Jess Percival
Hello, welcome back to the Thinkplus YouTube channel and our Friday live stream.

I’m super, super excited for this one.

Today Jana is going to be talking to us all about why your PPC campaigns aren’t converting, and of course, how you can fix them.

It’s going to be an absolute blast.

Wow. The music played really loud there. Let me turn that down.

Jess Percival
Same as always, if you leave a message in the chat, you’ll be in with a chance of winning a hard copy of our book, How To Get To The Top Of Google. And as you may know or you may not realise, if you click through from our social media, this is our brand new YouTube channel just for live videos. So if you are not subscribed, well, please double check to see if you are subscribed, because you might not be, and in the meantime, if you could drop a message in the chat let me know where you’re watching from today.

Jess Percival
See? Dale’s a lot quicker at this. He always knows where all the buttons are and what we need, whereas it takes me quite a long time to find them. But yeah, if you can let me know in the chat where you’re watching from today, and that will also give you a chance to be entered to win a copy of the book. I’m in a very, very, very sunny Grantham today, although about five minutes ago it was snowing because apparently, it doesn’t really know what it wants to do today.

Jess Percival
But anyway, let me go into the chats. Hey Tortoise Property, glad you managed to find us on the new channel. Slightly sunny and snowy Peterborough. I think you’ve got very similar to what we’ve got in Grantham now. I’m going to check in with Jana now. She looks like she’s in a pretty sunny place. Hey Jana. How are you doing?

Jana Maljic
Hi, Jess. Yeah, I’m doing good. I’m super excited to be joining another live stream and just can’t wait to get started.

Jess Percival
Yes, I’m so pleased because you were part of our Dominate live stream last Friday. Seems like it is so much longer ago than just last Friday.

Jana Maljic
Just last Friday. Yeah. It seems like ages ago, right?

Jess Percival
Yeah, exactly. It feels like so, so long. You’re completely right. Oh, we’ve got Ahammed who’s watching on LinkedIn, and of course we have Tortoise Property as well. But yeah, you look like you’ve got good weather where you are Jana, or have you got snow as well?

Jana Maljic
No, it’s actually a bit rainy, but it’s just everything is bright, like grey and bright.

Jess Percival
Yes. Yeah, yeah, I get that completely. The weather doesn’t know what it wants to do today. Shall we crack on with your marvellous presentation? I’m super excited to hear what you have to say today, absolutely buzzing. So yeah, let me pop that on the screen for you, and like I said, what I’ll do is I’m kind of going to leave Jana to just talk through everything and give some insight into her amazing knowledge, but if you do have any questions, you can drop them while we’re chatting, but we will… Oh my gosh. My brain just left. We will be answering questions at the end, so you feel free to leave them at the end as well. But yeah, I’ll bring up your presentation now Jana, and I will let you take it away. Enjoy.

Jana Maljic
Thank you. Hi everybody. It’s nice to be joining another live stream for [Thinkplus]. I hope you watched the previous ones. If not, find your way on YouTube to watch those as well. So like Jess said today, we will be talking about why your PPC campaigns are not converting and obviously how to fix it.

Jana Maljic
So a reason number one why your campaigns might not be converting is very, very simple, actually. It’s because you may be sending traffic to the wrong landing page. And what do I mean when I say wrong landing page?

Well, if you’re advertising a certain product, for example here we have organic baby blankets, then you want to lead your audience to exactly that product, to a product category page, or if it’s a product that’s on discount.

So wherever you’re advertising from, whether that’s Google search, Google Display, Google YouTube campaign, or Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, LinkedIn Ads, wherever you’re advertising, whichever platform you chose, just make sure you’re sending people to the right product category page.

Jana Maljic
It happens quite often when I see an ad, for example, I see cute dress being advertised and it’s on a discount and I click on the ad. It’s one of those Facebook carousel ads, and I click on it, and then I land to like a category page or a homepage where I need to search for that particular product for some extra time, and you don’t want that.

You want to make the journey as easier as possible for the customer. So don’t make it harder for them make, make the journey as easiest as possible for them to be able to get that purchase in like a few clicks, and yeah.

Jana Maljic
We have another example here. This is one ad on Facebook from ASOS store. So they have been advertising the Nike… Oh, sorry. I cannot see this. The Nike Blazer Jumbo Trainers, and as you can see, the ad for the trainers is leading to the ASOS page where it’s filtered out to show you only the Nike Blazer Jumbo Trainers. So it’s not filtered to show… It’s not leading you to the homepage. It’s not even leading you to the product category page of like the trainers. It’s leading you to the exact product that they’re advertising. So if anyone is interested in that product and they click on the ad, they’re sent to exactly that product. So just make it as easier as possible for the customers to purchase from you.

Jana Maljic
Okay. Reason number two, your landing page simply sucks.

