Calgary, AB PPC Agency

What is Calgary, AB PPC Management?

PPC management refers to creating and optimizing Calgary paid advertising campaigns. However, that is an incredibly simple explanation, so let's dig a little deeper.

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

Local service providers in Calgary, 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. 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. Using paid advertising, you can drive traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

Understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale Calgary PPC is the next step. To maximize the value of paid advertising, most Calgary agencies implement email collection strategies through squeeze pages or lead magnets. For ad budgets over $1,000/mo, it often makes sense to integrate with Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam to better understand ad attribution and reporting.

Your Calgary business should use a variety of advertising strategies and marketing tools to be successful with paid advertising. Some of the best paid advertising services in Calgary include:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social media channels, and third-party websites.
• Make your Calgary business more profitable by acquiring qualified leads or selling online.
• Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Engage users in story creation, email collection, and user generated content.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

In addition to managing Calgary-area PPC campaigns, our team also offers Edmonton, Red Deer, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, and Grande Prairie small businesses and large corporations a professional PPC management service.

How Paid Advertising Helps Calgary, AB Businesses

Traffic increases almost instantly with Calgary paid advertising.

The quality of your ads, landing pages, and business model will determine whether or not that traffic increase results in higher conversions.

The first recommendation we offer to Calgary 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.

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.

Calgary 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 Calgary, AB PPC Campaigns

The options for running paid advertising for your Calgary business are numerous. Calgary has a variety of business industries that use paid ads. Let's take a look at some of the most common ones.

Local Ads throughout Calgary

Local ads for your Calgary business can be run through nearly any advertising platform. You may find greater success on one platform over another depending on the nature of your local Calgary business. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Here are a few options for local advertising.

From Google, you'll have two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. The Google algorithm finds the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you local customers using this type of dynamic ad campaign. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies in and around Calgary, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

Alternatively, if your business qualifies, Google offers a Local Service Ads option. As a pay-per-lead platform, Google Local Service Ads charges a flat fee per lead. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors in Calgary, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in Calgary. The first step is to set up a campaign with ad sets restricted to Calgary as a city, or specific ZIP codes around Calgary. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of Calgary business industries.

Social Ads throughout Calgary

Almost all online ads you see on social networks qualify as social media ads.

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social ads. 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 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 Calgary business has to offer.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

Search Ads throughout Calgary

You should invest in search advertising if you know people are searching online for your products or services.

There are some people out there who refer to this as Calgary Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. An advertisement that appears on the search results page of a search engine is called a search ad.

If you have been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. In an October 2022 study from StatCounter, Bing was the primary search engine used by approximately 3.57% of online users.

Display Ads in Calgary

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

Google Ads and Bing Ads commonly offer these campaign types.

With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different 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 Calgary

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

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

Almost any ad platform can be used for retargeting ads.

Shopping Ads for Calgary Ecommerce Businesses

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

If you want to promote your Calgary storefront through Google Shopping, you'll need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), and a Google Merchant Center account.

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 throughout Calgary

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

Using YouTube Ads is as simple as setting up a video ad campaign in Google Ads.

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

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. Video ads are frequently used to showcase product launches, custom services, and personal introductions.

You should definitely consider incorporating video ads into your paid advertising campaigns in Calgary if you have the budget to do so.

Calgary, AB PPC Management Services

With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for local businesses in Calgary, we are a team of paid advertising specialists. Drive traffic and conversions to your Calgary digital assets with our experience across dozens of industries.

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 appear based on what is searched on Google or Bing.

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

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the Calgary roofing company wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? In order to solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid ads manager talking with the Calgary roofing company what services they want to target more often and where. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

As an example, the Alberta PPC manager might find that "Airdrie, Canada roofing companies" and "Calgary roof repair" have high search volumes. First phrase targets a location near Calgary, which may still be in the service area of the Calgary roofing company. The second phrase is targeting a slightly different service, which might result in a more lucrative roof replacement project if the repair work is extensive.

Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. You can use these to prevent your paid ads from showing in search queries that you know won't convert.

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".

You can see that as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend, the needs for keyword research become more complex.

Audience Research

Audience research is often mentioned as part of scaling social media ads on Facebook and Instagram in Calgary paid advertising campaigns. 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 Calgary's paid advertising managers in the past. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which Calgary advertisers lined up to exploit.

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

Apple's iOS 14.5 update included a pop-up message that let users opt out of personalized ad tracking. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices in Calgary and beyond. This even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

For most Calgary advertising agencies, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. With such sophisticated algorithms, it's often more harmful to choose your own interests compared to letting Facebook figure it out for you.

In spite of the fact that many Calgary paid ads agencies still rely on custom audiences, it is clear that the trend is shifting 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."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting.

However, audience research and targeting aren't going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within Calgary ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

Optimizing Landing Pages

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

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign in Calgary, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. In this review, we consider the following factors and more:

• Do you have a headline that emphasizes benefits?
• Is there an image above the fold?
• Does the content engage the reader?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• What is the visibility of the call to action?
• How fast does the page load?
• Is there social proof?
• Can I load the page on a mobile device?

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

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

You should never consider your landing page complete. For continuous improvement, run A/B testing every few months.

Including a Sales Funnel

Rather than a landing page, you might want to consider building out a sales funnel. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from Calgary. 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.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• 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 Calgary 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.

If you do decide to implement a funnel, take your time at it. Doing this type of work yourself can take weeks of training, whether you learn it at home by yourself or at a technical school in Calgary. It can take years of experience to master funnels, however. You can save yourself some time by looking for a PPC management firm, like WebCitz, to handle the heavy lifting!

Conversion Rate Optimization

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 throughout Calgary.

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

1. You sell a $100 sweatshirt in Calgary on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 Calgary 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 Calgary 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 Calgary 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 Calgary 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 Calgary, 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 Calgary.

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 Calgary 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 Calgary 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 Calgary 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 Calgary 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 Calgary 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 Calgary, AB PPC Managers

Our digital marketers are so excited about managing Calgary's paid advertising campaigns that they developed some helpful PPC calculators for you!

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

View All PPC Tools

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your Calgary, AB PPC Services

Let's work together on paid advertising for your Calgary business! In addition to PPC management, we have internal teams focused on sales funnel development, social media advertising, and ad creative testing for Calgary. This is not true of all Calgary PPC management companies, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. You might not get the results you want from Calgary PPC agencies if you don't test campaign optimization and creative ideas often enough.

In researching paid advertising agencies for your Calgary 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 Calgary business. 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 Calgary company grow. Our PPC experts are a good option for a number of reasons:

• It has been more than 18 years since we opened our doors, which makes us an industry leader.
• We rely heavily on sales funnels and paid advertising to shore up our organic search rankings.
• Since we have an internal advertising team, we do not outsource Calgary digital marketing services, such as PPC management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services.
• It is likely that one of our teammates will answer your call within a few rings if you call during normal business hours.

Let's discuss what our PPC experts can offer your Calgary company! Calgary small businesses often hire us for paid advertising management services, but larger corporations can also hire us to augment their marketing departments.

Our team would appreciate the opportunity to be considered when your Calgary business or corporation is in need of a PPC marketing agency. 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.