Duluth, MN PPC Agency

What is Duluth, MN PPC Management?

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

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

Service providers in Duluth, for example, are often only looking for quality 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 currently exist or need a lot of revisions.

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. In some cases, it might even make sense to include Google Shopping Campaigns. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

The next step in Duluth PPC management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. Most Duluth paid ads agencies will implement email collection strategies through squeeze pages or lead magnets to help increase the value of paid advertising. 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.

In order to be successful with paid advertising, your Duluth business needs to use multiple strategies and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns in Duluth should include tactics like:

• Promote your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc.) via search engines, social media channels, and third parties.
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your Duluth business.
• Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• 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 Duluth-area PPC campaigns, our team also offers Bloomington, Minneapolis, Plymouth, Rochester, St. Paul, and Woodbury small businesses and large corporations a professional PPC management service.

How Paid Advertising Helps Duluth, MN Businesses

One of the most obvious benefits of Duluth 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 Duluth businesses interested in running paid advertising is to 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.

If you're not getting conversions, don't blame Facebook or Google. It is usually the creatives, campaign settings, or sales process that is the problem.

The right combination of paid advertising and digital marketing strategy can greatly enhance your Duluth business's digital marketing strategy. Remember, more traffic doesn't always mean more conversions!

Types of Paid Ads for Duluth, MN PPC Campaigns

In Duluth, 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 Duluth.

Local Ads throughout Duluth

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your Duluth business. One platform may be more effective for your local Duluth business than another. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Now let's discuss some local advertising options.

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. 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 in Duluth. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals in Duluth. Even local 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. 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. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors in Duluth, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

You can also target people in your local Duluth area using Facebook Ads. 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 Duluth. Local Facebook Ads are often used by Duluth businesses of all types.

Social Ads for Duluth Websites

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

The trick to social ads is keeping the ad creatives fresh. 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.

The best part of social ads is you can target audiences that have never thought of your product or service, or perhaps just aren't thinking about it now. When running search ads, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively looking for what your Duluth 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 Ads within Duluth

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

In some circles, this is referred to as Duluth Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads, which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

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. In an October 2022 study from StatCounter, Bing was the primary search engine used by approximately 3.57% of online users.

Display Ads for Duluth Businesses

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

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

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

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your Duluth website, landing page, or sales funnel.

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 any ad platform, too.

Shopping Ads for Duluth Ecommerce Businesses

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

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

Video Ads within Duluth

Social networking websites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram allow you to advertise with video.

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

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!

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

Duluth, MN PPC Management Services

Our team of paid advertising specialists is knowledgeable about the latest PPC trends in Duluth. Take advantage of our experience across dozens of business industries to help drive traffic and conversions to your Duluth 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, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for.

A search for "Duluth Roofer" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a roofing company in Duluth. It wouldn't be necessary to conduct extensive keyword research to target that exact phrase as the paid ads manager for that roofing company in Duluth.

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

The next steps might involve the paid ads manager discussing with the Duluth roofing company what types of services they want to target more often and within what geographic areas. A broader keyword targeting strategy than exact matches might also be necessary.

For instance, the Minnesota PPC manager might discover high search volume for "Superior, WI roofing companies" or even "Duluth roof repair." The first phrase is targeting a nearby location to Duluth, which might still be in the service area of the Duluth 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.

When building negative keyword lists, keyword research can also be beneficial. You can use them to prevent your paid ads from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in a lead or sale.

An individual searching for "free roof repair services" or "when to advertise to roofers" is unlikely to buy a new roof. Your paid ads may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "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 Duluth paid advertising campaigns. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

Let's go over a little history on audience research and targeting within the Facebook Ads platform.

In years past, Duluth paid advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers in Duluth 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. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior across Duluth and beyond. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most Duluth ad agencies. With such sophisticated algorithms, it's often more harmful to choose your own interests compared to letting Facebook figure it out for you.

While there will still be plenty of Duluth paid ads agencies relying on 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."

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.

It's not to say audience research and targeting are going away. The targeting options within Duluth ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

Landing Page Creation & Optimization

It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements in Duluth.

We begin by examining the landing pages on any paid advertising campaign in Duluth to make sure they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Do you have a headline that emphasizes benefits?
• Are there any images 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?
• How quickly does the page load?
• Is social proof present?
• Does the page load on mobile devices?

Quality landing pages are the result of many factors.

Please, don't spend money on Duluth 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 Duluth sales pitch.

Sales Funnel Development

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 Duluth. 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 Duluth 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 Duluth. 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 Duluth.

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

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

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 Duluth 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 Duluth 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 Duluth 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 Duluth 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 Duluth 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 Duluth, MN PPC Managers

As part of our commitment to managing Duluth paid advertising campaigns, our digital marketers worked with our web development team to build a few PPC calculators that might interest you.

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

View All PPC Tools

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your Duluth, MN PPC Services

We'd love to partner with your Duluth team on paid advertising! As a full-service PPC management company targeting Duluth, 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 Duluth PPC management companies, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. For those Duluth PPC agencies, campaign optimizations and creative ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.

Choosing a paid ad agency for your Duluth business is not an easy task. The PPC strategies and tactics we suggest for your Duluth company are backed by more than 18 years of experience. As a lead generation agency, we often use similar PPC tactics.

In addition, you should choose us as your paid advertising agency because you are confident we can help your Duluth company grow. Our PPC experts are a good option for a number of reasons:

• We have been in business since 2004, which means we have more than 18 years of experience.
• Our paid advertising helps us rank for keywords we don't yet rank organically for.
• We do not outsource Duluth digital marketing services, 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 discuss what our PPC experts can offer your Duluth company! While we often provide complete paid advertising management services for small businesses in cities like Duluth, we are also able to augment the marketing departments of large corporations in Duluth and beyond.

We hope you consider our company when searching for a PPC advertising agency for you Duluth small business or large corporation. We would be happy to talk to you about your follow-up questions via email or phone if you have any.

800-796-8263 Email Us