Sorry to break it to you, but it could be the reason that your landing pages are not that good. So here we have a checklist that you can use. You can take a screenshot of this or write it down. It’s a really, really good one. This is something that we use for all of our clients.

Jana Maljic
So we’re going to start with the audience.

Have a really long think about who your audience is, and then is it clearly defined and represented in the pictures on your website? So if you are selling something for, I don’t know, let’s say women clothing, I’m sorry. This is obviously the only example my brain can think of today. Women clothing. Okay. You want to show women wearing that clothing in certain situations. So for example, if you’re selling, I don’t know, business clothes, you want to showcase this lifestyle you’re selling, the woman with the business outfit, I don’t know, walking down the street, carrying the laptops. So you want your audience, when they come to your website, you want them to see themselves and imagine themselves in your product if it’s clothing. [inaudible 00:08:08] product. So yeah, this is a very, very important thing.

Jana Maljic
Then we have the lead capture offer. This is obviously for lead gen businesses. Is your offer for the first thing that the user’s eyes are attracted to? Is it enticing? Does it define what the user can expect? So let’s say you are offering, I don’t know, plumbing service. No, that’s a bad example. Let me take something else. Okay. Let’s say you’re offering digital marketing services, so for example, I don’t know, PPC services let’s say.

Jana Maljic
When someone lands on your page, you need to make sure that whatever it is that you’re offering, it’s well explained and like, for example, for us, for PPC, it would be Google ads campaign management, and then underneath, what is included inside, whether that’s the keyword research, the strategy, the writing of the ads, the ad creatives, anything else that is included in your offer. So make it as easier as possible for your people, for your customers to know what you’re actually offering.

Jana Maljic
One thing I see a lot is that, for example, if you’re a SaaS, software as a service business, and you have the, for example, the free trial or call to action button, so this is your offer. Your offering a free trial. But what happens if your customer clicks on the free trial? So explain this to them. Maybe they have some fears, some uncertainties about how long is the free trial. Do I need to include my credit card details? So just add like one extra sentence to your offer, so what’s included in the free trial, or if you have a contact ask button, what is going to happen if I click there. Is the sales team going to attack me with 10,000 emails? Is it going to be a quick chat with the sales team just like to get to know each to other?

Jana Maljic
You cannot believe how much adding one extra sentence beneath your offer can increase your conversion rate. So think about that. Think about answering any uncertainties, objections and fears that your customers might have before they give you your contact details, because nowadays in like 21st century, not everyone will just give you your email for like the thing you’re offering. It’s just, it’s too common and you want to make sure that you’re sort of answering their objections and fears before they give you their contact information.

Jana Maljic
Okay. I’m just going to take a sip of water, talking a lot. Okay. Next we have the call to action. So whether that’s learn more, shop now, contact us, get a free trial, you need to make sure that it’s visible, that it’s in a colour that tastefully contrasts with the colours used on your page. Don’t use something that is off brand, but just make sure it’s visible, it’s easy to see it, easy to click it on desktop and mobile, and that it has that explanation that I just mentioned, like what happens next.

Jana Maljic
User journey. So that’s obviously very important. Like I said, make it as easiest as possible for your customer to find the next step. Make sure it’s easy or desktop and on mobile, and make sure that the customer doesn’t need to scroll like half an hour to get to whatever it is you want them to get to, and make sure that in two or three clicks, they can either get the information they need or they can contact you. So, yeah, that’s a really, really important thing that you need to pay attention to.

Jana Maljic
Page layout just sort of connects with the user journey, but also not only like how much they need to scroll, what they need to pick, but does the page seem like orderly, calm? Do you have enough white space? Is it readable? You don’t want to have like super, super small fonts, but also, you don’t want to have super, super huge fonts, so just make it as clean, as enjoyable as possible. This is something, if you’re not sure about all this stuff I’m talking about, user journey, page layout, obviously you can talk to experts such as us, but you can also search about the recent trends in website page layout, or you can find some brands that you enjoy, so some website that you are purchasing from, and just take a look at what they’re doing and try to see what is it that website, what’s appealing on that website to you? So have a think about that as well.

Jana Maljic
And then we have the headlines and the copy. Does the copy look inviting rather than intimidating? Are you using a simple language? So this is often the case with lead gen businesses, that they are just over complicating things. So I know you know what your business is about, and I know you want to sound professional, but in some cases, you need to just simplify it. Make it as easiest as possible for a customer who is seeing your website for the first time and they have no idea what you’re selling and what are you talking about, just make it as easiest as possible for them to understand.

Jana Maljic
And if you’re not sure you’re doing a good job, it’s always a great idea to ask someone like your friend, someone from your family, a neighbour, and just show them your website, show them your headlines, show them your copy and ask them if understand what is being said here.

