Make PPC work for your agency without spending too much

My agency, Write Arm, recently started a new Google AdWords campaign and, to our delight, it’s already been delivering great results. I’d like to share with you the easily replicable formula that we used for the landing pages.

First though a big ‘hats off’ to Write Armer Mat Fidge for writing the ad copy and setting up the campaign.

Chasing the long tail

Our previous AdWords campaign competed on very general terms like ‘copywriting agency’ and ‘content agency’. It brought in some really good projects, but not large volumes.

A few weeks ago we decided to change tack and go for some longer tail keywords that focus on two of the areas in which we have a particularly strong track record: technology in general and fintech in particular.

We created really simple landing pages of around 100 words for each campaign – here’s the tech one. It follows a simple seven-part structure and only took about 15 minutes to write.

The seven-part formula

This structure can be adapted for most kinds of agency – in fact for most types of small business.

1. The challenge and the solution (Need an expert technology writer? Look no further)
2. Establish credibility (We’ve written for everyone from IBM down to the smallest start up)
3. Subjects we can cover (a bullet point list including tech niches such as cloud, cybersecurity, crypto)
4. Types of writers we can offer (journalists, creative copywriters etc)
5. Types of output we can create (a bullet point list: blogs, white papers etc)
6. Why us? (a list of three quick reasons)
7. Cheeky call to action (So, stop staring at your screen and call us now)

A word from the wise

To this I add the wisdom of Barney Durrant, a KitchenTable Table Community member who owns PPC and SEO agency Bluebell Digital. He spent over a decade at Google, so really knows his stuff when it comes to setting up effective PPC campaigns. After I posted about the success of the campaign in The KTC’s Slack group, Barney responded with this really useful commentary:

You have captured the virtuous circle of Google Ads advertising. The auction is mainly driven by two factors – Max CPC bid and quality score.

Quality score is mainly clickthrough rate, so for any successful Google Ads campaign you need to respond to a specific query with an ad referencing that query precisely and then go to a landing page that is all about your service or product that solves that problem etc.

By following this mantra, you are establishing excellent relevancy, which will be rewarded by a high clickthrough rate, which will give you a good quality score, which will raise your power in the auction and ultimately bring down your costs, as you won’t need to bid as high to beat a less relevant competitor – ie one whose Google Ads are not as well optimised and whose landing page experience is less focused and relevant.

Costs that are lower leads to better ROI. Better experiences lead to better qualified traffic which leads to better conversion rates and sales. 

Our campaign is costing around £100 per month and it’s delivering three to four good leads a week. That’s not bad going I’d say.

So, go on, get to work on your PPC campaign and watch the leads start rolling in.