Columbus, OH PPC Agency

Our Columbus, OH PPC Management Services

PPC management refers to creating and optimizing Columbus paid advertising campaigns. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

To provide professional PPC management, a paid ads agency for Columbus 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 Columbus business is much different from how you'd handle it for an ecommerce brand.

Local service providers in Columbus, for instance, are often only interested in good leads. In order to accomplish this, paid advertising 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, then you could start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

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 team has even used sales funnels to help sell products and subscriptions.

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

To be successful with paid advertising, your Columbus business should utilize multiple advertising strategies and marketing tools. For example, the best Columbus paid advertising services will include tactics to:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your Columbus business.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• 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 Columbus-area PPC campaigns, our team also offers Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Hamilton, Kettering, Lakewood, Newark, Springfield, Toledo, and Youngstown small businesses and large corporations a professional PPC management service.

Pricing for Columbus, OH 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 Columbus, OH Businesses

Traffic increases almost instantly with Columbus paid advertising.

Whether a traffic increase results in higher conversions depends on your ads, landing pages, and business model.

The first recommendation we offer to Columbus 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.

Don't blame Facebook or Google if you don't get conversions. It is usually the creatives, campaign settings, or sales process that is the problem.

When everything comes together, paid advertising can be an invaluable addition to the digital marketing strategy of your Columbus company. It's important to keep in mind that increased traffic does not always translate into more conversions.

How We Manage Columbus, OH Paid Ads

With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for local businesses in Columbus, we are a team of paid advertising specialists. Take advantage of our experience across dozens of business industries to help drive traffic and conversions to your Columbus 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, search ads only appear based on what is searched on Google or Bing.

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

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the Columbus roofing company needs to expand their advertising reach? 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 Columbus roofing company what services they want to target more often and where. There may also be a need to broaden the keyword targeting.

For instance, the Ohio PPC manager might discover high search volume for "Bexley, OH roofing companies" or even "Columbus roof repair." First phrase targets a location near Columbus, which may still be in the service area of the Columbus 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.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. These are used to stop your paid ads from showing in search queries that you know won't produce conversions.

A person looking for "free roof repair work" or "how to advertise to roofing companies" is unlikely to buy a roof replacement. 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.

Audience Research

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

Let's take a look at audience research and targeting within Facebook Ads.

In years past, Columbus paid advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. As a matter of fact, one of the most attractive features of Facebook Ads was its ability to collect data on users, which advertisers in Columbus flocked to take 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. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices in Columbus and beyond. This even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

For most Columbus advertising agencies, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. 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 Columbus paid ads agencies using 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.

However, audience research and targeting aren't going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within Columbus ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

Optimizing Landing Pages

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

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign in Columbus, 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?
• Do I have immediate access to a lead form?
• Can you easily identify the call to action?
• How quickly does the page load?
• Does social proof exist?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

Designing and developing a quality landing page involves so many factors.

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

Developing a Sales Funnel

Rather than a landing page, you might want to consider building out a sales funnel. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

We have a client who promotes an online fitness challenge that you can even participate in from Columbus. 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:

• By using squeeze pages, we captured email addresses and raised 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 Columbus 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 Columbus. 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 Columbus.

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

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

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 Columbus 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 Columbus 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 Columbus 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 Columbus 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 Columbus 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 Columbus, OH PPC Campaigns

The options for running paid advertising for your Columbus business are numerous. Let's discuss some of the most common paid ads being run within various business industries in Columbus.

Local Ads throughout Columbus

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your Columbus business. You may find greater success on one platform over another depending on the nature of your local Columbus business. 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.

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. Columbus 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 Columbus, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local Columbus area. This is a little more straightforward, since it really just involves setting up a campaign that has ad sets with geographic restrictions to Columbus as a city, or specific Columbus ZIP codes. For all types of Columbus businesses, we often use Facebook Ads.

Social Ads for Columbus Websites

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

It's important to keep the ad creatives fresh when running 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.

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. 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 Columbus business offers.

It can also be a curse, as conversion rates often drop when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

Search Ads for Columbus Businesses

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

There are some people out there who refer to this as Columbus 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.

If you have been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

Display Ads throughout Columbus

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

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different sizes. 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 throughout Columbus

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your Columbus 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 any ad platform, too.

Shopping Ads for Columbus Ecommerce Stores

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 Columbus storefront.

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 Columbus

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other social networking sites allow you to run video ads.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

It's necessary to have a working Facebook Ads account 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 Columbus paid advertising campaigns.

Free PPC Calculators for Columbus, OH PPC Managers

Our digital marketers are so excited about managing Columbus'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 Columbus, OH PPC Services

Let's work together on paid advertising for your Columbus business! As a full-service PPC management company targeting Columbus, 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 Columbus PPC management companies, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. For those Columbus PPC agencies, campaign optimizations and creative ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.

In researching paid advertising agencies for your Columbus company, there are many factors to consider. The PPC strategies and tactics we suggest for your Columbus company are backed by more than 18 years of experience. These are often the same PPC tactics we use for our own lead generation.

Columbus companies should choose our paid advertising agency because they feel confident we are the right team. 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 paid advertising to bring in traffic from keywords we don't yet rank for organically.
• We do not outsource Columbus 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 Columbus company! We often provide complete paid advertising management services to Columbus small businesses, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger Columbus corporations to fill in missing skill sets.

When it comes time for your Columbus small business or large corporation to start the search for a PPC marketing agency, we hope you keep our team in mind for the task. 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.

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