Jana Maljic
Another thing copy is important for is, especially for PPC campaigns if you’re running, for example, search campaigns, you need to make sure your copy on the website includes the keywords and it just makes sense with the ad you are showing. That’s important not only for the customer and their journey, but also for, for example, for Google search ads especially. It’s because your keywords need to be shown on the landing page because Google is ranking your search ad based in the keyword relevancy, so this is another thing you to make sure that your keywords are included in your landing page. So yeah, just another really, really important thing.

Jana Maljic
Then we have branding and colour scheme. Obviously, you want to make sure, especially for ads, that whatever ads you’re serving, you didn’t just make up the design, it falls within your branding and your scheme and that your entire page is really on brand and consistent. So for example, if you’re advertising on a visual platform, such as Facebook or Pinterest or LinkedIn, you want to make sure that however your ad looks like, that the same look and feel is found on the website so the user is not really surprised when they land on your website and like, hey, where am I now? It needs to be a cohesive experience.

Jana Maljic
Use of images and videos. This is something I already mentioned with the target audience, so make sure your target audience, if you’re a eCommerce store, they see themselves, they see the product usage. One interesting thing to mention is that for example, for eCommerce stores, make sure whatever product you’re selling, whether that’s a clothing item or any other item, that you have multiple pictures from multiple angles, that you have maybe a video. If it’s some product that people need to use, showcase all the elements, create a little video, show how it’s used, show that in action, make it…

Jana Maljic
You are skipping the part. So people, when they’re purchasing online, you’re skipping the part where, for example, for clothing, you’re skipping the part where they can try it on. So how would they know how this looks on them if they don’t see it? And same goes for any other like tool or anything else you would sell. So they need to know how does it look like. Give as many images as possible, give infographics if it’s a really complicated product, create videos.

Jana Maljic
So this goes for B2B as well. Just imagine that your website is like, let’s say in person, you would be on a trade show and you would have your stand and you would have your product, whether that’s a software or anything else, and people will get to touch it, to use it, to see it in action, and just imagine your website being your stand and you, your salesperson. Just imagine your website as a salesperson and everything else you would say to your potential target audience in person live, just imagine that your website needs to show and tell everything about your product or services if that’s a service.

Jana Maljic
Then we have credibility devices, which is also really, really, really super important element because you know how people are. I am like that. I’m sure yourself, you are also like that. Your friend, your family member recommends a product service, obviously you’re going to choose that one over some other which no one recommended. Same goes for websites. So your landing page needs to have credibility devices. You need to have testimonials. You need to have some qualifications or credentials, so any, if you’re a B2B business, any previous customers that you served, you can put their logos on your website or their testimonials, and if you have any other reviews like Google reviews or Trustpilot reviews, you need to put that on the website. So you need to say to people, okay, I’ve sold this already. People love me. Buy from me. This is what they think. Just make your new audience trust you and your product and service.

Jana Maljic
And the last thing that we have here is urgency devices, which is something you might see around, maybe not so often, but yeah, some websites do use it. I think you’re also familiar with booking.com. So when you’re checking for apartments or hotels at booking.com, you will always notice that you have this thing saying X number of people are looking at this apartment right now, and this is one of those urgency devices. So this is something that gives you the idea of like, oh my God, I need to book this soon. Otherwise, it’s going to be booked and I’ll be left out of the apartment. So this is one of those things that just like psychologically impact your audience and they want to purchase from you straight away.

Jana Maljic
I think I have a few examples here, so let me just show you. Okay. So the example on the left is the Casper mattress. And as you can see all the way down, they have the testimonial, they have the image, and then on the right, we see the urgency device, which is a countdown. This is great if you have a special offer, a discount that lasts for only like 24, 48 hours or something like that, and then when the user comes on your website, they see this countdown and it really creates that urgency, and if they’re thinking about purchasing it, they’re going to purchase it really, really soon, so have a think about that.

Jana Maljic
The next reason we have… [inaudible 00:20:26]. Apologies. Okay. Reason number three is that your website is not mobile-friendly. And I don’t just mean here that your website needs to have responsive design and be mobile optimised and all that. It needs to be easy to navigate it on the mobile, so your fonts need to be readable, your buttons need to be clickable. It needs to be fast. It just needs to be easy because not every responsive design is really easy to navigate on mobile. It can maybe look good, but I need to, even though it looks good, maybe I need to scroll for like 10 hours to get to the bottom of the page or something like that, so make sure that it’s really mobile optimised. You have also a mobile-friendly test from Google. Just Google that and find it. I will not spend too much time talking about this because it’s honestly not my, it’s mostly devs work. That’s something worth mentioning.

Jana Maljic
Another reason is that your website is maybe too slow. So according to a Google study, 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load. So we all know 21st century, we are all super, super, we’re living really, really fast and we don’t have the time or the patience to wait for one website to be loaded for like five minutes. It’s just not the way today’s world works, and you need to make sure that your website is fast. There’s also a website speed test from Google you can take. Just Google that, and you can just put the link from your website and it will give you a short list of like things you can improve.

