Bismarck, ND PPC Agency

What is Bismarck, ND PPC Management?

The act of creating and optimizing Bismarck 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 Bismarck often begins by getting to know your company and its business model before providing professional PPC management. Since the way you approach paid advertising for a local Bismarck business is much different than how you would for an ecommerce brand, this information helps determine the next steps.

Local service providers in Bismarck, 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 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.

To optimize and scale Bismarck PPC, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. Most Bismarck 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.

Your Bismarck 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 Bismarck include:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Increase revenue for your Bismarck business through qualified leads or online sales.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• 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 Bismarck-area PPC campaigns, our team also offers and Fargo small businesses and large corporations a professional PPC management service.

How Paid Advertising Helps Bismarck, ND Businesses

The most obvious benefit of Bismarck 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 Bismarck, we recommend that you 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.

When everything comes together, paid advertising can be an invaluable addition to the digital marketing strategy of your Bismarck company. Remember, more traffic doesn't always mean more conversions!

Types of Paid Ads for Bismarck, ND PPC Campaigns

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

Local Ads within Bismarck

Local ads for your Bismarck 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 Bismarck 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.

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 Bismarck, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is 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 Bismarck, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in Bismarck. The first step is to set up a campaign with ad sets restricted to Bismarck as a city, or specific ZIP codes around Bismarck. For all types of Bismarck businesses, we often use Facebook Ads.

Social Ads for Bismarck Businesses

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

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. A weekly change in ad creative is often recommended for higher-spend ad campaigns.

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. It's quite the opposite when you run search ads since you only get to show them when someone searches for what you offer in Bismarck.

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 for Bismarck Businesses

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

Some people refer to this as Bismarck Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. An advertisement that appears on the search results page of a search engine is called a search ad.

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.

Display Ads in Bismarck

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

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

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 generate results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

Retargeting Ads for Bismarck Businesses

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

Retargeting ads are almost always recommended to help bring people back to your website after they have weighed their options.

Almost any ad platform can be used for retargeting ads.

Shopping Ads for Bismarck Ecommerce Stores

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 Bismarck storefront.

With these tools, you can provide Google Ads with an accurate list of all of your 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 Bismarck

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

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

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

Bismarck, ND PPC Management Services

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

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

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the Bismarck 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 Bismarck roofing company what services they want to target more often and where. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

Suppose the North Dakota PPC manager discovers that there is a high traffic volume for "Mandan, ND roofers" or even "Bismarck roof repair." The first phrase is targeting a nearby location to Bismarck, which might still be in the service area of the Bismarck 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.

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".

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.

Audience Research

Audience research is often mentioned as part of scaling social media ads on Facebook and Instagram in Bismarck paid advertising campaigns. However, Bing Ads and Google Ads also allow audience targeting.

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

Bismarck paid advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively 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 Bismarck advertisers lined up to exploit.

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

Apple's iOS 14.5 update included a pop-up message that let users opt out of personalized ad tracking. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. 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 Bismarck ad agencies. 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.

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

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. The targeting options within Bismarck ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

Landing Page Optimization

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

Our first step when managing a paid advertising campaign in Bismarck involves reviewing the landing pages for best practices. In this review, we consider the following factors and more:

• Does the headline focus on benefits?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Do you have a lead form I can use right away?
• Can you easily identify the call to action?
• How quickly does the page load?
• Is there social proof?
• Does the page load on mobile devices?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page.

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

You should never consider your landing page complete. You can refine your Bismarck sales pitch by running A/B tests on the landing page every few months.

Developing a Sales Funnel

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.

One of our clients promotes an online fitness challenge that you can even join from Bismarck. 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:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• Lead magnets provided health and fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peeks in exchange for email addresses.
• 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 Bismarck 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 Bismarck. 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 Bismarck.

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

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

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 Bismarck 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 Bismarck 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 Bismarck 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 Bismarck 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 Bismarck 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 Bismarck, ND PPC Managers

Our digital marketers are so excited about managing Bismarck 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 Bismarck, ND PPC Services

We want to be your Bismarck team's paid advertising partner! As a full-service PPC management company targeting Bismarck, we have multiple internal teams focused on search engine marketing, social media advertising, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. In most Bismarck PPC companies, only one person handles all tasks, but this is not the case for us! You might not get the results you want from Bismarck PPC agencies if you don't test campaign optimization and creative ideas often enough.

In researching paid advertising agencies for your Bismarck 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 Bismarck business. These are often the same PPC tactics we use for our own lead generation.

In addition, you should choose us as your paid advertising agency because you are confident we can help your Bismarck 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.
• Our internal advertising team handles all Bismarck digital marketing services, such as PPC management, sales funnel development, and ad creatives.
• 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 Bismarck company! Bismarck 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 Bismarck business or corporation is in need of a PPC marketing agency. 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.