When we discuss marketing strategies, sales performance, and other business strategies, there's always one underlying motivation - profit margin.

It doesn't matter how stellar your performance is, if the business is not making money, there is no business. Though we typically discuss techniques that ultimately contribute to increasing your profits, sometimes you need to focus on the basics.

Today, you're going to learn how to increase profit margins for your small business quickly. These basic changes should increase your cash flow and allow you to do more with your brand down the line.

How to Increase Profit Margins in Small Business?

Pandemic has taught us many things, including the value you drive from minimalism. So, apart from the crucial metrics like sales performance, it's time to discuss a few intelligent strategies that will cut wasteful practices and increase your profit margins with a high degree of certainty.

Strategy 1 - Get Rid of Unnecessary Operating Expenses

If there's been one benefit for businesses over the last two years during the global crisis, it's an increased focus on the essentials. More companies are eliminating unnecessary overhead by getting rid of the fancy offices, excess equipment, and superfluous expenses.

However, getting rid of the office isn’t necessarily a strategy that every business can utilize. Nevertheless, every business typically ends up with unnecessary spending through one of the following ways:

• Overstaffing for certain roles or tasks within the business
• Paying for unnecessary services / paying for higher subscription plan tiers than necessary
• Extending business hours beyond what’s worthwhile
• Poor efficiency in shipping and receiving
• Poor strategies & time management

As you can see, your business can quickly rack up its cost of daily operation in numerous ways. If you’re serious about increasing your profit margin, then it’s time to get very critical when it comes to the company’s strategies.

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Implement a plan to observe the daily tasks performed by employees. If you have any persons on your team that are not essential, then you have the tough task of relieving that employee of their duties. In some cases, it can be more affordable to assign more tasks to an essential employee with the promise of increased compensation and a title change. However, only do this if it does not harm overall productivity and company efficiency.

If your business is open for 12 hours a day, but typically only sees worthwhile business during 10 of those, consider cutting your hours to avoid paying operating costs beyond what's necessary. Alternatively, you can close the business to the public for the remaining time and allow employees to focus on internal tasks if it helps you to better achieve your goals.

Finally, you must maximize your efficiency when it comes to your shipping department. The longer it takes you to ship an order out of your warehouse after a purchase, the more you're spending on overhead costs. Keep your business agile, improve your workflow, and trim the fat wherever possible. Effective e-commerce order management can streamline your operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and directly contribute to your profit margins.

Strategy 2 - Better Forecast Customer Demand

This strategy bleeds into what we discussed above in regards to shipping and receiving. If your company consistently finds itself with more product on hand than what's being ordered, you need to revise your forecasting strategy.

Not only are you paying for more product than you are selling, but you are also paying overhead costs to store that excess product until it's ordered. If you work in a business that deals with fresh goods and expiration dates, you're losing money to product you'll never be able to sell in time.

This can be a tricky issue to solve as you also don't want to be a brand that's continuously out of stock of in-demand products. A way to solve this is to provide customers with alternative ways to order products such as direct home delivery with free shipping. Customers then have a way of spending their cash with your brand and securing the product, walking away satisfied.

Ultimately, this all comes down to continuously refining your production process. You want to minimize the time between production and sale to be as minimal of a period as possible. It's also okay to keep some surplus inventory on hand for emergencies but avoid overspending as much as possible.

Strategy 3 - Cut Low-Margin Products or Services

Continuing on the topic of inventory management, we also recommend that company's cut any low-margin products or services from their offerings entirely.

It's a natural thing for companies to want to offer their customers a large and competitive selection of offerings. However, if you're not getting a worthwhile ROI when producing and supplying certain goods, then it's ultimately not worth the expense.

You will be better suited to utilize that effort and spending to further market and produce your best-selling goods or services. For small businesses, you will often find better success in specializing in a few offerings as opposed to being average in many things. You might lose a small number of customers in the process, but the math shows that the expense reduction is worth more than the minimal number of sales gained otherwise.

Strategy 4 - Cross-Selling and Upselling

Cross-selling and upselling are staples for increasing profit margins for good reason.

Cross-selling is the practice of selling additional products or services that have a direct relation to the product or service the customer is already purchasing. For example, if a customer is already in the process of buying a computer, you could attempt to cross-sell keyboards, mice, monitors, mousepads, and much more.

Upselling, on the other hand, is the practice of convincing a customer to purchase a more expensive, premium version of a product or service they're already set on buying.

While both focus on different aspects of sales, both strategies are meant to capitalize on individuals that have already tipped over to become buyers in the sales process. Consider two different customers at polar opposite ends of the buying process:

Customer A is simply learning about computers and prices available from various brands. He/she is likely looking for the best product and the best value.Your brand still needs to market to them and convince them to make a single purchase from you. If you suddenly ask them to pay more without initially persuading them, you're simply likely to make them turn away.

‍Customer B has already chosen your brand and added their brand-new PC to their cart. They already have their credit card in hand and are clicking through the checkout process.If you were to show them a slightly upgraded version of the PC or suggest some affordable, add-on products, they'd be more inclined to buy. To someone spending $100, spending $10 more often seems insignificant.

This is all a part of segmenting your target audience and marketing to them appropriately. Not only is upselling or cross-selling to the wrong person a fruitless effort, but you'll also end up spending more of your marketing budget than is worthwhile. However, if you target the right customers with additional offers, there's a great chance you can sell more with minimal effort.

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Strategy 5 - Increase Your Prices

This is the strategy that typically scares company owners away, but it can often be a necessity.

Let's face it. When a business raises the price of its products or services, it's an inevitability that it will lose some customers that get priced out. It's even scarier if your closest competitors continue to sell at lower prices despite rising overhead costs for everyone.

However, a pricing change can also spell success if you do your research.

