Hugh-Peter Ward

Wondering why you aren’t getting the PPC results you expected or thinking about starting online advertising for your business? Then this free 26-paged guide I wrote might be just what you need. 📘 "The Ultimate Guide to Online Success - From Compelling Stories to Sales Tactics: Steps to Prepare for Online Advertising"! 📘 Why should you be interested in this guide? Many businesses jump straight to online advertising without covering the fundamentals. The reality is that Google, Meta, and LinkedIn ads won’t work if you lack compelling, cohesive brand messages, have a poorly navigable website, and don’t provide trust signals or social proof, among other things. This guide offers a straightforward checklist to cover all the bases for online success. 💡 What are your online growth tips? 💡 #OnlineMarketing #DigitalSuccess #AdvertisingTips #BrandStorytelling #SalesTactics I'm Dean 👨‍🦲 from AdSuccess - The PPC Growth Experts. I help business leaders increase online sales and generate leads, focusing on Google, Meta, and LinkedIn Ads, as well as E-commerce, particularly in the health & sports, home & furniture, and professional services markets. Connect with me to learn more!

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PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising can seem like the perfect way to drive traffic and grow your business - sounds great in theory, right? But as Tony Restell highlights in his latest post series, PPC often doesn’t deliver the results businesses are hoping for. And for small businesses, that frustration when your marketing spend doesn’t deliver can be all too familiar. 👇 Take a look at Tony’s post below to learn how to avoid common PPC pitfalls. If you’ve tried PPC before, what worked for you - and what didn’t?

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Why you need SEO - Social sizing - Crazy canonicals | The Filter This week’s episode comes to you from sunny Norwich! Sign up for The Filter here - https://lnkd.in/ezyZ-9Sg

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How often should you review your Google Ads accounts? This is one of the most frequently asked questions I receive when onboarding new clients, and for good reason. With Google's new AI features and changes to match types pushing users towards broad match, it's crucial to actively review the 'search terms' your business is showing up for. Of course, my answer often falls to the age-old "it depends." Small accounts with fewer search terms may not need as much review as larger accounts running multiple tests to push through different phases of the customer journey. Our rule of thumb is to check an account every 3 days or so. The main things we look at when we review campaigns on this schedule are the search terms report, focusing on these two items: 1. Negative keywords to add that have no relevance to our clients' products/services 2. Long-tail search terms that we can add to our ad groups to better personalize our campaigns We then follow a weekly, monthly, and 60-day checklist with more granular items to check. This doesn't mean constantly fidgeting and tweaking your campaigns. It's just a way for us to keep a pulse on campaign performance and guide them to success rather than making massive daily changes. I hope this helps anyone getting into Google Ads! For those who have been working in Google Ads for some time, what are your thoughts on our approach to Google Ads account audits? --- Hi! I'm Nick — founder of Well-Oiled Marketing. I help busy marketers grow their businesses with paid media and data-driven strategies. If you found this post helpful, Give it a like 👍 and follow me for more tips on how to use paid media to grow your business.

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One of the biggest mistakes we're seeing agencies make from our audits right now 👇🏻🚩 It's nothing to do with who the agencies are targeting. It's who they're not excluding... We're seeing countless "retargeting" campaigns set up with lengthy hot audiences and NO exclusions 🤦🏼‍♂️ Anyone can get a great ROAS from a campaign retargeting all website traffic in the last 180 days (with fairly high buying intent as it stands). With the way attribution works, Meta will undoubtedly take credit for purchases that were already happening/happened. Exclusions aren't a silver bullet but it will certainly help you find NEW customers rather than dumping thousands into existing customers that were already going to purchase regardless of the social ads. ✅ Set exclusions (e.g. web visitors or purchasers) to help find new customers. ✅ Use the new "Existing Customer Budget Cap" feature to lower the amount allocated to existing customers (around 15%-20% is where we've set most campaigns to).

