Educator PPC Agency

What is PPC Management for Educational Facilities?

The act of creating and optimizing paid ads campaigns for educational facilities is known as educator PPC management. However, that is an incredibly simple explanation, so let's dig a little deeper.

To provide professional PPC management, a paid ads company for educators often starts by getting to know you. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a local educational facility is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide educator ecommerce site.

Local educational facilities, for instance, are often only interested in contact form submissions or calls. To accomplish this, paid ads can drive traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, we recommend you start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

Alternatively, ecommerce-focused educational facilities are most often interested in online sales. Using PPC advertising, you can increase traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. In some cases, it might even make sense to include Google Shopping Campaigns in your strategy. Our team has even used sales funnels to help sell products and subscriptions.

The next step in educator paid ads management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some educational facilities, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid advertising, your educational facility needs to use multiple plans and marketing tools. For example, the best educational facility PPC advertising plans will include plans to:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social media channels, and third-party websites.
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your educational facility.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Provide social proof with case studies, white papers, video testimonials, etc.
• 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.

Types of Paid Ads for Educational Facilities

There are numerous ways to run PPC advertising for your educational facility. educational facilities definitely use paid advertising. Let's take a look at some of the most common ones.

1.) Local Marketing

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your educational facility. You may find greater success on one platform over another depending on the nature of your localized educational facility. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Let's talk about a few local advertising choices.

There are going to be two options from Google.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. 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. Local professionals such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians frequently use Performance Max campaigns.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. Plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers often use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also target people in your local area using Facebook Ads. This is a little more straightforward, since it just involves setting up a campaign that has ad sets with geographic restrictions. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of educational facilities.

2.) Social Ads

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

It's important to keep the ad creatives fresh when running social media advertising. 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 modifications.

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. It's quite the opposite when you run search ads since you only get to show them when someone searches for what your educational facility offers.

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.

3.) Search Engine Ads

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

There are some people out there who refer to this as educator 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, which are above the organic SEO placements.

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.

4.) Display Ads

Many different message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (even nearby news stations), gossip sites, and more run display advertisements.

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. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you increase results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Your educational facility 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.

You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.

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 educational facility.

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. Using that information, they can determine what types of search queries to display your products at the top of search results.

7.) Video Ads

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

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. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid advertising campaigns.

Tips for Managing PPC for Educators

We are a team of paid advertising professionals with extensive knowledge in the latest PPC trends for educational facilities 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 educators 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 and targeted by your educational facility.

A search for "nearby educator" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a educational facility website in their area. Knowing to target 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 educational facility needed to increase their advertising reach? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

The next steps might involve the paid advertising manager discussing with the educational facility about what types of products / services they want to target more often and within what geographic areas. There may also be a need to broaden the keyword targeting.

For instance, the paid ads manager might discover high search volume for "nearby educational facilities" or even "educator services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. If the service is extensive, the second phrase might result in a more lucrative opportunity.

When building negative keyword lists, keyword research can also be beneficial. Negative keywords are used to stop your PPC advertising from showing in search queries that you know won't bring in students.

For example, someone looking for "free services from educational facilities" or "how to advertise to educators" isn't likely to convert with your educational facility. Your paid ads may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "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.

2.) Audience Research Tips

When you hear audience research talked about for educational facility paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social 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.

Educational facility paid advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively in the past. After all, one of the most appealing features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which educators lined up to exploit.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices. This 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 ad companies for educators. 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 educational facility paid advertising agencies using custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. Don't take our word for it though. If you've been involved in the creation of Facebook ads, you've probably noticed the removal of interest-based targeting options here and there. Maybe you've even seen changes to how "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is recommended during the setup process.

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. The targeting options within educator ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

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

When we take on the management of a paid ads campaign for educators, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• 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?
• Can you easily identify the call to action?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• 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 paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. 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 your local area. While managing their internet 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 educational facility 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.

5.) Conversion Rate 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 advertising, 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 ads you get one dollar in return.

For most educational facilities, 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 paid advertising company 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 site 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 ads.

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 educators, 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 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 good 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.

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your PPC Solutions

We want to be the paid ads partner of your educational facility! In addition to PPC management, we have internal teams focused on sales funnel development, social media ads, and ad creative testing for educators. This is not true of all educator-focused PPC management agencies, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. For those educational facility paid ads agencies, campaign optimizations and innovative ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.

While researching paid ads agencies for your educational facility, there are many factors to consider. The paid ads plans and strategies we suggest for your educational facility are backed by more than 20 years of experience. These are often the same PPC plans we use for our own lead generation.

More importantly, you should choose our PPC advertising company because you feel confident we are the right team to help your educational facility grow. Our PPC experts are a good option for numerous reasons:

• We have been in business since 2004, which means we have more than 20 years of experience.
• We rely heavily on PPC advertising to bring in traffic from keywords we don't yet rank for organically.
• We do not outsource internet marketing services for our educational facility clients, including PPC management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services since we have our own internal advertising team.
• If you call us during normal business hours, you will likely get an answer from one of our teammates within a few rings.

Let's talk about what our paid ads consultants can do for your educational facility! While we often provide complete paid advertising management packages for small educational facilities, we are also able to augment the marketing departments of large educational facilities.

When it comes time for your educational facility to start the search for a PPC marketing company, 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 agency.

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