First, if you already have a strong customer base, a slight price hike is going to be unlikely to scare them away. Any price increase is disappointing, but communicating your reasoning for the change effectively can help quell any strife. Your hard work in nurturing and taking care of your best clients will be rewarded here.

“Some price optimizations were successful and others weren’t. But the ones that we communicated well were always value-driven.” – Yamini Rangan, Chief Executive Officer, HubSpot

If this isn't enough, consider any low-cost additions or upgrades you can add to your products or services to sweeten the value without adding much of an additional expense. If customers can correlate a price rise to more/better products or services, they'll generally be more agreeable to pay.

Finally, you can pivot your brand marketing to focus on highlighting the quality of your offerings. No matter your industry, there are always brands that can maintain a loyal following with the understanding that they are paying a premium price to engage with your brand.

Of course, price increases should ultimately be avoided if your research shows that the effect of the potential client loss outweighs the potential profit margin increase. Exercise caution with this strategy, but know that many brands continue to implement it to great effect.

What is a Healthy Profit Margin for My Business?

If you were to try and get a general answer for any business, you're likely to hear around 10%. However, this is not exactly helpful as typical profit margins vary greatly depending on your industry.

Thankfully, the NYU Stern School of Business provides us with the latest average profit margins in the United States as of January 2022 here. As you can see, gross margins can fluctuate by the tens, placing a much greater focus on the success of businesses in the same field as yours.

The general rule is that a sub-10% profit margin is low, with 10 being the average, and above 20 is exceptionally high. More importantly, the sign of a successful business is to see a steady increase in your profit margins each year that you stay in operation.

Conclusion - Boosting Profit Margins is a Constant Analytical Effort

All of the above strategies are regularly utilized by businesses every year to increase their earnings. Some of these tips are great rules to operate by for any business including cutting unnecessary expenses, accurately forecasting demands, and upselling customers when possible.

Further improvements to your margin will take closer analysis and testing to ensure the best results. While cutting unnecessary staff can help in the short term, you might also hurt performance or productivity if you find your company too short-staffed.

Finally, increasing company prices can bring in more revenue, but do so with caution. Create a careful strategy to support your price hikes as to not alienate the customers that allow you to stay in business. With the right data to back up your decisions and the right strategy to support them, you can add small percentages to your profit margins in several areas over time.

Building a marketing plan is essential if you want your brand to survive in the digital landscape.

The shocking reality is that many brands are unaware of what a marketing plan is or looks like. What results is much-wasted effort and budget throwing tactics at the wall to see what sticks.

Your marketing strategy doesn't need to look like this. Every business goal is far more attainable than you think as long as you have the right marketing strategy outline that works for your team.

Let's dive into what a true marketing plan is and what you can do to start creating a marketing plan template today.

What is a Digital Marketing Plan?

A digital marketing plan is a blueprint of your business objectives and how you intend to use digital marketing channels to achieve them.

A well-formatted plan should include a realistic timeline for near and future business goals. It might also include mini-objectives you can use along the way to chart your progress and navigate potential pitfalls.

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With a marketing plan template in place, all members of your team should have a clear vision of how best to use their marketing channel and specialty to help the brand reach its destination. It should also reveal ways for various mediums to synergize for a greater impact on your ideal customer.

Building a Marketing Plan

With this definition in mind, you may have a better overall idea, but still need some instructions as to where to begin.

Thankfully, creating a marketing plan is not so daunting as long as you follow a basic, proven template that's helped countless businesses achieve marketing success online. First, we'll start with the basics and then expand on key ideas as we learn more about the process.

Step 1 - Conduct a SWOT Analysis of Your Current Business Status

First, let's define a SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for Strengths,ā  Weaknesses,ā  Opportunity,ā  and Threat.ā  It's a popular planning strategy that helps individuals choose how to best attack a personal or business project. You may also hear this referred to as situational analysis.

The reason for the popularity is that this template allows you to immediately identify four key factors that most heavily impact any plan and its potential outcome. Let's look at how this applies to a business marketing plan.

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A. Strengths

What is your company's greatest strength? This can highlight your best products and services, your best marketing channels, access to greater ad budgets, and so on. Any company asset or utility that can give you a leg up in achieving your goals can be classified as a strength.

B. Weaknesses

Conversely, which areas leave your company most vulnerable? You need to be completely honest and assert which offerings are not competitive and which areas of your current team require improvement.

Turning these weaknesses into strengths can be a long-term goal, but are ultimately things you want to keep at the forefront of your mind so that you can plan for potential problems.

Both your company strengths and weaknesses are a direct result of factors you can actively control within the team.

C. Opportunities

On the other hand, your opportunities and threats are the direct result of factors outside of your immediate control. This includes the potential customer base and the direct competition that poses a threat to your overall success.

Opportunities can come in many forms. Is there a particular demographic that expresses interest in problem solutions that your brand can solve? That demographic is now an opportunity.

It can also include economical changes, events, or even physical proximity to a customer base with high potential. Consider everything happening at the community level, nationally, or even internationally that might set your brand up for unique opportunities that otherwise would not be as prevalent.

D. Threats

Finally, your threats would be the same forces of opportunity but are actively working against your success. Perhaps the employment crisis as a result of COVID-19 leaves your target consumer with less money to spend on your product. This is an easily-identifiable threat to your brand.

Brainstorm every community and environmental factor that's relevant and classify them as either an opportunity or a threat. This will come in handy when building your actual plan.

Finally, and perhaps the most important part of threat analysis is to closely examine direct competitors. You'll want to remain acutely aware of their offerings as well as the strategies being implemented in their digital marketing plan. You'll want to be less reactionary and more proactive in creating your digital marketing strategy that can capitalize on the competitors' weaknesses.

With all of this initial data accumulated, we can then proceed to the next steps in creating a digital marketing plan.

