Birmingham PPC Agency

What is Birmingham, AL PPC Management?

The act of creating and optimizing Birmingham paid advertising campaigns is known as PPC management. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

To provide professional PPC management, a paid ads agency for Birmingham often starts by getting to know your company and its business model. Since the way you approach paid advertising for a local Birmingham business is much different than how you would for an ecommerce brand, this information helps determine the next steps.

For example, local Birmingham service providers are often only interested in qualified leads. In order to accomplish this, paid advertising can drive traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. Start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those digital assets don't yet exist or need to be substantially improved.

Alternatively, ecommerce brands tend to be interested in online sales. Pay-per-click advertising can be used to drive traffic to an optimized product or category page. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense in some cases. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

To optimize and scale Birmingham PPC, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For paid advertising to be effective, most Birmingham paid ad agencies will implement email collection strategies, such as squeeze pages or lead magnets. To better understand ad attribution and reporting, it makes sense to integrate with Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam. For that to make sense though, your ad spend should be over $1,000/month.

To be successful with paid advertising, your Birmingham business should utilize multiple advertising strategies and marketing tools. For example, the best Birmingham paid advertising services will include tactics to:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social media channels, and third-party websites.
• Make your Birmingham business more profitable by acquiring qualified leads or selling online.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
• Test the effectiveness of different ad creatives across different media and ad placements.

In addition to managing Birmingham-area PPC campaigns, our team also offers Auburn, Decatur, Dothan, Florence, Huntsville, Mobile, Montgomery, and Tuscaloosa small businesses and large corporations a professional PPC management service.

How Paid Advertising Helps Birmingham, AL Businesses

The most obvious benefit of Birmingham paid advertising is the near instant increase in traffic it provides.

Whether a traffic increase results in higher conversions depends on your ads, landing pages, and business model.

The first recommendation we offer to Birmingham businesses interested in running paid advertising is to start slowly.

Make sure you have realistic goals, a working sales funnel, and the ability to gather actionable data before diving into paid advertising or scaling your ad campaigns.

If you run into trouble getting the conversions you were expecting, don't blame Facebook or Google. It is usually the creatives, campaign settings, or sales process that is the problem.

Birmingham companies can benefit greatly from the addition of paid advertising to their digital marketing strategy strategy when everything comes together. Remember, more traffic doesn't always mean more conversions!

Types of Paid Ads for Birmingham, AL PPC Campaigns

There are numerous ways to run paid advertising for your Birmingham business. Let's discuss some of the most common paid ads being run within various business industries in Birmingham.

Local Ads throughout Birmingham

Local ads for your Birmingham business can be run through nearly any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your local Birmingham business, you may find better success in one platform versus another. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Here are a few options for local advertising.

From Google, you'll have two options.

In the first case, you can run traditional Google Ads, possibly using the newer Performance Max campaign type. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers in Birmingham. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals in Birmingham. Even local stores use this campaign type.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. Using Local Service Ads, you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform generates. Plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers in Birmingham often use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local Birmingham area. This is a little more straightforward, since it really just involves setting up a campaign that has ad sets with geographic restrictions to Birmingham as a city, or specific Birmingham ZIP codes. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of Birmingham business industries.

Social Ads throughout Birmingham

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network site is going to qualify as a social media ad.

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social ads. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. A weekly change in ad creative is often recommended for higher-spend ad campaigns.

Using social ads allows you to reach audiences who have never thought of your product or service, or aren't thinking about it right now. The opposite is true when you run search ads since your ads will only show when someone is actively looking for what your Birmingham business has to offer.

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

Search Ads within Birmingham

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 Birmingham Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. This is just a different way of explaining search ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine.

If you've been running search ads 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.

Display Ads throughout Birmingham

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

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different sizes. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you generate results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

Retargeting Ads throughout Birmingham

Your Birmingham website, landing page, or sales funnel won't convert everyone on the first visit.

To help people return to your site after they've thought through various options, retargeting ads are almost always recommended.

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

Shopping Ads for Birmingham Ecommerce Businesses

Google Shopping Campaigns popularized this type of search ad.

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 Birmingham storefront.

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

Video Ads throughout Birmingham

You can run video ads on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other social networking websites.

Using Google Ads, you can run YouTube Ads by creating a video ads campaign or performance max campaign.

It's necessary to have a working Facebook Ads account to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.

Video is an excellent ad creative in terms of conversion opportunities. Video ads are frequently used to showcase product launches, custom services, and personal introductions.

Your Birmingham paid advertising campaigns should definitely incorporate video creatives if you have the budget to support them.

Birmingham, AL PPC Management Services

We are a team of paid advertising specialists with extensive knowledge in the latest PPC trends for Birmingham local businesses. Take advantage of our experience across dozens of business industries to help drive traffic and conversions to your Birmingham digital assets.

Keyword Research

In the context of paid advertising, keyword research largely relates to Google Ads and Bing Ads search campaigns. After all, search ads only show up based on what is searched on Google or Bing.

A search for "Birmingham Roofer" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a roofing company in Birmingham. Targeting that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research for that Birmingham roofing company's paid ads manager.

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the Birmingham roofing company wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? Researching keywords would be necessary for the solution.

Typically, the paid ads manager will discuss with the Birmingham roofing company what types of services to target more often. A broader keyword targeting strategy than exact matches might also be necessary.

Suppose the Alabama PPC manager discovers that there is a high traffic volume for "Mountain Brook, AL roofers" or even "Birmingham roof repair." The first phrase targets a location nearby Birmingham that might still be within the company's service area. If the repair work is extensive, the second phrase might result in a more lucrative roof replacement project.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. These are used to stop your paid ads from showing in search queries that you know won't produce conversions.

