Relevance: The Lowest Hanging Fruit For Better Results From Your PPC Campaigns

Whether you are setting up and optimizing a campaign for your own bootstrapped startup, or for a client with a limited budget, it`s easy to get lost in the data.

“Oh I see that at Wednesdays between 8 and 9 AM, there`s been a decent amount of conversions this month, so I`m going to set a bid adjustment for that time!

Campaign. Optimized.”

-Me (Before making change that yielded 0 tangible results.)

And sure, while recognizing patterns in data, and adjusting bids based on those patterns is an important part of campaign optimization for BIG campaigns with BIG budgets, that have BIG data for every day of every week each month, that`s typically not really an effective strategy for campaigns on a different scale.

Avoid the data trap.

Just because you have analytics installed, and you have data and numbers to look at, doesn`t mean that they are relevant right away.

If you have 10–50 monthly conversions in total, in most cases, you don`t really have enough data to justify making these kinds of hour by hour, postcode by postcode level changes.

So when you make bid adjustments for times, dates, or areas, and even if you`re seeing results in the short term, just know that there is no guarantee that you weren`t going to get those conversions even without making the changes. (And that you`ll likely see that play out in the mid to long term.)

The scale is simply too small.

So what should you focus on instead?

Relevance.

Double down and focus on getting your ads in front of the right people.

Let relevance be your guiding star leading you to a successful campaign, long before you have enough data to make more traditional “numbers” optimizations.

Make sure your ads are as relevant to your target audience as possible, that they lead to a relevant landing page and that you make an offer that is relevant.

And don`t just take my word for it.

Google and Facebook are already trying to force feed this concept of relevancy through Google`s Quality Score, and Facebook Ads relevancy scores.

But a lot of new advertisers(especially bootstrappers who pride themselves on being data-driven) don`t listen.

They still leave relevance and up-front research hanging and try to make sense of a data set where there is none.

Not only will you get better campaign results and more conversions anyway if you deliver relevant ads to relevant audiences, you`ll actually end up with more impressions, and cheaper CPC/CPM because the platforms will reward you for it as well.]

Targeting The Right Audience — Facebook

The first step to being able to show someone ads that are relevant to them, and then sending them to a relevant landing page, offering them a relevant service or product, is to actually put your ads in front of the right people.

With Facebook ads, people often skip this step, run untargeted ads to an uninterested audience, and go “Facebook ads just aren`t for my business”.

That`s just not how it works.

Yes, it`s true that FB ads is not the best fit for every project/business.

But you don`t just write an ad, create some random audience of millions of people, run your ad, and then retire to the Bahamas based on the ROAS of your campaign.

Instead of thinking of PPC as what it is, online advertising that you can set and it basically takes care of itself, you should imagine that you are trying to sell your product to someone in person.

Imagine you are going door to door, selling your product.

If you`re going to spend your own time going door to door and trying to sell something, you`d want as much information about the neighborhood as possible. That`s the only way to make sure that it will be worth your while.

Let`s say you want to sell your new cookbook: PB&J 100 Ways. Plus you have a lot of data on people in different neighborhoods, so you can decide which neighborhoods to go to based on a multitude of different factors.

Are you just going to ignore this data and hit the doors of everyone who is interested in food(hint: 7 billion and counting)?

You`ll be spending much more of your time knocking on doors and talking to people who will never buy your product than with inherently interested prospective clients:

• People who don`t like PB&J sandwiches.
• People who are allergic to peanuts.
• People who are allergic to wheat.
• People who can`t spare the money.
• People who never buy cookbooks.
• Etc…

You`ll meet them all.

Worse, you`ll be spending a lot of your time on each and every one of them before you even realize that they`re inherently not interested.

When first setting up your campaign, you should spend a lot more time targeting the right audience, than on refining ad copy into the ground(I`ll show you a trick on how to quickly get good ad copy done later).

You can literally target ONLY people who likes the Facebook page of a peanut butter brand, are engaged with recent cookbooks similar to yours and frequently make purchases online.

(Not to mention income, area, and age based targeting to top it off.)

Instead of starting off with an audience of millions, narrow it down to your core audience.

Even if that is only a few thousand people, you can use this core audience to figure out which ads work, what landing page/sales funnels, what offers convert etc.

Then you can scale and expand using audience insights and custom/lookalike audiences later on.

Targeting The Right Audience — AdWords

The major difference between Facebook Ads and AdWords, is that with AW you can gauge the person`s intent at that time.