Step 2 - Define the Ideal Customer Persona - Then Segment Your Audience

The upside to performing a company situation analysis first is that it can help you get a leg up with this next step.

Every brand has its ideal customer persona. This is the fictitious profile of an individual that naturally stands to benefit the most from your offerings. Your products or services help the individual solve a problem, and your pricing conveniently meets their income level and buying habits.

Essentially, you want to consider your lineup of offerings and think about the group(s) that would genuinely benefit from them. If you run a landscaping business, it wouldn't make much sense to make a marketing plan that sells to apartment renters. Instead, you might want to target the associations that own those buildings. You could also target homeowners if you observe a need for your services in local neighborhoods and income levels that support that need.

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Beyond realizing your ICP, you'll then also want to start segmenting your audience. Realistically, your team will be able to come up with several different groups that stand to potentially benefit from your brand. You'll need real marketing data to determine the strongest buyer group, but that will come later.

Segmenting your audience is essential for marketing success as online marketing channels become overly saturated. When users are flooded with ads daily, they're more likely to click away from anything that's not highly personalized.

When you segment your target audiences by age, gender, income levels, living status, or personal interests, you're better poised to market-specific sections of your offerings to the groups. This will result in running multiple campaigns and ad groups simultaneously, but the clicks you receive will be from more qualified customers.

Step 3 - Create Immediate and Long-Term Objectives

We now have our results from our SWOT analysis and understand the type of customer we want to emphasize in our marketing plan. Now is the time to start visualizing and creating an objective roadmap.

While long-term goals such as achieving X profit by the end of the fiscal year is great, creating several smaller objectives will help you better chart your progress. If you aren't hitting your smaller objectives, you'll be more agile in identifying problems and coming up with new solutions. Setbacks are inevitable for every business and planning for them is what sets a successful business apart from a failing one.

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It's ultimately up to you to define the goals you want to achieve as they are contingent upon your business plan. However, all of your goals should be realistically achievable, measurable, and have firm dates for completion. You may want to boost brand recognition on social media channels, increase your email listing subscribers, or achieve a certain ROI progressively over the entire year.

Defining your goals is crucial in creating a marketing plan as all great digital marketing occurs as the result of experimenting, measuring, and optimizing. If you don't have the means to achieve a goal or a way to measure performance, you have no feedback loop to help you guide future business efforts.

Step 4 - Position Your Products and Services to Sell

This one's a bit trickier to get into place as your business will naturally have limitations regarding what it can offer the customer. However, it doesn't matter how much of a demand there is for a product if your selection costs more than the average customer can spend.

Getting your pricing right, however, is only one piece of the puzzle. Consumers will be critical of product/service selection, as well as the quality or build of those offerings. You need to find the best middle-ground of satisfying customer demands without overextending your budget or capabilities.

This will all tie back into identifying your ideal customer as well as the direct competition. Your brand will be best positioned to sell more if it offers one or more of the following:

• Better pricing
• Better quality
• Better customer service
• A better selection of goods
• A selection of goods that differs from competitors

Not only will product positioning help you connect more with existing audiences, but it can also help you branch out and market to new groups that were initially less qualified. A strong foundation for your brand will help you to achieve both short and long-term goals when it comes to new customer acquisition.

Step 5 - Create an Action Plan for Each Marketing Channel

So far in our digital marketing plan, we have:

• Identified the company’s strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities
• Discovered our ideal customer(s)
• Established the business goals we want to achieve through digital marketing
• Established an attractive product and service lineup

The final step is to utilize this well-earned data and use it to guide our digital marketing campaigns. The marketing channels you choose to use will be contingent upon your resources and budget.

For new brands looking to make immediate customer acquisitions through spending, you will want to consider utilizing PPC campaigns on popular platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. The CPC offered through these channels is relatively low and will also allow you to collect a wealth of data from your audience segments.

For long-term growth and brand awareness, you'll want to start bolstering your website's SEO and content. Blogs are an exceptional way to boost your search rankings and make for great content to share on your social media accounts.

While brands would benefit from leveraging every digital marketing channel, it's important to create a realistic plan for the ones you intend to use. Study up on each channel and consider how you can use them to help you achieve your short and long-term goals. Set up micro-conversions and custom goals to help you track your progress along the way.

Bonus Step - Continuously Monitor and Optimize Your Campaigns!

With your digital marketing plan in place, know that your job is far from over. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving game and you shouldn't be surprised when best practices change not long after you've created a new plan.

Thankfully, most digital marketing platforms feature convenient smart automation tools that allow for better optimization and tracking. However, your team will still need to monitor this data and use it accordingly to help you achieve sales and growth. Anticipate changes and trends ahead of time and pivot your creatives as you go or else you'll fall behind.

This new data creates a feedback loop that will bring you back to earlier steps in the digital marketing planning process. If you're struggling to achieve goals, use your new data and circle back to your ideal customer or goal objectives. Modify your strategy and work your way forward once more.

With meticulous attention to detail and continued effort, you'll have a living marketing plan that will help you achieve your business goals.

Creating a sales culture is a challenging task for every business.

We’re not talking about simply landing big clients and closing profitable deals. Those are the rewards you can obtain after you do the hard work of building a sales organization that will succeed.

Sales culture ideas refer to things such as team synergy, creativity, and promoting values that foster a healthy, motivational, and productive sales team.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to build a sales team that inspires current employees to succeed and for newcomers to join with pride. Help your hardworking digital marketing team reach the finish line by supporting them with a dynamic sales team that knows how to deliver results.

What Does a Quality Sales Culture Look Like?

Before we can dive into how to create a better sales culture, we first must define positive sales culture traits. To better understand why those positive traits are essential, we should also examine the traits of a harmful sales environment that are unfortunately all too common.

What qualities do you think of when you are presented with an opportunity at a sales-focused team or company?

