Portland, ME PPC Agency

Our Portland, ME Paid Ads Management Services

PPC Management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns in Portland. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

To provide professional paid ads management, a paid advertising company for Portland often starts by getting to know your company and its business model. You can use this information to determine the next steps, since paid advertising for a local area business differs from paid advertising for an ecommerce store.

For example, localized Portland service providers are often only interested in qualified leads. Through PPC advertising, traffic can be driven to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. Start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those digital assets don't currently exist or need a lot of revisions.

In contrast, ecommerce brands are most likely 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. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

The next step in Portland PPC management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For PPC advertising to be effective, most Portland paid ad firms will implement email collection strategies, such as 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.

To be successful with paid advertising, your Portland company should utilize multiple advertising strategies and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns in Portland should include tactics like:

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

In addition to managing Portland-area paid ads campaigns, our team also offers Auburn, Scarborough, and York small businesses and large corporations a skilled paid ads management service.

Pricing for Portland, ME PPC Management

The price of our PPC management services is based on the amount of time you want us to dedicate to your campaigns each month. Listed below you will find our starting price for PPC management, but we can discuss an increased budget if you have a higher ad spend or service requirements.

How Paid Advertising Helps Portland, ME Organizations

One of the most obvious benefits of Portland paid advertising is the quick 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 Portland small businesses interested in running paid advertising is to start slowly.

A working sales funnel, realistic goals, and the ability to gather actionable data are essential before you invest in paid ads or scale your existing ad campaigns.

If you run into trouble getting the conversions you were expecting, don't blame Facebook or Google. In many cases, the problem lies in the ad creative, campaign settings, or sales process.

The right combination of paid advertising and online advertising can greatly enhance your Portland business's website marketing tactics. It's important to keep in mind that increased traffic does not always translate into more conversions.

How We Manage Portland, ME PPC

Our team of paid advertising professionals is knowledgeable about the latest PPC trends in Portland. Take advantage of our experience across dozens of business industries to help improve traffic and conversions to your Portland digital assets.

Keyword Research

Keyword research in PPC is mostly used for Google Ads and Bing Ads search network campaigns. After all, search ads only show up based on what is searched on Google or Bing.

If you are looking for a roofing company in Portland, you might search "Portland Roofer" on Google. It wouldn't be necessary to conduct extensive keyword research to target that exact phrase as the PPC advertising manager for that roofing company in Portland.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the Portland roofing company needs to expand their advertising reach? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid advertising manager talking with the Portland roofing company what services they want to target more often and where. A broader keyword targeting plan than exact matches might also be necessary.

For instance, the Maine PPC manager might discover high search volume for "South Portland, ME roofing companies" or even "Portland roof repair." The first phrase targets a location nearby Portland that might still be within the company's service area. 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.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. You can use them to prevent your PPC advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in a lead or sale.

For example, someone searching 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 Portland paid advertising campaigns. However, Bing Ads and Google Ads also allow audience targeting.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

In years past, Portland PPC advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most appealing features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers in Portland eagerly took advantage of.

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

When Apple released its iOS 14.5 update, they included a pop up message that allowed users to easily opt out of personalized ad tracking. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior across Portland and beyond. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

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

Though there will still be plenty of Portland PPC advertising firms using custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. Don't take our work 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.

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

It's not to say audience research and targeting are going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within Portland ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

Landing Page Creation & Optimization

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your Portland paid advertising campaigns.

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign in Portland, we start by searching over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Do you have any images above the fold?
• Does the content engage the reader?
• Do I have immediate access to a lead form?
• Can you easily identify the call to action?
• How quickly does the page load?
• Is social proof present?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

Quality landing pages are the result of many factors.

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

Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. For continuous improvement, run A/B testing every few months.

Sales Funnel Development

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.

We have a client who promotes an online fitness challenge that you can even participate in from Portland. In the course of managing their digital marketing, we built several sales funnels using Click Funnels. Here are a few of the funnels we used:

• To increase awareness and capture email addresses, we used squeeze pages.
• 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 Portland small 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 Portland. It can take years of experience to master funnels, however. You can save yourself some time by searching for a paid ads management company, like WebCitz, to handle the heavy lifting!