“Restaurants Near Me”

This simple phrase tells us a lot of things about the person who is searching it at that time, especially considering they probably have their GPS turned on on their phone, so Google can actually give them relevant recommendations.

“Restaurants” tell us that obviously, the person is interested in restaurants in some way, but by adding “near me” , there is very strongly implied intent that the person is looking for restaurant to eat at in the near future.

“Best Tuesday Lunch Deals in AREA”

Again, very clear intent, as long as you are offering a lunch deal in the area they are Googling for, it`s hard to go wrong.

Relevant Ads — Adwords

But even if you have the right audience, people who are actively looking for a restaurant right in your area, you can fail completely if you don`t show them relevant ads.

For example, if we take the latest search phrase: “Best Tuesday Lunch Deals in AREA”

There are a lot of factors that goes into showing them a relevant ad.

Time: They are looking for deals specifically for a certain weekday. You don`t want to be showing them ads with deals for other days of the week, and it`s not even advisable to show them a breakdown of your weekly lunch deals. Ideally you`ll show them the only deal that they are looking for.

Budget: These people obviously want a good deal (they care about cost, as well as value) and if you don`t show them an ad that indicates that you are offering a good deal, that`s not an ad that is relevant to them.

Location: Obviously you need to restrict your campaign to only targeting areas where it would make sense for someone to visit your restaurant during lunch. Consider here that range of a campaign targeting restaurant-goers for dinner is wider than people who are looking for lunch places, (usually near their office or University.)

Relevant ad:

“ $15 Dollar Grilled Salmon Lunch Set Only On Tuesdays!”

http://www.yourrestaurant.com/area/lunch-deal

Hands down the best value for money lunch in AREA.

Time, location, and cost all covered in a very simple ad.

No so relevant ad:

“Check Out Pierro`s Lunch Menu, The Best Pasta in Town”

We serve home-made Italian dishes from traditional recipes.

http://pierrosrestaurant.com/lunch-menu/best-pasta/

There`s no mention of a deal anywhere, and while the words “lunch” and “best” are included in the headline, that doesn`t make it an ad that is very relevant to someone who is looking for the best lunch deal.

It`s also not mentioning Tuesday anywhere, which is a wasted opportunity to make the user feel that your ad is relevant to them.

Google AdWords gives you all the tools you need to show incredibly relevant ads to very targeted users, all you need to do is put in the time to set up your campaign the right way.

When targeting a certain keyword, always ask yourself (from the shoes of your target audience) if you would happily click your ad if you were searching for that.

If the answer is no, something needs to change, whether that`s increasing the number of ad groups or just changing copy.

Relevant Ads — Facebook

The most reliable way to show an audience relevant ads on Facebook, is to really dive in and research the audience that you are marketing to before you create a single ad.

Are you targeting people who like certain pages?

Go through every single one of those pages.

In-depth.

Identify the kind of content (images, text and video) that gets the most engagement from their fans.

What titles do well? What length of content does well? Tone of voice?

Find out the whys behind content that goes viral in that niche.

But don`t stop there. (That`s the easy way out.)

Join relevant groups and forums and talk to real people.

See what they are passionate about, what problems they have and what language they use to describe those problems. (Old-school, I know.)

Once you`ve done this step, you will be able to tailor ads that speak perfectly to your audience.

A great example of such an ad is the following ad Hayden Peddle covers in his video on how he made $500 from spending $5 on this very Facebook Ad.

If you check out the kind of content that does well on pages that he`s targeting, you immediately understand why the ad got the results that it did.

It simply followed a winning formula across the board.

• Video.
• Eye-popping bling (highlighted by the dark).
• Big text to motivate people to start playing the video, using the kind of language people organically use in relevant groups “I Need This On My Truck” as opposed to “Powerful LED Lighting, Only $200 For A Limited Time”.
• Call to action that asked people to tag someone who “needed” this. (Getting viewers to do the hard lifting.)

A lot of things that were done right that you can learn from and use for the benefit of your campaign performance.

Relevant Landing Pages

It`s easier than ever to show relevant ads to relevant people. You can target people in extremely detailed ways, and then you can even use exactly the words that they are searching for in your ad, if you use AW`S keyword insertion.

But one thing that`s not as simple, is showing relevant landing pages to all the visitors that you are getting from your campaign.

One mistake I see quite often, is having one general landing page, and sending visitors from all Ad Groups to that very same landing page.