If the company is successful and with a team that boasts a strong track record, you can likely expect the following qualities:

• Strong, well-defined sales strategies shared and implemented by the entire team
• Mistakes are encouraged, not shamed
• Team members are given personal freedom to develop their own techniques
• New ideas are shared as part of a collaborative effort
• A team-first mindset
• Strong compensation that includes benefits (bonuses for employees that excel)
• Humility and an eagerness to learn regardless of experience or tenure
• Team competitiveness that is encouraging, not destructive

While these sales culture ideas might seem like a no-brainer for what you want your company to look like, it’s quite often not the reality. Instead, we see many negative sales culture ideas that perpetuate and look more like this:

• A lack of structure, project management, or a cohesive vision for the company or its goals
• Employees rarely try new strategies as mistakes are severely punished by management
• Heavy micromanagement regardless of performance
• Team members withhold new ideas to distance themselves from others for personal gain
• A me-first mindset
• Poor compensation and unreasonable expectations that emphasize survival instead of growth and success
• Superiority complexes and actively discouraging new members from speaking up or participating
• Toxic competitiveness that celebrates an individual at the expense of others in the company

It can seem like an easy task to avoid these common pitfalls of toxic sales culture if you know what to avoid.

However, many of these negative characteristics end up falling into place because of how closely sales culture can toe the line. What can start as a friendly competition to encourage better performance from all can turn destructive quickly. Before you know it, members of the team will dread coming to work until they inevitably quit and leave you shorthanded.

While it’s the responsibility of all to create the healthy work environment they want to see, much of these ideas start and end with quality management.

If you find that your sales team is constantly battling a high turnover rate, burn-out of employees, and overall poor performance, it's time to self-reflect and look at some proven strategies you can implement to reinvigorate and build a high performance, healthy sales team.

How to Build a Healthy Sales Culture?

While sales-oriented companies face the high stress of deadlines and reaching critical goals, none of it is possible without your team. With that in mind, a healthy sales culture starts by building a strong foundation that allows each individual to succeed on their own and as a part of a unit.

As a manager or company owner, it's your responsibility to not just coordinate the sales team, but to understand and motivate your employees to reach their full potential. To achieve this, start by tackling the following issues and allow the results to speak for themselves.

1. What is the Goal for the Individual/Team/Company?

Of course, the company's goal is to increase its profits. However, what does that mean to the individual sales rep and the entire team?

Sit down with the leaders and decision-makers at your company and consider what goals you need to establish for your sales team. This is good practice for any work environment, not just sales. Humans tend to work more efficiently when they have a clear understanding of what's expected of them as well as a goal to aspire to achieve.

Having clearly-defined goals can also immediately quell any potential for issues between team members. If the overall goal is for the entire team to reach a monthly sales quota, it naturally creates motivation for each person to carry their own weight. If someone is underperforming or struggling, it benefits them to connect with their teammates and understand what works and what does not.

It also sets up a more natural opportunity for you to identify areas for improvement among individual sales reps. This allows management to approach team members to discuss potential issues without leaving them feeling blindsided.

2. Identify the Cause for Employee Turnover

In sales-oriented environments, unexpected resignations or firings can place undue stress on the team and the company in a hurry. Unfortunately, a problem like high turnover rates is not always easy to identify. However, you can take steps to control things on the company side that encourage employees to stay on board and perform to their full potential.

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First, consider the current level of compensation your company offers. Speak with your team members and interview former employees regarding their reason for leaving. If compensation is an issue that is repeatedly brought to attention, you can guarantee that it will be a motivation-killer.

Again, your company cannot achieve success without a strong team. Take care of your sales representatives so that they take care of you.

Of course, not all companies can offer the best compensation in the industry. This is why it's also essential that you communicate expectations for duties and compensation when recruiting and hiring for the role. Never mislead employees about expected pay and do not bait-and-switch new hires by demanding more responsibility than what was agreed upon.

Finally, reassess your interview and hiring process overall. Your role expectations and compensation may be fair and competitive, but you still can end up hiring the wrong person for the role. Though it will take longer to be thorough and interview more candidates, it will pay off in the long run when you do not have to repeat the process.

Using tools like Personio can assist in managing employee data and tracking turnover rates. Additionally, exploring alternatives to Personio can provide options that might better suit your company's specific needs and budget.

One employee's resignation can be reflective of the person. Multiple resignations that lead to a high turnover rate are almost certainly a sign of problems on the company side that you must address immediately.

3. Foster Communication and Collaboration

While micromanaging your employees is a bad idea, that's not an excuse for you to be absent and avoid communication. As the team leader, you can help to facilitate the type of sales culture you want to see by being an active part of it.

Common strategies for promoting better communication and teamwork are to schedule regular meetings between you and your sales team. These can be short, daily get-togethers or weekly sitdowns that offer a brief reprieve to destress and discuss the week's activities.

These types of meetings are opportunities for you to encourage the type of democratic environment you want from your sales representatives. They also present opportunities for learning and development that everyone can benefit from equally.

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If your employees see you elevating team members because of their successes and helping struggling employees to do better, they will follow your lead.

Be sure to stress that while personal performance is desired and admirable, overall team success is what allows the company and everyone involved to reach new heights.

4. Establish Trust and Respect

Something that often goes overlooked is establishing implicit trust between yourself and the sales rep. Even if the expected duties are reasonable and the compensation is fair, employees will notice a lack of trust or respect and grow to resent you for it.

It's one thing to check in on a struggling team member, but repeatedly hassling someone with a great track record is a great way to make them check out mentally. Establishing and maintaining that level of trust and respect falls to you.

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As mentioned previously, avoid micromanaging any of your employees. While your company should have defined goals and establish helpful strategies, remember that you hire new employees for their talents, knowledge, and experience. If the sales rep is hitting their marks and keeping customers happy, trust them to get their work done like a professional. If they have an issue, they will let you know.

