Toronto, ON PPC Agency

What is Toronto, ON PPC Management?

The act of creating and optimizing Toronto paid advertising campaigns is known as PPC management. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

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

Service providers in Toronto, 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. 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. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense in some cases. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

The next step in Toronto PPC management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. Most Toronto 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.

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

• Promote your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc.) via search engines, social media channels, and third parties.
• Increase revenue for your Toronto business through qualified leads or online sales.
• Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

In addition to managing Toronto-area PPC campaigns, our team also offers Gatineau, Hamilton, Kitchener, London, Oshawa, Windsor, St. Catharines, Barrie, Guelph, Kingston, Milton, Brantford, Thunder Bay, Peterborough, Belleville, Welland, North Bay, and Ottawa small businesses and large corporations a professional PPC management service.

How Paid Advertising Helps Toronto, ON Businesses

The most obvious benefit of Toronto 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.

The first recommendation we offer to Toronto 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.

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

Types of Paid Ads for Toronto, ON PPC Campaigns

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

Local Ads throughout Toronto

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your Toronto business. One platform may be more effective for your local Toronto business than another. 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.

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. 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 Toronto. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies in and around Toronto, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

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

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local Toronto 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 Toronto. Local Facebook Ads are often used by Toronto businesses of all types.

Social Ads for Toronto Businesses

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

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social ads. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. 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 Toronto business offers.

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 Toronto Businesses

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 Toronto Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. This is just a different way of explaining search ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine.

If you have been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. In an October 2022 study from StatCounter, Bing was the primary search engine used by approximately 3.57% of online users.

Display Ads throughout Toronto

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

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

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image 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 for Toronto Businesses

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your Toronto 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 Toronto Ecommerce Businesses

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

In order to get started with Google Shopping, you just need an e-commerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads 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. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

Video Ads for Toronto 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.

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

Video is an excellent ad creative in terms of conversion opportunities. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

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

Toronto, ON PPC Management Services

We are a team of paid advertising specialists with extensive knowledge in the latest PPC trends for Toronto local businesses. Take advantage of our experience across dozens of business industries to help drive traffic and conversions to your Toronto 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 "Toronto Roofer" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a roofing company in Toronto. As a paid ads manager for that Toronto 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 Toronto roofing company wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? In order to solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

Typically, the paid ads manager will discuss with the Toronto roofing company what types of services to target more often. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

For instance, the Ontario PPC manager might discover high search volume for "Etobicoke, Canada roofing companies" or even "Toronto roof repair." The first phrase is targeting a nearby location to Toronto, which might still be in the service area of the Toronto 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. 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. However, they might see your paid ads if you are using 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

In Toronto paid advertising campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. 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, Toronto paid advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which Toronto advertisers lined up to exploit.

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. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior across Toronto and beyond. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

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

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within Toronto ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

Landing Page Optimization

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

We begin by examining the landing pages on any paid advertising campaign in Toronto 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?
• Is there an image above the fold?
• What is the quality of the content? Is it well written?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

Quality landing pages are the result of many factors.

Until you have a landing page that follows best practices, don't spend money on Toronto paid advertising.

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

Including a Sales Funnel

You might consider building out one or more sales funnels instead of a landing page. 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 Toronto. 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 Toronto 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 Toronto. 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 Toronto.

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

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

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 Toronto 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 Toronto 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 Toronto 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 Toronto 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 Toronto 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 Toronto, ON PPC Managers

Our digital marketers are so excited about managing Toronto 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 Toronto, ON PPC Services

We want to be your Toronto team's paid advertising partner! As a full-service PPC management company targeting Toronto, 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 Toronto PPC management companies, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. For those Toronto 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 Toronto business is not an easy task. The PPC strategies and tactics we suggest for your Toronto company are backed by more than 18 years of experience. 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 Toronto 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 sales funnels and paid advertising to shore up our organic search rankings.
• We do not outsource Toronto 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 Toronto company! We often provide complete paid advertising management services to Toronto small businesses, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger Toronto corporations to fill in missing skill sets.

We hope you consider our company when searching for a PPC advertising agency for you Toronto 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