Tuscaloosa PPC Agency

What is Tuscaloosa, AL PPC Management?

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

A paid ads agency for Tuscaloosa often begins by getting to know your company and its business model before providing professional PPC management. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a local Tuscaloosa business is much different from how you'd handle it for an ecommerce brand.

Local service providers in Tuscaloosa, for instance, are often only interested in good leads. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that drives traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, then you could start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

Alternatively, ecommerce brands are most often 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 Tuscaloosa PPC, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For paid advertising to be effective, most Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa business should utilize multiple advertising strategies and marketing tools. For example, the best Tuscaloosa paid advertising services will include tactics to:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Increase revenue for your Tuscaloosa business through qualified leads or online sales.
• Utilize third-party attribution software to better understand ad attribution.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

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

How Paid Advertising Helps Tuscaloosa, AL Businesses

The most obvious benefit of Tuscaloosa 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.

If you are interested in running paid advertising in Tuscaloosa, we recommend that you start slowly.

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

Don't blame Facebook or Google if you don't get conversions. The issue is often in the ad creatives, campaign settings, or sales process.

When everything comes together, paid advertising can be an invaluable addition to the digital marketing strategy of your Tuscaloosa company. Just keep in mind increased traffic doesn't always result in more conversions!

Types of Paid Ads for Tuscaloosa, AL PPC Campaigns

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

Local Ads within Tuscaloosa

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your Tuscaloosa business. You may find greater success on one platform over another depending on the nature of your local Tuscaloosa business. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Let's talk about a few local advertising choices.

There are going to be two options from Google.

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 Tuscaloosa. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals in Tuscaloosa. 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 Tuscaloosa often use Google Local Service Ads.

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

Social Ads for Tuscaloosa Businesses

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

The trick to social ads is keeping the ad creatives fresh. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative changes.

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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa

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 Tuscaloosa 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. According to a StatCounter study from October 2022, about 3.57% of online users use Bing as their primary search engine.

Display Ads for Tuscaloosa Businesses

There are display ads on message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local Tuscaloosa news stations), gossip websites, and more.

These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.

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.

Retargeting Ads throughout Tuscaloosa

Your Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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. Then, your products will be displayed at the top of search results based on the right types of search queries.

Video Ads for Tuscaloosa Businesses

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other social networking sites allow you to run video ads.

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. Video ads are frequently used to showcase product launches, custom services, and personal introductions.

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

Tuscaloosa, AL PPC Management Services

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

Keyword Research

In the context of paid advertising, you'll find keyword research mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, search ads only appear based on what is searched on Google or Bing.

For example, a person looking for a roofing company in Tuscaloosa might search "Tuscaloosa Roofer" on a search engine. As a paid ads manager for that Tuscaloosa roofing company, targeting that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

However, what if that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the Tuscaloosa roofing company needed to increase their advertising reach? Researching keywords would be necessary for the solution.

Typically, the paid ads manager will discuss with the Tuscaloosa 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 "Northport, AL roofers" or even "Tuscaloosa roof repair." The first phrase targets a location nearby Tuscaloosa 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.

A person looking for "free roof repair work" or "how to advertise to roofing companies" is unlikely to buy a roof replacement. However, they might see your paid ads 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.

Audience Research

When you hear audience research talked about in Tuscaloosa paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social media ads on Facebook and Instagram. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

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

Facebook custom audiences were heavily relied upon by Tuscaloosa'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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa ad agencies. By choosing your own interest-based targeting, you tend to do more harm than good because their algorithm often understands your ideal audience better than you do.

While there will still be plenty of Tuscaloosa paid ads agencies relying on custom audiences, it is clear the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it for yourself. Every few months Facebook rolls out updates that gradually remove lesser-used interest-based targeting options. They even keep changing out "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is pushed in the ad set creation.

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.

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

Optimizing Landing Pages

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

We begin by examining the landing pages on any paid advertising campaign in Tuscaloosa 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?
• What is the visibility of the call to action?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Does social proof exist?
• 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.

Please, don't spend money on Tuscaloosa paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices!

You should never consider your landing page complete. You can refine your Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa. While managing their digital marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• By using squeeze pages, we captured email addresses and raised awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• Using application funnels, we encouraged people to apply for 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 Tuscaloosa business isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa, 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 Tuscaloosa on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa, 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 Tuscaloosa.

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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa, AL PPC Managers

Our digital marketers are so excited about managing Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa, AL PPC Services

We want to be your Tuscaloosa team's paid advertising partner! As a full-service PPC management company targeting Tuscaloosa, we have multiple internal teams focused on search engine marketing, social media advertising, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. In most Tuscaloosa PPC companies, only one person handles all tasks, but this is not the case for us! For those Tuscaloosa PPC agencies, campaign optimizations and creative ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.

In researching paid advertising agencies for your Tuscaloosa company, there are many factors to consider. With more than 18 years of experience, you know you can trust the PPC strategies and tactics we suggest for your Tuscaloosa business. These are often the same PPC tactics we use for our own lead generation.

More importantly, you should choose our paid advertising agency because you feel confident we are the right team to help your Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa 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 Tuscaloosa business! We often provide complete paid advertising management services to Tuscaloosa small businesses, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger Tuscaloosa corporations to fill in missing skill sets.

When it comes time for your Tuscaloosa 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. To start a discussion with the helpful staff at our PPC firm, send us an email or give us a call if you have any follow-up questions.