Fargo, ND PPC Agency

What is Fargo, ND PPC Management?

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

For example, local Fargo service providers are often only interested in qualified 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 are most often interested in online sales. Using paid advertising, you can drive traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense in some cases. Our team has even used sales funnels to help sell products and subscriptions.

The next step in Fargo PPC management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. To maximize the value of paid advertising, most Fargo 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.

In order to be successful with paid advertising, your Fargo business needs to use multiple strategies and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns in Fargo 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 money online or through qualified leads for your Fargo business.
• Utilize third-party attribution software to better understand ad attribution.
• 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.
• Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.

In addition to managing Fargo-area PPC campaigns, our team also offers Bismarck, small businesses and large corporations a professional PPC management service.

How Paid Advertising Helps Fargo, ND Businesses

Traffic increases almost instantly with Fargo 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 Fargo 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.

If you run into trouble getting the conversions you were expecting, 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 Fargo business's digital marketing strategy. Just keep in mind increased traffic doesn't always result in more conversions!

Types of Paid Ads for Fargo, ND PPC Campaigns

The options for running paid advertising for your Fargo business are numerous. Fargo 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 Fargo

Local ads for your Fargo business can be run through nearly any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your local Fargo business, you may find better success in one platform versus 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.

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. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers in Fargo. Fargo 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. 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 Fargo, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

You can also target people in your local Fargo 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 Fargo. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of Fargo business industries.

Social Ads for Fargo Websites

A social media ad is pretty much any online advertisement you see on a social networking site.

It's important to keep the ad creatives fresh when running social ads. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative changes for campaigns with higher spending.

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 Fargo.

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 for Fargo Businesses

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

Some people refer to this as Fargo 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. According to a StatCounter study from October 2022, about 3.57% of online users use Bing as their primary search engine.

Display Ads for Fargo Businesses

Many different message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (even local Fargo 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 throughout Fargo

Your Fargo 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 Fargo Ecommerce Companies

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

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

Video Ads for Fargo Businesses

You can run video ads on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, 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, definitely look to implement them into your Fargo paid advertising campaigns.

Fargo, ND PPC Management Services

With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for local businesses in Fargo, we are a team of paid advertising specialists. Drive traffic and conversions to your Fargo 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 show up based on what is searched on Google or Bing.

A search for "Fargo Roofer" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a roofing company in Fargo. 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 Fargo.

However, what if that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the Fargo roofing company needed to increase their advertising reach? In order to solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

Typically, the paid ads manager will discuss with the Fargo roofing company what types of services to target more often. There may also be a need to broaden the keyword targeting.

For instance, the North Dakota PPC manager might discover high search volume for "Moorhead, MN roofing companies" or even "Fargo roof repair." First phrase targets a location near Fargo, which may still be in the service area of the Fargo 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.

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. Your paid ads may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

Even if your keyword research needs are obvious when you start building out your campaign, they become more complex as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

Audience Research

When you hear audience research talked about in Fargo paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social media ads on Facebook and Instagram. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.

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

Fargo paid advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively in the past. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers in Fargo eagerly took advantage of.

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. 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 Fargo ad agencies. By choosing your own interest-based targeting, you tend to do more harm than good because their algorithm often understands your ideal audience better than you do.

While there will still be plenty of Fargo paid ads agencies relying on custom audiences, it is clear 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 changes.

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

Optimizing Landing Pages

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

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign in Fargo, 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:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Is there an image above the fold?
• Does the content engage the reader?
• 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.

Please, don't spend money on Fargo 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 Fargo 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 Fargo. 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 Fargo 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 Fargo. 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 Fargo.

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

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

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 Fargo 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 Fargo 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 Fargo 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 Fargo 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 Fargo 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 Fargo, ND PPC Managers

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

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

There are many factors to consider when researching paid ads agencies for your Fargo business. The PPC strategies and tactics we suggest for your Fargo company are backed by more than 18 years of experience. As a lead generation agency, we often use similar PPC tactics.

More importantly, you should choose our paid advertising agency because you feel confident we are the right team to help your Fargo company grow. Our PPC experts are a good option for a number of reasons:

• Having been in business since 2004, we have more than 18 years of experience.
• We rely heavily on paid advertising to bring in traffic from keywords we don't yet rank for organically.
• We do not outsource Fargo digital marketing services, including PPC management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services since we have our own internal advertising team.
• 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 Fargo company! While we often provide complete paid advertising management services for small businesses in cities like Fargo, we are also able to augment the marketing departments of large corporations in Fargo and beyond.

We hope you consider our company when searching for a PPC advertising agency for you Fargo small business or large corporation. 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.