Jana Maljic
And then we have reason number five, your budget or bidding is too low. So whether you are doing your ads on Google or Facebook or LinkedIn or anything, any other platform, it could be the case that your campaigns are not working just because your bidding or budget is too low. So sometimes we see the case that for example, on Google ads, you didn’t actually do your keyword research, but you rather sort of came up with the keywords from your head, even though you do have some tools that you can use such as Keyword Planner from Google, and you set the budget just from the top of your head, like I’m going to do five pounds for this keyword. And it could be the reason that it’s just too low and that your ads are not serving because of that.

Jana Maljic
And this is something you can always correct by manually adjusting the budget, but like I said, there is this tool called Keyword Planner in your Google ads. Use it. It’s very, very simple. You’re just typing out the keywords you want to bid for and it’s going to give you a search volume and forecast of the average cost per click, and then you can make sure that you are building high enough.

Jana Maljic
And then for example, on Facebook, maybe if you started running Facebook ads and you see this information and warning that says learning limited, it’s probably because your ad set has a very low amount of budget and then it cannot optimise for the objective that you set out to optimise, and then it just, the algorithm is like not getting enough information, and then the algorithms learning is not capable of performance. So try increasing your budget. Try testing that for at least like two or three weeks and see what happens. I know it’s a scary thing to increase the budget, especially if you’re like on a limited budget or something, but try and increasing it for at least like two or three weeks a month if you can and just see what happens there, and then you can, once you have your data and once you have like the first initial performance, you can see if it makes sense to invest in Facebook, Google, Pinterest, any other platform.

Jana Maljic
But if you are too scared to increase that budget, if you’re just doing the ads with like 10 pounds per day and not willing to increase, you will just keep spending like budget for no reason. So it’s best to maybe increase it for a while and then see what happens and then make a decision if it’s something that is worth your investment and time or not.

Jana Maljic
Moving on to reason number six. Your audience is too broad or narrow. This is mostly for Facebook ads because you have the options to choose like the targeting based on your interest and demographics, and sometimes people go too narrow. I see this many times when I’m auditing Facebook accounts. They’re thinking to themselves, okay, I’m selling, I don’t know, I’m selling a certain type of product, like for vegans. I’m just going to go for interest in veganism, et cetera, et cetera.

Jana Maljic
But try and giving Facebook’s algorithm a space to breathe and a space to find the audience by itself. They do give these options of like the interest-based targeting, which is fine and it’s worth testing, but it’s also worth testing having your audience a bit broader and just giving, because those algorithms, Facebook and Google, they’re spending thousands of dollars into those algorithms, so they’re really, really, really smart. They’re smarter than us and they will know by themselves to reach people they need to serve the ads without us just limiting their hands with this. So just try it, test it, give it a bit of, go broader.

Jana Maljic
If you’re a local business, I would definitely suggest keep your targeting within your location and go broader, but if you’re like a product that could be of interest of like a lot of people, if you’re a clothing brand, you don’t need to select, for example, fashion or clothing as an interest because we all wear clothes, so it doesn’t maybe have to be something like that of an interest. Maybe just try and keep it broad and see what happens.

Jana Maljic
Okay. I think I talked about this. Reason number seven is that your account is poorly structured. This is mostly the thing we see happening on Google, but it can happen on Facebook as well, that your account is poorly structured, but I will cover that with another reason. So this is like, for one example, here you have the best way to set up your campaigns is that have a look at your website, and if your website is structured well, which it should be, so please don’t waste your money on advertising if your website is not structured well, and then group campaigns by your website layout.

Jana Maljic
So for example, on your website, you would obviously have some product categories and then product and then landing pages for certain product categories and products, et cetera, and you want to do that on Google ads as well. So if you structuring, let’s say search campaigns, and let’s say you’re selling office furniture, one campaign would be office chairs. And then in ad group one, and then in ad group two, you would have different segmentation of those office chairs. Ad group one can be leather chairs. Ad group two can be, for example, ergonomic chairs, or white chairs, or I don’t know, wooden chairs, any other chairs. So make sure that you’re just structuring your campaigns and ad groups really nicely so that each of your keyword is connected to the ad group.

Jana Maljic
We see often that some people, some businesses choose to just put like 10 keywords in one ad group and have lots of different products in it, which just it’s impossible for your campaigns to work well, because what will happen is that you will have ad copy promoting, let’s say those chairs, but it’s not something…

Jana Maljic
If I’m searching for leather chairs, then I want to have the ad shown to me that is promoting leather chairs, and then when I click on it, I want to go to a landing page that is a product category of the leather chairs. So don’t mix everything up in one ad group. This is a common mistake. And one other thing, because I’m talking about segmentation, is that don’t segment it too much. So don’t go too narrow because what you need to have is that you need to have a search volume.

