the competition in your field and your search terms, it may be difficult or impossible to rank near the top of the first page organically. Meanwhile, 41% of clicks go to the top paid ads on the search engine page, making paid search a very cost effective way to spend your marketing budget. The biggest benefit is that customers who click on paid search listings are often looking to buy immediately and offer better conversion rates than other types of advertising.

For local businesses, search engine marketing also provides cost effective ways to target small, but relevant location areas - like individual zip codes or a two-mile radius around your place of business. If you're a Houston-area business, don't miss out on the affordable growth opportunities from PPC advertising.

Core Components for New Paid Search Campaigns

We've developed core components for new paid search campaigns to bring amazing benefits to our clients. Some things you can expect in your paid search campaign through HexaGroup include:

• In-Depth Competitive Research – For a paid search campaign to be effective, you have to know exactly where you fall in the marketplace, who your target audience is and what you offer that your competition doesn't. We provide in-depth competitive research to make sure your paid search campaigns hit the right benchmarks.
• Comprehensive PPC Keyword Research – We use a proprietary, in-house tool for keyword research called Clustaar Keyword Analysis. This allows us to dig deep into keyword analysis to invigorate your paid search campaigns.
• Landing Page Analysis – Launching your campaigns is only part of the process. We also monitor your real-time performance on landing pages using Google Analytics and HubSpot. We use heat-map tools to monitor users' interactions to provide an intricate picture of your visitors, so we can evaluate the success of current campaigns and optimize future campaigns.
• Bid Management – We tailor our bid management strategy to fit your business goals and each campaign, combining manual implementation and structured automation. This process is integral to increasing high-value clicks and eliminating low-value clicks.
• Crafting Ad Copy – Our ad copy improves visibility and click-through-rate (CTR). Ad copy looks simple to create because there's little verbiage, but writing ad copy that reaps results is an art form and technical skill combined. We include at least four ad variations, allowing Google to rotate ads and prioritize higher performing variations.

Programmatic Display Advertising

Programmatic display is the automated purchase of ad inventory through one exchange platform or several simultaneously. At HexaGroup, we leverage programmatic display when we create buyer personas. These personas help us use targetable attributes, like customers' interests, demographics and business titles, to reach the best audience. We can automate the real-time purchase of ads so that our clients can reach their ideal customer across millions of websites without any lag time.

We use display campaigns as remarketing ads, directed at the people who've already visited your website. We can further segment this audience by the number of visits and other indicators of interest, such as leaving a shopping cart abandoned. Using new display campaigns, we can leverage both standard image ads and animated ads, as well as accelerated mobile protocol to make certain we're reaching the most popular search segment, those visiting your website on their phones.

We do recommend programmatic video ads for many of our clients due to their high conversion rates. A total of 43 percent of customers will buy something they saw in a YouTube ad, making this a platform to consider for any type of campaign. We run video ads through YouTube, where we apply many of the same programmatic targeting options available through Google's Ad network. 

Some of the video ad options we offer include:

• Pre-Roll Ads – These are non-skippable, in PPC format, and are 15 to 20 seconds long.
• TrueView Ads – There are two variations: in-stream ads, which are shown before videos and are skippable after five seconds. These are 30 seconds or longer. You might also use discovery ads, which appear as suggested videos. In this format, the ads are pay per view, rather than pay per click.
• Bumper Ads – These are six-second, non-skippable ads. They're also pay per view.

The HexaGroup Approach to PPC

We prioritize ongoing ad creative testing, campaign experiments and conversion optimization to keep our clients' marketing endeavors reaping the highest results at all times. We offer constant monitoring of landing page performance through conversion analytics, as well as the implementation of heat maps to better monitor user behavior on landing pages.

For PPC services and paid search advertising, we focus on improving the quality score metric to lower the average click cost and improve your positioning. For display and video ads, we focus on targeting your audience through research, assessment, testing and aggressive implementation of custom audiences within Google Analytics and other analytical tools. This makes our efforts highly effective and lends itself to more successful remarketing initiatives.

We provide comprehensive, real-time reporting through an interactive online dashboard. This allows us to provide clients with easy-to-monitor KPIs and campaign performance analytics that are up to date and easy to thoroughly assess.

Contact HexaGroup today for ROI-driven PPC advertising services in Houston.