That leads to the second aspect of building trust. If an employee comes to you with feedback, even if it's tough to swallow, always be willing to listen. Even as an experienced manager, you are not without faults and can just as easily make mistakes. While every company has a hierarchy, you're ultimately two individuals working together to achieve the same goal.

Listen to your team members, respect their voices, and approach serious discussions with a level of preparation. As long as you remain fair, reasonable, and respectful, your employees will notice and provide you with the same treatment in return.

5. Allow Fun in Your Sales Culture

Finally, encourage your sales team to not only work hard but take time to enjoy themselves. We all spend a significant portion of our lives in the workplace, often spending more hours with coworkers than we do with families. No matter how great the work environment is, this can take a toll on even the best worker if they're dreading every day to be all work, no play.

Think of ways to keep the workplace interesting and exciting. Surprise employees with unexpected breaks to hang out and chat. Use the occasional company funds to provide food or drink for employees just to break up the usual routine. Even minor changeups to the day can help your sales reps break out of that monotonous loop and get reinvigorated for the rest of the day.

Not all the fun needs to happen in the office, either. If your company can afford it, pay your team to take half a day and head out somewhere fun for casual team-building and rapport. These gestures remind us that we're all people striving for the same goals. Most companies will not make the effort to do this, so you can be assured that your employees will thank you for it.

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Don't Just Build a Sales Team - Build a Sales Culture Worth Joining!

In summary, start forming your new sales culture by developing the workplace you'd want to be a part of as a promising sales rep. Employees are rightfully expecting more out of employers, which means much more than just compensation. However, none of these expectations are unreasonable and will lead to a healthier work environment not just for them, but for everyone involved.

If you want a healthy, positive, competitive sales culture, use these strategies to create that exact environment for them to thrive. When your employees are satisfied, they will be loyal to you and work hard to achieve their goals. Never forget that employees are what makes a company succeed and you likely won't go wrong in creating the ideal sales culture.

According to Revealbot's live calculator, the average CPC for Facebook (cost-per-click) currently stands at $0.97 for all campaigns.

We calculate that number from the monthly CPC between February 2021 and February 2022. Facebook Ads are currently trending toward a cheaper rate when compared to recent months as of writing this article.

The question is - is the average cost of Facebook Ads worthwhile in the increasingly competitive digital marketing space?

Below, we'll dive into how Facebook Ads cost is calculated, what rates you can expect for your business industry, and whether or not you should look elsewhere for your PPC campaigns. Finally, we'll provide you with tips as to how you can refine your campaigns to improve your CPL (cost-per-lead) and get the most out of your advertisements.

Facebook Ads Cost - How to Calculate Your Campaign Cost?

Though Facebook isn't keen to provide any hard numbers on costs for industries, they do clearly define how you can calculate the cost.

Of course, their reasoning for omitting hard numbers is because you technically can control your costs through smart use of your Facebook Ads account tools. Careful targeting and smart bidding strategies can certainly lower your overall campaign costs if you know what you're doing.

However, your ad costs are effectively defined by:

• The overall amount spent on the campaign
• Cost of each result you get from the campaign

Technically, you could spend the minimum limit of $1 per day, but you shouldn't expect to get significant results with such a limited budget. The other factor is how many qualified leads you obtain as a result of your total spending.

But, you're not here for theoretical. You want hard numbers. Thankfully, sites like HubSpot offer a basic calculator you can use to estimate your potential costs. However, you'll need an existing campaign history to get a better idea of how your CPC ads typically perform.

Utilizing an experienced marketing fulfillment team can also help you keep costs lower than the industry average. If you need a bit of help in getting a better ROI out of your campaigns, check out DashClicks' Facebook Ads reseller service for more information.

Average CPC of Facebook Ads by Platform

For a more in-depth look at specific Facebook Ads cost by industry, we turn to a study by Wordstream. As of the latest update in February 2022, the breakdown of the average CPC looks like this:

• Apparel – $0.45
• Auto – $2.24
• B2B – $2.52
• Beauty – $1.81
• Customer Services – $3.08
• Education – $1.06
• Employment & Job Training – $2.72
• Finance & Insurance – $3.77
• Fitness – $1.90
• Home Improvement – $2.93
• Healthcare – $1.32
• Industrial Services – $2.14
• Legal – $1.32
• Real Estate – $1.81
• Retail – $0.70
• Technology – $1.27
• Travel & Hospitality – $0.63

These trends make sense with industries like apparel, retail, and tech likely having the widest appeal to the most users due to the necessity and low purchasing costs. Meanwhile, industries with higher barriers to entry such as home improvement, auto, and B2B will typically cost more per click and impression.

Average CPC by Advertising Platform

Next, let’s take a look at estimates of how much you could expect to pay for your PPC ads on competing advertising platforms.

• Instagram – $1.32
• Google Search Ads – $2.69
• Google Display Ads – $0.63
• Twitter – $0.38
• YouTube – $3.21
• LinkedIn – $5.26

These averages are taken from the latest available studies ranging from 2021 to the current month. As we can see, Facebook’s current average CPC remains superior to virtually every advertising platform except Twitter Ads and Google Display Ads.

However, dollars and cents only tell a portion of the story. When examining the potential CPC you can expect to pay when using an advertising platform, you also need to consider the audience and the reach that’s available to you when introducing a new advertising campaign.

Let’s cross-examine this data with recent user counts for each platform. These numbers (in millions) come from an October 2021 study courtesy of Statista.

• Facebook – 2,895 (though, this number is expected to exceed 3 billion in 2022)
• YouTube – 2,291
• Instagram – 1,393
• Twitter – 436

Not included in this study is LinkedIn, which is expected to reach 66.8 million monthly users in 2022. Of course, Google is playing a different ballgame as a world-renowned search engine and accounts for a staggering 92% of search traffic.