Jana Maljic
So yeah, my example with the leather chair, that could be the case if you’re a office furniture who sells, I don’t know, in the entire US, and then it makes sense because probably the search volume for leather office chairs is quite big there, but if you’re a local business and you’re just promoting in one certain city or something, then you don’t want to go so segmented. This is where you will use the keyword planner and you will see the search volumes and you will see the trends, and then based on that, you will make a decision whether or not you do have enough search volume to have the keyword segmented all the way down to the leather office chair.

Jana Maljic
Okay, moving on we have the reason number eight. Your campaign settings have mistakes. I know this sounds like, okay, I probably set it up correctly. These are just settings, basic settings, but you cannot believe how many times the settings can be set up just like wrongly, and it’s such a basic step that we all think it’s super, super easy and intuitive, but it actually happens many times, so double, triple check your campaign settings. Make sure everything is correctly before you start your campaign. Make sure location is the one you want it to be. Make sure you included the location you want to serve ads for, not exclude it. This can also happen, and it happened too many times. Make sure your bidding strategy you’re using is correct. Don’t use some smart bidding strategies just because you think, okay, Google is smart and I’m going to beat my competition, because smart bidding strategies work but they work after you get a certain amount of data to your account. They work when you have great conversion tracking set up data.

Jana Maljic
They don’t work from start, like okay, you’re a brand new account and you turn on the smart bidding and it works. It doesn’t. So make sure all your settings is correct and it’s aligned with your business goals.

Jana Maljic
Reason number nine. Your ad copy is too blend. So it can happen that you did your campaign structure, you set it up nicely, your clickthrough rate, you wrote your ads and it’s… This is not where I wanted to go. Oh, it’s too bland. Okay. Sorry.

Jana Maljic
So take a look at your clickthrough rate. Often people ask us, what is a good clickthrough rate? It’s not a fixed answer. It’s not something I can tell you, like 2% is a good clickthrough rate or 5%. It really, really, really depends on your industry, on your business. Which location are you targeting? What is the competition? There’s so many factors that affect your clickthrough rate. But what you can do as a benchmark is that you can find your industry benchmark, and then you can see if it’s really, really, really, really below your industry benchmark. And then what you need to do is you need to revisit your ad copy. You need to make sure that your keyword are included in the headlines and descriptions. You need to make sure that your unique selling points are in the ad copy.

Jana Maljic
And you also just need to make sure that you’re saying all the right things to sort of attract your customer, but also to disqualify your customer. So people are often focused on like writing the ad copy to make it like super attractive, but then just remember that you’re paying for the clicks. So for example, if you’re selling something that is a bit more expensive and someone is looking for like a cheaper version of your product, I’m going to go back to the example with the office chairs just because my head is not capable of coming up with something else at the moment.

Jana Maljic
Okay. Let’s say you’re selling the office chairs, but you have a really high quality office chair, and they’re a bit pricier, high quality, but pricier, and you might want to include the price in the ad copy. So chairs from 500 pounds or something like that, because if I’m searching for a cheap office chair, you don’t want to pay for the click for someone who’s searching for the cheap office shares. You want to eliminate them before they click on your ad, because you’re just spending money to get people on your website who are not interested in the thing you’re offering. So make sure you’re also disqualifying audience that is not for you.

Jana Maljic
Okay. Reason number 10. I need some water. Your ad creative is bad. Okay. So what to say here. In this ever changing fast-pacing world, we are constantly scrolling and being bombarded with like 10 thousands of ads per day, and yeah, it’s just too much of everything and I think our attention is really starting to decline.

Jana Maljic
And how would you even… Like people spend so much time, for example, thinking about this cool ad copy for their Facebook ad and what will be included inside and everything, but then it comes to the situation where user is not even stopping to read the super cool ad copy you’ve created, so you want to make sure that your ad will stand out. You want to make sure that you’re just stopping the scrolling and grabbing that attention, and how do you do that? Obviously it’s super, super hard and I can imagine right now you’re thinking, well, where do I start? And it can be quite hard to think of something that is eye-catching in this super, super crowded world, but where you can start.

Jana Maljic
You can start by looking at, obviously if you decided to advertise on Facebook ads for example, you obviously have your Facebook profile. Have a look at your posts and which type of post got the most engagement, the most comments, the most likes or shares, and maybe try creating an ad around something like that. You can also use Facebook ads library as an inspiration. You can check what your competitors are doing at the moment, what type of ads are they they using.

Jana Maljic
And one other thing that I love doing is that whenever you see an ad, that caught your attention, so you’re scrolling in your free time and you see an image or video ad, any type of ad that made you stop scrolling, take a screenshot, take a screen recording and think about what is it that made you stop scrolling and try to replicate, steal those tactics in creating your own ad. And yeah, that’s a great way to get inspired.