If you Google “Long Beach Taco Truck”, and the advertiser uses keyword insertion to show you “Long Beach Taco Truck” in the headline of the ad, if you send them to your general Food Truck category page on your aggregation website, that is NOT a relevant landing page.

A relevant Landing page would either be a single taco truck located in Long Beach, or a list of taco trucks that are specifically in Long Beach.

With Facebook, it`s more about making sure that your landing page is platform appropriate. If you are trying to get people to join an event/webinar etc, while you need to send people to an outside page with other PPC, creating an event in Facebook so you can do truly native advertising can often be a better option.

Relevant Offer — Price

You could be putting your ads in front of exactly the right audience.

Your ads could be awesome, relevant, and seeing out-of-this-world click-through rates.

You could even have a great landing page.

But if your offer isn`t relevant to the people who make it through the top of the funnel, you won`t get any conversions.

We were working with a client who were running a successful campaign. They were bringing in a decent amount of customers, and they were seeing a positive ROAS, which is really ultimate goal of any campaign.

They decided to increase the price of the offer by 50% (from 20, to 30$ for the first month,) and they surmised that the conversions would take a small enough hit that they`d make it back in the bigger profit margins.

Overnight, conversions dropped to almost 0.

Price can be an integral part of what makes your offer relevant to an audience, and if you`re selling a big-ticket item you need to make sure that you are offering it to an audience with the means to purchase.

Sure their profile of interests matches someone who should be interested in what you`re selling, but is your offer relevant to them in terms of price?

Relevant Offer — Platform

Where you are advertising also affects the logical flow of making your offer to someone.

If you are advertising on AdWords and you are targeting keywords with proven intent, it makes sense to focus on selling your item right then and there.

A product and sales focused landing page is appropriate.

However, if you are advertising on Facebook or other social networks, and you are selling something that doesn`t have a price tag within the “impulse buying” range, or if you are promoting a B2B product, sending someone to a straight up sales page is rarely the way to go.

You see this all the time with big-ticket items, like expensive products, getaways or courses.

Great ad, good targeting(I clicked on it), good landing page, interesting design and content, and then with me coming off Facebook, they straight away ask me for 100s of dollars. (Not going to happen.)

Now, if I was googling for luxury chef`s knife, or “business retreat”, where they know that my intention is to actually find a product or service like theirs, that offer would be very relevant to me.

But, I`m on Facebook, I`m not there to spend money, I am there to message some friends, check out what my friends are up to and maybe read some news/information that they thought was interesting.

If I see an interesting ad, I might click on it, but I`m not really in a shopping mode, as much as just in an information collection mode.

Proper structure for big ticket item campaigns on Facebook involves setting up a sales funnel with multiple stages.

• Top of the funnel ads that fuel lead generation.
• A combination of email marketing and remarketing to engage and qualify leads.
• Then closing the deal.
• And finally, remarketing to people who you weren`t able to close (abandoned carts, etc).

TL;DR

Clocking in at around 10 minutes and more than 2000 words, I realize not everyone will take the time to go through this mammoth of an article.

So I narrowed it down into a 4 point checklist for the TL;DR crowd:

• Narrow down your audience to be as targeted as possible. (Not just interest, look for patterns in your customer base regarding age, locations, behaviors, everything.)
• Then make sure that your ads are relevant to the audience. (Find your target customers where they hang out, FB pages, Groups, Forums, and see what they talk about the most. Use their concerns, and their language in your ads.)
• Send the users from the ads to a relevant landing page. (Don`t rely on automated keyword insertion to give you relevant ads, and then send users to unrelated landing pages, give them what they are looking for.)
• Make them a relevant offer. (Make sure that the offer is something that is as appealing as possible to people in your target audience. Where possible, give value up front.)

Checking off these four items is likely going to produce more tangible results from your campaigns than trying to use irrelevant data samples to make what appears to be data/numbers-based decisions for young or small campaigns.

While numbers help you improve a campaign that is already working (to some extent), diagnosing a complete failure, or starting from scratch is very differnet.

Remember that what is on the other side of your ad campaign is real, living, breathing, humans.

People who most likely are just as enthusiastic about ads as you are.. or even less.

The ideal ad provides value to someone that needs what it`s offering.

It does not annoy people that will never buy in a million years.

Obligatory Call To Action

If this post was useful to you at all, even if just as a reminder, then go ahead and rework your campaign to whichever extent is necessary.

That`s obviously the priority here.

After that`s done, consider coming back here and giving me some props, or following me on Twitter so you won`t miss my next posts on similar topics.

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