Paid search as part of a multi-channel marketing strategy

Some say that PPC is all about the numbers, and it’s easy to see why. This isn’t entirely true though, as there is another, often overlooked, side to Paid Search that comes through its agility.

Depending on the size of the campaign, through PPC we are able to promote content, events, or simply a brand in less a day. Incredible, isn’t it? It gets even better when you integrate your PPC efforts with a client’s multi-channel marketing strategy, and even more so when you include their offline efforts.

If you think it sounds easy though, think again. Aside from brand awareness on Display, how often do you actually set up a campaign where the main purpose is anything other than driving direct conversions to the site?

You might question the purpose of a campaign with no directly attributable revenue to it, and if you work in PPC that’s understandable. How easy our work would be if we could just spend the budget on promoting a creative campaign that we think is just amazing – but unfortunately we can’t.

What we can do, however, is find other KPIs on which we can measure the success of our campaign, and then translate those into financial metrics.

It might take some time, but believe me, it’s worth it. By doing so you won’t be just following Paid Search best practice but also adding value to it, and clients will appreciate you proactively seeking opportunities to support their business.

But enough about why you should be thinking slightly outside of the PPC box, and let’s look at an example of how we’re doing it here at QC.

Every Business Needs New Customers

Acquiring new customers is at the backbone of every business, and the sooner you start addressing that in your PPC strategy the better.

When we learnt that for one of our retail clients, Christmas is a period of increased new-user site visits – particularly on mobile – we set up a mobile-specific localised campaign targeting users around nearby stores on gift-related search queries. For example:

Our aim was to capture on-the-go users doing their Christmas shopping and to direct them to a local store to complete the purchase. To measure success, we looked at clicks and counted visits to store locator pages.

Often clients have offers promoted locally via different marketing channels, and you can easily support them by setting up a localised campaign for a specific region or using geo-ad customisers.

The slightly trickier part comes when you have to measure how your campaign has contributed to the promotion of the offer, and, therefore, the revenue. One of the ways of getting around this is to set up PPC-specific promo codes or vouchers which can help track offline conversions, or simply to set up new goals/events in Analytics. The same techniques can be applied for quick promotion of a one-off event like a store opening.