Jana Maljic
I have an example here of one ad that I screen recorded this, but you can also I think find in the Facebook ads library when searching for Nuud Care. This is a vegan-free deodorant. So basically this woman just starts dancing and then you see all these cool, unique selling points, which is very, very interesting for the user to see. It’s vegan. It’s cruelty-free. It’s no aluminium, no parabens, et cetera, et cetera. And those USPs just fly inside and she continues dancing. And then she takes the product and it’s a deodorant, so she puts it in her arm pit and then have fresh outfits worldwide, this is their tagline, at the end. It’s very short. It’s very snappy. It’s very fast, and it has this cool orange background, which just made me stop and stare.

Jana Maljic
And you will notice. Yeah, obviously they’re not just showing an arm pit and they’re not just showing the deodorant, they’re showing the person as well, which is another good thing to think about is that when you’re advertising on social media, try and use people as much as possible in your ads, just because people go to social media to interact with other people, and this is something they expect to see. They don’t want to see some polished sponsored ad or something like that. So yeah, I think this is a great ad and there are so many ways to get inspired.

Jana Maljic
Reason number 11 is that you have the wrong campaign objective. What do I mean by that? This is especially, on Facebook, it can happen often. So if you have advertised on Facebook before, you’re probably familiar with the campaign objectives. You have the brand awareness objectives, the reach, traffic, engagement, page likes, video views, messages, and then you have conversion objectives, which is conversions, scale of sales, et cetera, et cetera. So Facebook is great with offering these objectives, but you need to make sure what your goal is with your campaign.

Jana Maljic
So we see this too many times when auditing Facebook ads campaign is that businesses are using traffic objective because they want to get as many people to the website, obviously, but they’re using this objective when they want people to purchase, but this is not something Facebook will optimise for. If you want to get people to your website and you use the traffic objective, this is what a Facebook will do. It’s very simple. They will bring traffic to your website, but it doesn’t mean they will bring traffic and people that are willing to convert. It just means they will bring traffic and people that are willing to come to your website.

Jana Maljic
You need to use conversion objective and set your event for purchase, for example. And then you need to use that campaign objective if you want people to purchase. So obviously in many cases, you cannot just use conversion objective because obviously you want purchases and you’re just going to use purchases as objective, and you’re going to get tonnes of sales, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn’t work like that.

Jana Maljic
You need to segment your campaigns and you need to segment your audience and just funnel everything out. The first time you’re advertising to someone, to a very, very cold audience, you might want to use the awareness objective or the traffic objective, where you will just showcase your brand, showcase your product or service or anything your offering, and then that audience will visit your website who maybe interacted with your ad, like liked and commented or anything else, you want to retarget that audience, because they’ve seen your website. They’ve seen your product. They’re a little bit more familiar with your brand. You want to retarget those with the conversion objective campaign and get them back to purchase. Not many people will purchase on the first time they interact with you. So have a think about that and make sure you’re using the right campaign objective.

Jana Maljic
Reason number 12. Are you considering external factors? This is interesting one because we saw it recently with the COVID-19 pandemic is that a lot of businesses actually increased their sales. Why? People were home. They were bored. They started purchasing, I don’t know, things like whatever they wanted to purchase, whether that’s a clothing item or something else. If you’re offering like courses, they were bored at home, they were close. They were purchasing courses for many different things, I don’t know, language courses, these type of courses, do it yourself, whatever.

Jana Maljic
If you are a restaurant, maybe you saw an increase in your takeaways. So don’t just, when you’re evaluating your business and your performance, don’t just think about, okay, last month was really great and this month I want to do better, or last year was really, really great with sales and next year I want to do better, because maybe it’s not applicative in every situation.

Jana Maljic
If you were doing really, really great during the COVID pandemic, I’m happy for you. It’s good that you took advantage of the situation and you increased your sales during that year, but it’s a very, very specific year. It’s not going to happen again. And when you’re comparing your performance month to month, week to week, year to year, just make sure you’re taking all those external factors into consideration, and don’t compare apples to oranges. Just make sure you’re comparing reasonably and you need to make sure if you have, take a look at your analytics and your data, if you have some sort of seasonality changes, people are buying more during summer or during winter or et cetera, et cetera, and just adjust your effort and your budget and your goals accordingly.

Jana Maljic
So if you see that during springtime, your sales is off the roof, okay, invest a little bit more budget during springtime. Take advantage of that seasonality, and then save up some budget during summertime, if it’s a slow period for you know, et cetera.

Jana Maljic
And not only that, but like consumer buying habits, this is something that is changing from year to year. People are not buying today in the same way they were buying five years ago. So make sure you’re like on the top of the trends of how people buy, what do they want to see in your website, what you can offer to them that is like in the 2020 year that we’re in. So have a really large thought about that. It’s something that I see often, but in some cases, it’s not being considered, it’s not being discussed about.

Jana Maljic
Okay. Reason number 13. Is your offer actually good? I saved the best reason for last. Make sure that whatever your offer is, it’s aligned with your customer expectations. So don’t expect, let’s say… I’m taking clothing brands today a lot, but okay.