While platforms like YouTube and Instagram still feature a higher average CPC or CPV (cost-per-view), you also need to consider the tremendous reach potential it offers over a competitor such as Twitter or LinkedIn. While those platforms most certainly still have their place in paid advertising, there’s a reason why more popular platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Ads are such a mainstay for digital marketers.

Are Facebook Ads Worth it in 2022?

The cost of Facebook Ads is steadily increasing. The average CPC in February of 2020 rested at roughly $0.84, while the average CPC this time last year was about $0.93. As PPC ads become more expensive and are expected to steadily increase further by year's end, are Facebook Ads worth it?

The answer is still a resounding yes.

As far as social media platforms go, Facebook is effectively untouchable when it comes to a global userbase. Their monthly user account is expected to rise year-over-year until at least 2025. While the cost of Facebook Ads is subtly increasing each year, so too is the size of potential audiences around the world.

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Businesses and marketers are aware of this, and this is most certainly the source of rising costs. As the Facebook Ads platform becomes more saturated with competition, you can expect bidding costs to increase accordingly.

A more important figure than the total userbase is the percentage of users that make up the young adult to the middle age range of 25-34. This is Facebook's largest demographic and accounts for almost 32% of its userbase with the 18-24 and 35-44 groups close behind.

Why does this matter? Because this age group represents the largest working-class, and, therefore, the individuals most likely to purchase products that you advertise. Instagram features similar metrics with 31% of users falling between 25-34 and 31% between ages 18-24. However, the dropoff in younger and older age groups is significant, making the platform a bit less viable for certain industries.

With the evidence before us, no other platform offers the level of reach and purchase potential as Facebook. Of course, if you can afford video ads, YouTube also continues to reign supreme as the number one video platform. However, Facebook suggests that their video player is effective, accounting for nearly half of user activity on their platform.

With the potential reach, ease of entry, and complete platform of tools for advertisers, using Facebook for your PPC campaigns remains an obvious choice.

How Do I Deal with Increasing PPC Costs?

While Facebook remains a marketer's PPC platform of choice, the steadily rising costs might not be so insignificant for some companies. For this reason, you'll need to bolster your campaign strategies if you want to avoid overspending and keep costs low, particularly if you're in an industry with higher acquisition costs.

The good news is that rising CPC costs do not necessarily mean you need to drastically increase your ad budget to reach your campaign goals. Instead, we need to closely analyze the latest trends we're seeing with paid ads to determine what prompts users to click more frequently.

Here are some vital tips to keep in mind when creating or updating an existing campaign.

1. Get Up Close and Personal

With the Facebook platform becoming more saturated, general, surface-level advertisements are less effective than ever.

Consider the user's perspective: if a homeowner sees ten generic landscaping ads when looking at their timeline, there's no particular motivation to click on any one of them. You might see it as a 1/10 chance that they'll click yours, but the truth is that it's even less if no offer that speaks personally to their situation. That's an inefficient way to go about displaying your ads.

Instead, you want to take advantage of the data Facebook automatically gathers from the campaign to continuously refine your targeting and hyperfocus your new ads. You need to examine which groups show the highest level of engagement with your ads and make the effort to speak to those people personally.

While the initial reach can be helpful, it won't amount to much if you don't use that data to further segment your audience into carefully selected groups. In other words, it's not only who might be interested in your brand, but what specific products or services would speak to them directly. Understand the audience, identify their pain points, and deliver the ad that's tailor-made for them.

2. If You're Not Tracking with Facebook Pixel - Get Started Immediately

The Facebook Pixel is a short line of code that you can add to any webpage for better visitor tracking. When someone clicks on your ad, the Pixel can immediately begin to gather data regarding their age, employment status, interests, income level, and much more. It then compiles all of this data for you to use to create more personalized ads as discussed above.

The Facebook Pixel is essentially mandatory for any landing page or sales funnel. Not only does it give data about the user, it can explain the behaviors of users who visit your web page.

Are users spending time on your page only to abandon the sign-up form? You may need to spice up your offer.

Are they getting past initial sign-up only to abandon the process mid-checkout? You need to tighten up that last sell to ensure that users are motivated to seal the deal.

Typically, the businesses that are overspending on Facebook are the ones who are either failing to utilize tracking tools or failing to make proper use of the valuable data that is gathered. It's not an easy or quick process, but your work is never wasted. The more work you put into understanding your audience now will pay off for future ad groups and future campaigns down the line.

3. Nurture Existing Audiences

Much of this article has emphasized the cost and difficulty associated with new customer acquisition. Studies say that it can cost as much as five times more to acquire new customers than to keep an existing one.

However, there's no getting around this fact. A business that can't afford to bring in new customers is a business doomed to fail. This statistic alone doesn't tell the whole story, however. While it's expensive to get new customers to convert, that cost is ideally an investment in much more than a one-time purchase.

For this reason, you want to utilize your Facebook Ads for remarketing as well as for new customer acquisition. It makes sense that if someone is already a customer, then you already have the data you need to help build future conversions. However, you shouldn't assume that a customer will simply buy again, but should actively nurture them and help them discover new offers that appeal to them.

Have you ever clicked on an ad, added an item to a cart, and then left the site because you couldn't decide? You've likely received automated marketing emails designed to nurture you and convince you to make the purchase. This is an excellent example of highly-personalized targeting that's nurturing someone who's already completed several conversion goals. This type of attention to detail is what helps businesses gain even more value out of every new acquisition.

Other examples of effective nurturing strategies might include email lists or getting users to follow you on your regularly-updated social media accounts. These communications might feature your latest promo, but they can also provide free value to the customer in the way of quality content that keeps the relationship feeling personal.

