Manufacturer PPC Agency

Tips for Managing PPC for Manufacturers

Our team of paid advertising professionals is knowledgeable in the latest PPC trends for manufacturers and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of paid ads, you'll find keyword research for manufacturers mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, search ads only show up based on what your manufacturing company targets on Google or Bing.

If you are searching for a manufacturing company in your city, you might search "nearby manufacturer" on Google. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the manufacturing company wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? The solution would require keyword research.

The next steps might involve the paid advertising manager discussing with the manufacturing company about what types of products / services they want to target more often and within what geographic areas. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

Suppose the PPC manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby manufacturing companies" or even "manufacturer services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.

Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more customers.

For example, someone searching for "free services from manufacturing companies" or "how to advertise to manufacturers" isn't likely to convert with your manufacturing company. However, they might see your paid advertising if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

Even if your keyword research needs are obvious when you start building out your campaign, they become more complex as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

Audience research is often mentioned as part of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram for manufacturer paid advertising campaigns. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

Let's go over a little history on audience research and targeting within the Facebook Ads platform.

In years past, manufacturer-focused paid ads managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers for manufacturing companies eagerly took advantage of.

The rise of data privacy and machine learning had a significant impact on custom audiences over time.

In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad firms for manufacturers. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

Though there will still be plenty of manufacturing company PPC advertising companies using custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

Interested in another take on audience targeting? Social Media Examiner's blog article does a good job of explaining recent changes.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within manufacturer ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements for manufacturers.

Our first step when managing paid advertising campaigns for manufacturing companies involves reviewing the landing pages for best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Does the headline focus on benefits?
• Is there an image above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• What is the visibility of the call to action?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is social proof present?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on PPC advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! If you want to create an effective landing page, you should never consider it finished. You can refine your sales pitch by running A/B tests on the landing page every few months.

4.) Conversion Funnel Tips

You might consider building out one or more sales funnels instead of a landing page. Our lead generation, email marketing, and even online purchases are heavily dependent upon sales funnels.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their internet advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. These are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• Lead magnets provided health and fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peeks in exchange for email addresses.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your manufacturing company isn't limited to only these options. Keep in mind that these tools can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product, building an email list, and selling online.

5.) Conversion Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid ads, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most manufacturing companies, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a PPC advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for manufacturers, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out attractive ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Manufacturing Company PPC Management

If you want us to dedicate more time to your campaigns, the price of our paid ads management services will be adjusted accordingly. The price for our PPC ads management packages begins at the amount provided in the list below, but we are willing to consider a higher budget if your ad spend or service requirements are greater.

Types of Paid Ads for Manufacturing Companies

For manufacturing companies, there are many ways to run paid ads. manufacturing companies definitely use paid advertising. Let's take a look at some of the most common ones.

1.) Local Business Ads

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your manufacturing company. Depending on the nature of your local manufacturing company, you may find better success in one platform versus another. You should try out every option available to see which suits you best. Let's talk about a few nearby advertising choices.

From Google, you'll have two options.

The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. This is a very dynamic ad campaign type which utilizes multiple headlines, images, videos, and service locations to allow the Google algorithm to find the best combination of assets to bring you customers. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. As a pay-per-lead platform, Google Local Service Ads charges a flat fee per lead. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.

Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in the area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of manufacturing companies.

2.) Social Media Ads

A social media ad is pretty much any online advertisement you see on a social networking site.

The trick to social media marketing is keeping the ad creatives fresh. The performance of your campaign will gradually decline if you do not rotate your ad creatives every couple of weeks. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative updates.

The best part of social media ads is you can target audiences that have never thought of your product or service, or perhaps just aren't thinking about it now. When running search engine ads, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively looking for what your manufacturing company offers.

However, this benefit can also be a curse, since conversion rates are typically lower when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Advertising

You'll want to invest in search ads if you know people are looking online for the products you offer.

Some people refer to this as manufacturer Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

If you've been running search advertising on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local area news stations), gossip websites, and more.

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your manufacturing company website, landing page, or sales funnel.

Retargeting ads are almost always recommended to help bring people back to your website after they have weighed their options.

You can run retargeting ads on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.

6.) Shopping Ads

It was Google Shopping Campaigns that popularized this form of search advertising.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your manufacturing company.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. Then, your products will be displayed at the top of search results based on the right types of search queries.

7.) Video Ads

Social networking websites such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube allow you to advertise with video.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. It's not unusual for us to use video ads for product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

Your manufacturing company paid ads campaigns should definitely incorporate video creatives if you have the budget to support them.