Jana Maljic
You created your own little clothing brand and it’s great. It’s something that, I don’t know, it’s sustainable. It’s something your customers don’t have, et cetera, et cetera, your competitors don’t have, or maybe they do, but you have so many brands out there. You cannot just come to the market and just like offer, I don’t know, something for 100 pounds, whereas your competitors are offering the same product for like 50 pounds. How do you compete? If I’m going to purchase something that you’re offering for 100 pounds and your competitor is offering for 50 pounds, why would I do that? What makes you different? What makes you stand out?

Jana Maljic
Find that thing that makes you different, whether you’re selling a product or a service is just, you need to make sure that whatever it is that you’re offering, the price is something that the customers expect or the service is something that customers expect.

Jana Maljic
So maybe you cannot lower down the price, or maybe you cannot provide that 10% discount offer for the first time purchase or something, but what you can do is maybe provide a really, really fast delivery. If you are a software as a service, maybe you can provide a really, really amazing 24/7 support. So anything that you can offer to your customers that will make you stand out, that will make you different, you need to do that. You need to give them something. Make sure that your offer is aligned with 21st century customer expectation, whether that is a B2B or a B2C product or service. I think we are done. Here’s the questions and answer side, and I can take some of your questions now, but I think I will need help from Jess too.

Jess Percival
Yes, that is absolutely fine. Yeah. Feel free to leave your questions in the chat. And as I said before, if you leave a question, you’ll be entered in with a chance to win a copy, a physical copy of How To Get To The Top Of Google, which is our best-selling book. This is a 2022 edition, but if you can’t wait that long and you don’t want to worry about losing the giveaway let’s say, you can actually download the e-book version for free in the description. And also don’t forget to hit like on this video if you’ve learnt something new from the wonderful Janna today, and also double check your subscribe, because this is a whole new channel, and I think we’re at 98 subscribers so it’d be nice to hit a 100 today.

Jess Percival
So yeah, thank you so much, Jana. I’ll give you a couple of moments to give your voice a break.

Jana Maljic
Yes.

Jess Percival
Because you worked super hard there. So this first question, I wasn’t quite sure of the wording, but what I think it means is if you’re already doing pretty well with SEO, why should you run a PPC campaign as well? What’s the point, I guess is the question?

Jana Maljic
Okay, this really depends. So PPC might not be needed for your business if you’re ranking really, really well in SEO. This can be potentially good for local businesses because there’s not maybe so much competition. So if you’re ranking well on SEO for the keywords you want to rank well, I would say just don’t spend that money on PPC. It’s not a mandatory thing.

Jana Maljic
Businesses are using PPC because they’re probably not ranking well for their products or services organically, and this is the reason why they’re using PPC for a certain time period, because SEO, it’s a more of a long-term investment and you need so much time to see the results, so PPC is sort of like a faster way.

Jana Maljic
Another thing I would say, why you can use PPC is that even if you’re ranking well organically, maybe you have a special offer, like a Black Friday offer or anything else, you want to showcase that discount, whether that’s on Google search ads or Facebook ads, any type of ads, not just maybe a special offer. Maybe you have a new product, maybe you have a new service and you want to advertise that to people because how will they know? So think about all the other ways that PPC is important for you. And yes, results are faster with PPC. That’s also correct, Paul

Jess Percival
Yes, that was a really good answer. And something else that I’ve noticed as well, sorry if you answered this when I was looking at the comments and I just wasn’t quite listening, but sometimes you can be ranking number one for a search term and your competitors maybe bid on that search term so they can beat your number one spot using that ad spot. So you might, even if you’re on like, let’s say your company name is Thinkplus for instance, and somebody else is running ads on that keyword, you could also run ads on that keyword to like make sure that you’re absolutely in the top spot. So that’s another thing that could be quite important.

Jana Maljic
Yes. I agree. That’s another thing, especially because if you’re really, really strong as a brand, competitors might be bidding even in your brand name, and obviously organically, your brand name will be ranking among the top, but maybe you want to beat your competition. So there’s many, many cases and scenarios when you would still want to use PPC.

Jess Percival
Absolutely. Absolutely. And like you said, if you’ve got an offer or like a new product or something that you want to let people know about that they might not know about yet, then that’s a fantastic way to use PPC. So I’ve got quite a long question from Tortoise Property, but I think it’s a very, very good one. So Tortoise Property, is a property, a state… What is it that you do Tortoise Property? It’s to do with housing, and there’s like, it’s a special category now that Facebook has changed, so Tortoise Property can no longer target postcodes despite being based in a specific area. So would you have any recommendations considering they can’t target their audiences now due to the limitations on things like postcodes, even though they’re very much a business who just has restrictions?