4. Embrace the Video Future

It's a bit of a misnomer to call it the future as the importance of video is already upon us. Earlier in this article, Facebook already reported that video playback accounts for nearly half of the time spent on their website. Another study from Wyzowl purports that 86% of marketers are now utilizing video as a primary tool in their marketing strategies.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth exponentially more. A short, well-produced video can communicate more about your brand and your offer in an ad than an entire page of copy. Users are also more likely to sit through a short clip rather than carefully read important text in your sales funnel.

Video production is also more accessible than ever. Your everyday iPhone is now capable of shooting high-quality video and sound without much effort at all. Upload it to your computer, trim the fat, add in some personal branding, and you have a video ready to go for your next PPC ad. You'll earn more clicks, a better conversion rate, and get e out of your campaign when compared to traditional media channels.

Conclusion - Facebook Ads Are Still the Way to Go!

Facebook Ads costs are increasing year-over-year. While you can expect peaks and valleys, you can expect the average CPC to go up in your industry as a result of more advertisers joining up each day.

However, no other platform on the internet offers more global reach nor targets high-purchasing demographics as effectively as Facebook does. Furthermore, even with the rising costs, the average CPC and CPA for a customer on this platform is still lower than virtually every other social media platform.

With that said, with costs expected to rise and challenge smaller businesses, there are still ways to utilize your ad budget effectively. Take advantage of Facebook's tracking and targeting tools to create highly-specific, personalized ads for each segment of your audience. Additionally,Ā make as much of an effort, if not more, to nurture existing customers as you do to acquire new ones.

So long as you put the time and effort into creating the right strategy for your audience, you can continue to remain competitive on Facebook despite the rising costs. Doing so is necessary as few other platforms offer marketers better advantages to date.

Paid search ads are arguably the most powerful way to increase brand awareness and improve your CTR. However, ads require careful keyword research and targeting to connect with the right audiences. Choosing ineffective keywords can result in lost resources that hinder your overall business goals.

That's where dynamic search ads come into play.

Below, we'll help you better understand how to define dynamic search ads, the pros, and cons of using them, and how you can start running your first campaign today.

What are Dynamic Search Ads?

Dynamic search ads are a type of search ad that Google automatically creates based upon the content that already exists on a landing page. After crawling your web page, it then compares your advertised content to other relevant content online. With all of this gathered information, Google can then dynamically generate new headlines in an effort to target new keywords and audiences.

If there are keywords you didn't consider targeting, or if your current content isn't effectively targeting certain terms, DSAs can help you cover all the bases. If your DSAs are able to attract new, high-quality traffic with new keywords or headlines, it can help guide future ad creation and campaign efforts down the line.

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Dynamic Search Ads - The Pros and Cons

Before you hastily dive into your Google Ads account settings, it's important to consider the benefits and drawbacks before making alterations. First, let's take a look at the big positives in regard to why you'll want to consider using DSAs moving forward.

Pro 1 - More Comprehensive Keyword Coverage

Even with the help of SEO keyword research tools like SEMRush or Moz, there are often limitations to what we can achieve. In our efforts to choose smart, highly-targeted keywords, we often overlook relevant keywords that require some outside the box thinking. Further still, your keyword search results likely omit lower-traffic terms in an effort to increase your CTR.

Google's search crawler often knows better.

By turning on DSAs, you effectively have an automated smart tool constantly scanning the web for content related to yours. It's able to rapidly process a tremendous amount of data, look at how those keywords perform and make alterations based on its discoveries instantly. It's like having an expert double- and triple-check your work at all times.

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This is valuable as it can also help you discover lesser-used keywords that happen to show stronger buyer behaviors overall. Even if a term doesn't necessarily have a high search volume, those actually using the term might be your key to gaining higher conversions. This can make these dynamically-discovered keywords more valuable overall.

Pro 2 - Dynamic Ad Targets

Standard search ads base all of their targetings on your chosen keywords. Dynamic search ads have several alternate targeting settings that can help you find new users without entering new keywords.

A. Your Entire Site

One dynamic targeting setting is to utilize the content found throughout your entire site. Google then automatically generates new keyword ideas and headlines based upon any relevant content it finds throughout the domain.

B. Specific Pages on the Site

Using your entire domain might not be ideal for your chosen ad campaign. Instead, you can choose to highlight specific pages on your site that may have content that's relevant to your offer. Select this targeting option to generate new content based upon specific pages.

C. Automatic Categories

Finally, Google can automatically generate a list of categories based upon the content found on your page(s). You can then select as many categories as you'd like from the list to use for further dynamic targeting.

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Pro 3 - Simplified Ad Creation

Finally, ad creation and management can be greatly simplified by turning on dynamic search ads. While your team will still need to do the bulk of the work and create a great foundation, you can automatically generate sexy, new headlines without any effort.

The new keyword and headline generation can also assist with providing motivation for future ads as your campaign progresses. This makes the overall ad management process easier and far more time-efficient if you've got a busy schedule and limited resources.

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With the positives out of the way, let's consider some of the ways that dynamic search ads might adversely affect you and your campaign depending on the circumstances.

Con 1 - Dynamic Search Ads Require Impeccable SEO

Dynamic content generation is contingent upon the content that already exists on the site. If there's too little content, or if that content is poorly written or optimized, then DSAs won't be very helpful.

If you already understand the importance of SEO for your website rankings, then this should not be much of a concern. However, if you're a smaller business that needs to prioritize its marketing resources, you may not have the bandwidth to emphasize both paid ads and SEO.

In other words, DSAs are not a guaranteed solution for every type of company. You'll need to take a look at your overall marketing strategy before you even consider turning DSAs on.

Con 2 - Low-Quality Keywords Might Eat Up Your Budget

While dynamic search ads can potentially generate awesome new keyword ideas that generate clicks, the inverse can also happen. Some of those new search terms may not generate enough volume or conversions to truly be worthwhile when it comes to your limited budget. As a result, those DSAs can actually take away from funds that would be better used elsewhere.