For example, someone looking for "free roof repair companies" or "how to advertise to roofing contractors" isn't likely to purchase a roof replacement service. They might see your paid ads if you use broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

Audience Research

In Birmingham paid advertising campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. However, Bing Ads and Google Ads also allow audience targeting.

Let's take a look at audience research and targeting within Facebook Ads.

Facebook custom audiences were heavily relied upon by Birmingham's paid advertising managers in the past. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers in Birmingham eagerly took advantage of.

A number of factors, including data privacy and machine learning, have had an 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. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most Birmingham ad agencies. 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 Birmingham paid ads agencies using custom audiences, it is clear 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.

However, audience research and targeting aren't going away. The targeting options within Birmingham ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

Optimizing Landing Pages

An important factor in the success of your Birmingham paid advertising campaign is the landing page.

We begin by examining the landing pages on any paid advertising campaign in Birmingham to make sure they follow best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Do you have a headline that emphasizes benefits?
• Do you have any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• How fast does the page load?
• Is there social proof?
• Does the page load on mobile devices?

Designing and developing a quality landing page involves so many factors.

Until you have a landing page that follows best practices, don't spend money on Birmingham paid advertising.

You should never consider your landing page complete. You can refine your Birmingham sales pitch by running A/B tests on the landing page every few months.

Including a Sales Funnel

Rather than a landing page, you might want to consider building out a sales funnel. Our lead generation, email marketing, and even online purchases are heavily dependent upon sales funnels.

We have a client who promotes an online fitness challenge that you can even participate in from Birmingham. While managing their digital marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• For leads, we provided healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peeks as lead magnets.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• As part of the online program, sales letter funnels were used as the registration system.

Your Birmingham business isn't limited to only these types of funnels. Keep in mind that these tools can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product, building an email list, and selling online.

Take your time if you decide to implement a funnel. You can learn this type of work at home or at a technical school in Birmingham after weeks or months of training. Getting really good at funnels, however, can take years. Look for a PPC management firm like WebCitz to do the hard work for you!

Conversion Rate Optimization

Knowing your conversion rate is crucial to making informed advertising decisions. Throughout Birmingham, conversion rates vary widely between industries, products, and services. However, you can expect average conversion rates of 1-3%.

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

1. You sell a $100 sweatshirt in Birmingham on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 Birmingham residents that visit your website you sell 1 sweatshirt.
3. You have a $0.50 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person in Birmingham that visits your website you spend 50 cents.
4. To sell 1 sweatshirt, you need 100 clicks from paid ads, which would cost you $50. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 2x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid ads you get two dollars in return.

For most Birmingham businesses, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable unless the margins were great.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising agency 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 sweatshirts. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might actually be profitable now selling those sweatshirts.

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

Ad Creation

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads in Birmingham, 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 have to develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need build out amazing 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 have to change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people in Birmingham.

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 (in Birmingham and beyond) 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 have to understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You have to understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

This is one of the benefits of working with a PPC management company that helps Birmingham businesses, since we are proponents of testing new ad creatives regularly.

Ad Attribution Consulting

Knowing your ad attribution is important. If you don't know what ad attribution is, it is the process of determining which advertisement resulted in the conversion you experienced on your Birmingham website or funnel.

You might be suffering from ad attribution issues and not even know it.

Do you rely on Facebook Ads or Google Ads to tell you which campaigns, ad sets, and ads are performing the best?

If so, you are relying on incomplete data to form critical decisions about when to turn off or scale an ad.

For Birmingham ecommerce businesses running on Shopify, we recommend you look at ad attribution companies like Triple Whale or Northbeam to get a much clearer picture of your ad attribution.

For Birmingham content-based websites, or ecommerce websites in platforms other than Shopify, check out ad attribution companies like Wicked Reports or Hyros to get a better idea for how well each of your paid advertising campaigns are doing.

Free PPC Calculators for Birmingham, AL PPC Managers

Our digital marketers are so excited about managing Birmingham paid advertising campaigns, they worked with our web development team to build out some helpful PPC calculators that you might be interested in trying!

• Return on Ad Spend Calculator
• Cost Per Acquisition Calculator
• Churn Rate Calculator

View All PPC Tools

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your Birmingham, AL PPC Services

We want to be your Birmingham team's paid advertising partner! As a full-service PPC management company targeting Birmingham, we have multiple internal teams focused on search engine marketing, social media advertising, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. This is not true of all Birmingham PPC management companies, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. You might not get the results you want from Birmingham PPC agencies if you don't test campaign optimization and creative ideas often enough.

There are many factors to consider when researching paid ads agencies for your Birmingham business. The PPC strategies and tactics we suggest for your Birmingham company are backed by more than 18 years of experience. Many of these are the same PPC tactics we use to generate leads for our company.

In addition, you should choose us as your paid advertising agency because you are confident we can help your Birmingham company grow. Consider our PPC experts for the following reasons:

• Having been in business since 2004, we have more than 18 years of experience.
• Our paid advertising helps us rank for keywords we don't yet rank organically for.
• Our internal advertising team handles all Birmingham digital marketing services, such as PPC management, sales funnel development, and ad creatives.
• During normal business hours, you will likely receive an answer within a few rings from one of our teammates.

Let's talk about what our PPC experts can do for your Birmingham business! We often provide complete paid advertising management services to Birmingham small businesses, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger Birmingham corporations to fill in missing skill sets.

When it comes time for your Birmingham small business or large corporation to start the search for a PPC marketing agency, we hope you keep our team in mind for the task. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to send an email or give us a call to start a discussion with the helpful staff at our PPC firm.

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