Jana Maljic
Okay. So you might not have the option to target based on postal, but can you target based on your city? It might be the case that they’re located in London and not serving in the entire London I can imagine, because London is just very, very big, but I think even in London, there are some areas you can select, you can pinpoint. On Google or on Facebook, there’s option to pinpoint your location, so even if you can’t use a postcode, you can pinpoint your location and select the radius. So yeah, that’s also one option you can try.

Jess Percival
Very good. Yeah. I know there was, it impacted quite a lot of businesses when they made those changes, but I suppose they were trying to keep the consumer in minds and stuff, but I can understand why that’s frustrating. So I had a question from Kelvin who asked, regarding audiences being too narrow, how narrow is too narrow and how broad is too broad? Is there really a benchmark or is it nearly impossible to tell from business to business?

Jana Maljic
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I would say, yeah, there’s no like specific benchmark, but according to my experience, like I would say anything, it obviously depends on your location and your type of business and all that, but I would say anything below 20,000 people, because on Facebook, when you select your audience, you have on the right side, you have like the prediction of how many people you will reach, and I think you have the same thing for Google.

Jana Maljic
So I would say anything less than 20,000 people or 30, 50,000 people is too narrow. And then broad, well, you cannot go too broad just because you can always have multiple ad sets and multiple audiences tested, so there are some cases when we select the audience, as it says, the audience reaches 2 million, and I don’t care that the audience reaches potentially 2 million because the algorithm, when it starts getting data, it’s not going to serve the ads to the entire 2 million. It’s going to serve the ads to the people that are the most relevant. So don’t think about audience being too broad. That’s fine. In any case, you will test the narrow version of the audience and the broad version and you will see the results, so go ahead, go broad.

Jess Percival
Yeah. That’s a really good answer. That definitely makes a lot of sense. Phil has asked, what should you do if your PPC is generating leads, but not quite the right kind of leads?

Jana Maljic
Well, this is a great question as well. This happens many times. Well, it depends. So whether it’s something you can do to improve in your landing page, because where are you generating those leads? Obviously someone came to your website and they read some stuff there and they decided to convert.

Jana Maljic
So make sure the information you have on your landing page is something that only your qualified and right kind of leads would convert. And if you are using a lead gen type of a campaign on Facebook, when you are getting those leads on Facebook itself for example, also make sure that in the ad you are mentioning all the things you want to qualify or disqualify your audience. This comes back to the thing I was mentioning before. So when it comes to pricing, if your pricing is a bit too high, make sure that they know the pricing is high because you don’t want to pay for leads that will just end up not converting later on.

Jana Maljic
Same goes for any other thing you’re offering. If you like a location-based service, make sure they know, because I see this many times in search ads, for example, you are a local business and then you’re advertising for, let’s say Invisalign. You’re a dental studio, and you’re only, you’re located in a certain, I don’t know, city like London any other area, and you’re paying for the keyword Invisalign, but you might want to pay for the keyword Invisalign near me or Invisalign London or something like that that makes you… And you want to have this in your ad as well, your location, because we see it many times that local services, they’re going to advertise in certain keywords and their ads will appear, but it’s like, the location is totally wrong. It’s not something the customer was searching for. So have a think about everything you’re communicating out to your audience and make sure that it’s something that either qualifies them or disqualifies them.

Jess Percival
Fantastic. Yeah. There’s so many different things that can lead to the leads, lead to the leads not quite being right. This is quite a nice question from Vladimir. Starts off by saying great lecture. And also just asked, how would you go about looking for a junior position, for instance, for PPC, if you were trying to get a job in PPC? What would your advice be, Jana?

Jana Maljic
Thank you Vladimir first, and I’m not sure if he’s asking where he will find, where he will search for the positions or how can he learn about Google ads?

Jess Percival
I think maybe how you can learn and the kind of skills that employers are looking for when it comes to PPC.

Jana Maljic
Okay. So how you can learn, obviously by watching YouTube videos, such as this one, but there are also many other PPC experts. I even watch them myself. So people that are experts in their field. You have lots of courses as well, but I tend to watch YouTube videos and read articles just because courses can be a bit outdated. By the time you start selling the course, the information has changed because it’s a fast-changing world. So follow some experts, read the articles, the newest articles about the newest trends. And in the beginning, if you’re looking for a job, don’t be afraid to volunteer somewhere and just work for free. I started advertising for my friends at first, and then I moved on from there because I needed the experience, so yeah.

Jess Percival
Yeah. That’s a really great answer. I think some of the other things I would say as well is even though Google and Facebook both offer their own courses for their own ad platforms, it’s so different when you actually get hands-on with it. It just feels totally, totally different. And so, as Vladimir said, they are managing a small account for a business, so that really helps that you’ve got started with that.

Jess Percival
But yeah, I’d say, think about both those things and don’t be afraid to join like Facebook communities or Reddit communities of people who work in the industry, because people are always happy to offer you advice and help you out if you need it. So, yeah. Lovely.

Jess Percival
Thank you so much, Jana. This has been an absolutely fantastic talk.