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562% year-over-year (YoY) SEM revenue increase {Case Study} We've all been there—pouring thousands into PPC with little return. Ecommerce apparel brand 686 faced this, needing a creative boost to improve their 160% ROAS to 350-400%. Despite the saturated market, they leveraged their unique selling points and customer persona to refine their strategy. Strategies: Location-based targeting: they refined 686's PPC campaigns to focus on U.S. areas where people benefit most from cold-weather products. Remarketing: To cultivate the buyer's journey, they launched an aggressive remarketing strategy on Google’s Display Network and Facebook, adding touchpoints to boost conversions. Optimized shopping campaign and product feed: They revamped 686's product feed with eye-catching photos and clear pricing to boost SERP conversions. The results: - 562% year-over-year (YoY) SEM revenue increase - More than 186% conversion rate increase - 303% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) - 67% reduction in cost per conversion #digitalmarketing #marketing #socialmediamarketing #facebookads

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Remarketing not seeing the desired numbers?   We're running a Google Ads remarketing campaign for a client and they're seeing a return of around 500%, which is not bad at all for their industry.   However when you actually break this down and look at the “View Through Conversions”, it's painting a very different picture.   View through conversions for this campaign in the last 30 days are sat at whopping 230! So with our clients average conversion value of around $120, we’re actually seeing $27,600 of revenue being indirectly attributed to these campaigns.   So users are seeing our clients ads, not directly interacting with them, but are still coming back to the site and converting via other channels - so we're getting some great visibility on these ads!   Have you checked your View Through Conversions lately? You could well be in for a surprise – let me know! #googleads #remarketing #ads #ppc #display

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"Optimised website using SEO best practices" ❌ If this sentence is in your CV in needs to be REMOVED Clients want detail They want to understand how you think What strategies you've used Why you've used them Did it work? If not, what did you do to fix it? Using a vague sentence to try and cover 4 years of work at a company is not going to land you an interview Especially in the current job market Talk facts & figures ✅ On the lookout? Drop me a message for new roles 🤝

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How did I turn this failing Google Ads campaign for a mobile tyre business in Dublin around from an 8% conversion rate on June 18 to a 33% conversion rate on July 11th? Well with most Google ads campaigns you need to give them time. You need time to build data and time to work things out. You need to figure out what's working, what isn't working and is the landing page converting. From day 1 with this campaign, I used phrase match keywords. This meant Google was showing my ads to more people but it wasn't people looking for what this company does. I let that run for a week to see how it went. It didn't go too well so then I made the switch to exact match keywords. Exact match worked a bit better but there was still something missing. I started making changes to the landing page. Because this campaign targets Dublin which is a large area, I starting adding all the separate areas around Dublin and I added a map of Dublin to the landing page. This worked! The conversions started to increase. The business owner took a risk and raised the daily budget from €30 a day to €100 a day. This gets them 7 or 8 phone calls per day now. They told me their business was failing before this and now things have improved massively. It feels good as marketer when you help out businesses like this and things work out.

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This so much... Always telling clients that technical SEO is so important, we cannot guarantee it will have a huge impact (because we can't guarantee anything especially in silo) but 9 times out of 10 it does make a significant difference to rankings, impressions, and traffic.

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Oh the irony! PPC agencies can't market themselves using PPC: not unless they have huge budgets. But most PPC agency owners don't like using LinkedIn (see RAVING review evidence below 😆). Because it's not data and clicks: it's relationship building and takes time. I have been coaching an agency owner on his LinkedIn over the last few months. He has just won a client that he really wasn't expecting to. How? 😊 We optimised his LinkedIn profile 😊 We offered value to his ideal client 😊 We established trust 😊 He didn't sell 😊 We elevated his profile across LinkedIn 😊 He was generous with his knowledge and his comments and his support for others. 😊 I gave him a list of the ideal people for him to connect with. 😊 I coached him through the relationship-building process. Only 10% of people on LinkedIn actually engage. So as soon as he got more active, he was noticed more. And we made sure his profile was set to encourage people to get in touch off LinkedIn (because senior decision makers often don't engage publicly) In this situation, his client emailed him having seen him on LinkedIn. He sent me this RAVING note... 😆 The new-client funnel is THE most important thing to get right in any business as if your leads dry up, your business dries up. Right? Over 70% of people who sign up to my email newsletter have never engaged with me on LinkedIn... yet this is the only place I market my business... How crazy is that?!