CRO

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 Portland.

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

1. You sell a $100 sweatshirt in Portland on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 Portland 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 Portland that visits your website you spend 50 cents.
4. To sell 1 sweatshirt, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, 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 PPC advertising you get two dollars in return.

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

To improve the situation, you hire a paid ads 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 website you now sell 2 sweatshirts. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling those sweatshirts.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your Portland PPC 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 Portland, 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 in Portland.

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 Portland 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 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.

This is one of the benefits of working with a PPC management company that helps Portland organizations, 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 Portland website or funnel.

You might be suffering from ad attribution errors 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 Portland 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 Portland 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.

Types of Paid Ads for Portland, ME PPC Campaigns

In Portland, there are many ways to run paid advertising. Let's discuss some of the most common paid ads being run within various business industries in Portland.

Local Ads throughout Portland

If you have a business in Portland, you can run nearby ads on almost any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your local Portland business, you may find better success in one platform versus another. You should try out every option available to see which suits you best. Now let's discuss some local area advertising options.

Google is going to offer 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. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals in Portland. Even localized stores use this campaign type.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. Using Local Service Ads, you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform generates. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors in Portland, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local Portland area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to specific ZIP codes in Portland. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of Portland small business industries.

Social Ads throughout Portland

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

It's important to keep the ad creatives fresh when running social media advertising. The performance of your campaign will gradually decline if you do not rotate your ad creatives every couple of weeks. A weekly change in ad creative is often recommended for higher-spend ad campaigns.

One of the best things about social media marketing is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. When running search engine marketing, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively looking for what your Portland business 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.

Search Advertising for Portland Organizations

If you know people are searching online for the products or services you offer, you'll want to invest in search advertisements.

In some circles, this is referred to as Portland Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. This is just a different way of explaining search engine ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine.

You might consider copying your Google Ads campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform if you've had success with Google advertising. In an October 2022 study from StatCounter, Bing was the primary search engine used by approximately 3.57% of online users.

Display Ads throughout Portland

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

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

With display ads, all you need are a few different sizes of ad creatives. 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 in Portland

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your Portland website, landing page, or sales funnel.

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 Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.

Shopping Ads for Portland Ecommerce Companies

Google Shopping Campaigns popularized this type of search ad.

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

By using these tools, you can provide Google Ads with accurate product data, including 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.

Video Ads within Portland

Social networking websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram 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.

Facebook Ads is required if you want to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.

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!

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

Free Paid Ads Calculators for Portland, ME PPC Managers

As part of our commitment to managing Portland paid ads campaigns, our online marketers worked with our website development team to build a few PPC calculators that might interest you.

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

View All Paid Ads Tools

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your Portland, ME PPC Strategies

We'd love to partner with your Portland team on PPC advertising! As a complete paid ads management company targeting Portland, we have multiple internal teams focused on search ads, social media advertising, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. This is not true of all Portland PPC management companies, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. You might not be testing campaign optimizations and creative ideas often enough with those Portland paid ads companies to get the results you desire.

There are many factors to consider when researching paid advertising agencies for your Portland small business. Having over 18 years of experience, you can trust our paid ads strategies and tactics for Portland organizations. As a lead generation agency, we often use similar paid ads plans.

Portland businesses should choose our paid advertising firm because they feel confident we are the right team.

Our PPC specialists are a good option for numerous reasons:

• It has been more than 18 years since we opened our doors, which makes us an industry leader.
• Our paid ads help us rank for keywords we don't yet rank organically for.
• We do not outsource Portland digital marketing plans, including PPC management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services since we have our own internal advertising team.
• During normal business hours, you will likely receive an answer within a few rings from one of our teammates.

Let's discuss what our paid ads experts can offer your Portland company! We often provide complete paid advertising management services to Portland businesses, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger Portland corporations to fill in missing skill sets.

We hope you consider our company when looking for a paid ads agency for you Portland small business. 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.

800-796-8263 Email Us