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SEO and PPC are a match made in heaven 🤝👼 So much so that you can effectively explain how both work in the marketing funnel at the same time... 🤯 Don't believe me? Check out my most recent YouTube video where I do just that 😉 📈 Click the link in my headline for it 📈 This is my first like "whiteboard" sesh and I think I will make more like this... Let me know if you like it 👇 #digitalmarketing #seo #ppc #marketing #youtube

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Do you know how long it takes your customer to buy? Good news, some recent updates to Google Ads Performance Max campaigns can help. In case you missed it, you can now segment the data of your asset groups into new categories to compare and optimise. You can look at a breakdown of your results in for time, click type, network, top vs others and conversions. You can gather insights like whether people prefer to buy or mobile or desktop and which gets the highest return on ad spend. Or times or days of the week which lead to the most profitable purchases, for example if you get most sales on a Sunday or the highest ROAS on a Thursday. My favourite is ‘days to conversions’, where you can break down how many days it takes for a sale. Previously, you could only compare at campaign level, but now you get get much more granular with it 🤓. Scroll for details. >> Are you using this in your campaigns? #GoogleAds #PPC #PerformanceMax

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Manual CPC gets the chicken dinner. A few days ago I posted a poll, curious to see how PPC managers would handle a new account. 42% prefer to start with manual CPC, 35% would prefer to start with Max Clicks. So here’s my take on how I’d structure an account with both of those bid strategies. Manual CPC: Start with phrase match. Keep a very close eye on the SQRs. Add negative keywords, as many as you can that makes sense. Start your bids just below First Page Bid. Slowly increase your bids. If any keywords convert, give an extra 20% bid increase. Max Clicks: Start with exact match. Set up a max CPC in either the campaign level or portfolio bid strategy. Watch your SQRs, add as many negatives as makes sense. When your campaign is converting around 30 convs/month consistently, swap to Max Conversions or target CPA/ROAS strategies. If you follow a different Google Ads strategy, we’re all ears!

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So, you’re running a Feed Only Pmax campaign on Google Ads and you’re like “Yeah I’m tapping into Google Shopping without the other crappy Google media 💥” Think again! Do yourself a favour and have a look at your placements report in the Report Editor (remember one of the first reports Pmax allowed you to do a few years ago?). This screenshot is from a client of mine running Pmax Feed Only. Admittedly other accounts aren’t this bad, but you better check your account to find out. 👀 #googleads #ppc #pmax #visiblity #transparency #google #digitalmarketing

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This is a lemming 🐁 They follow each other and jump off cliffs. (a misconception but humour me!) The Google Ads recommendations are like your PPC Lemming. Follow them and watch your ad performance potentially plummet. There is a misguided belief that applying Google Ads campaign recommendations will improve performance. That a high Google Ads optimisation score means a successful campaign. This isn’t always true. I’ve run campaigns with an optimisation score of 100% which have performed poorly. And I’ve run campaigns with a score of 70% which have run extremely well. The optimisation score is not a measure of success. It is a measure of how many of Google’s best practices you have implemented. And Google’s best practices may not be the best practices for your particular campaign. So does this mean you should ignore the recommendations? Not necessarily. Some best practices, such as adding site link extensions or adding images to your ad can improve performance. However, apply your due diligence with other recommendations - especially those that suggest increasing your budget. (I’ve never seen a recommendation to decrease budget - Google is a business after all!). If Google is telling you to increase your budget, check out your Search lost impression share (budget). This is an estimate of how often your ad didn’t show on the search network due to low budget. This is a better indication of whether or not to increase the budget. And personally, I would never increase the budget by more than 20% at a time. Otherwise you risk upsetting the algorithm. Google Ads recommendations reflect their best practices, not your potential for success. Do your due diligence and don’t follow the PPC Lemming! 🐁 #ppc

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Bing Ads are sunsetting manual CPC bid strategy and defaulting to enhanced CPC as of 30th April. If you're keen to keep your CPC below a certain level, your base bids will still be honoured. Don’t usually see Bing make a move like this before Google! Interesting

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👀 Are you ready to roll your eyes... Google delays cookie phase-out until 2025. A further delay marks the 4th time that the cookie deprecation deadline has been delayed, a move that will dramatically transform how a large proportion of ads are targeted on websites. I can't say that I'm surprised as this is a huge undertaking. However, now is the time to make sure that you're ready for this industry-changing move by Google. The question is, are you ready for it? #GoogleCookies #Cookies #WebBox

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