This is particularly important if you're not consistently on top of your DSAs and implementing new negative keywords. Whether you're finding your DSAs to be an improvement or not, you need to be on top of new queries and implement the correct negatives. This will reduce the number of low-quality clicks you get on one of your ads.

Con 3 - Less Control Over the Copy

This con can be mild or fairly severe depending on your company's industry. When you turn on DSAs, you're rendering a lot of creative control over to Google automation. This has the potential to create several issues if you're not highly engaged in selecting the correct ad targets.

First, there is the potential for the auto-generated headlines to not match the actual ad copy. Needless to say, this is a significant issue. However, it's also rare for Google to actually generate any headlines that do not match the body, especially if the content is high-quality and SEO-optimized.

Second, auto-generated text can be an issue if there are specific rules and regulations to what you can and cannot include in copy for your industry. This would apply to businesses in medical, legal drugs, gambling, education, or financial services.

How to Set Up a Dynamic Search Ads Campaign?

With the pros and cons of DSAs in mind, you might decide that it's worth trying out this feature for your new campaign. The good news is that setting up a DSA campaign is extremely simple and requires most of the same steps as a normal ad campaign.

Go through the standard process that you would when creating and establishing a PPC campaign. At the bottom of your Google Ads settings where you establish start/end dates and your ad schedule, you will see a setting for Dynamic Search Ads. You will need to click this dropdown to start setting up the parameters for your DSAs.

You will first need to select the domain you wish to use. This should auto-populate based upon your current settings, but you can edit the URL here if necessary.

Then, you'll need to select a targeting source for the campaign. You can select to use Google's index of your site, URLs from your page feed, or a combination of both. After you make your selection, save and continue to proceed to set up your ad groups, which should now read as dynamic.

This is where you will select the dynamic ad targets we discussed earlier in the article. Remember, you can select your entire site, select specific URLs, or select one or more categories that are auto-generated by Google. You'll want to use the knowledge gained from this article to carefully choose the right targeting option for your DSAs. Avoid using any pages that have no relevance to the campaign content or goals.

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Finally, you'll arrive at a page showing your ads with the new, dynamically-generated headlines. Because you rendered control to Google with the DSA option, you will not be able to edit these. Afterwards, you simply need to save your ads and publish to get started.

Additional Tips for Your Dynamic Search Ads Campaign

You can further improve the quality of your DSA campaign and headlines by taking a few added measures.

First and foremost, you should ensure that each page of your website, particularly the ones being sourced for targeting, feature best SEO practices. This includes providing high-quality content with proper formatting and page layouts such as using the correct header tags and descriptions. Also, be sure to create attractive, informative meta descriptions for each page. Google states that it uses this content in headline generation.

Second, take advantage of dynamic exclusions in the ad group settings. Properly segmenting your audiences is essential for improving performance, and this continues with DSAs. You can set up dynamic exclusions on an ad-by-ad basis or for the entire ad group. Try to target specific groups with each ad group as opposed to targeting everyone all at once. The more refined your targeting is, the better quality your traffic will be for the campaign.

Finally, always take advantage of Google's AI-driven smart bidding feature. This allows you to set a goal for the campaign and Google will automatically strive to meet it. It also helps you avoid overspending on underperforming keywords that are not worthwhile.

Dynamic search ads can be highly impactful for the right business and the right campaign. Consider your industry and campaign needs before making the decision to experiment with dynamic search ads. Then, invest the time in choosing the correct dynamic ad targets to get the best results. Correct use of this feature could elevate your PPC campaigns to the next level.

It's every company's goal to dominate search engine results pages. The problem is that competitive industries make this easier said than done. That's why we lean on paid ad campaigns.

However, don't fall into the trap of burning up your ad budget needlessly. You need to know what will improve your ad quality score and ad relevance to get the best results.

Here are 5 SEM hacks you can use to improve your ad campaigns immediately.

Hack #1 - Perform Better Keyword Research

Keywords are the bedrock of search engine marketing. When a user types your keyword into the search bar, there's a chance that your page will appear depending on its quality and relevance.

Amateurs will make the mistake of simply targeting high-volume keywords without considering other important factors. This will result in your ads getting ignored even if you technically are outbidding the competitor.

For this reason, you need to rethink your keyword research strategy before publishing your latest advertisements. Consider the following ideas when reviewing a list of recommended terms or phrases with your favorite keyword research tool such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz Keyword Explorer.

What is the User's Search Intent?

Every keyword implies a particular search intent. The type of intent generally falls into one of three categories:

• Navigational – The user is looking to go to a website or page. Examples might include “Amazon,” or “DashClicks login.”
• Informational – The user is looking to learn about a topic or acquire information. Examples typically include question words such as “how,” “what,” or “why.”
• Transactional – The user is likely looking to make a purchase. They’re using keywords to target specific products or services such as “best,” “affordable,” or “purchase.”

When researching keywords, think about how a keyword you're considering fits into one of these categories. Compare this to the type of content you're including in your ad campaign. If your campaign is to promote an offer for a specific product, transactional keywords better align your ads with user intent and improve ad relevance.

On the other hand, using an informational keyword might get you initial clicks, but it ultimately doesn't serve the user. This leads to a higher bounce rate and will prompt Google to omit your result even if you're paying a solid value for that keyword. The clicks you do get will likely do little more than waste your budget as those users simply aren't ready to buy.

Your ad campaign doesn't necessarily need to be transactional, however. Promoting informational content about your products or brand is a great way to increase awareness and nurture an audience. Be thoughtful about the keywords you select, even if they do not have the highest search volume.

Don't Forget About Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are terms you can enter to prevent your ads from displaying to users entering unrelated keywords. This is crucial when the keywords you're ranking for as just broad enough to inadvertently attract uninterested audiences.

For example, let's say that a wedding planning business is running ads using the keyword event planner. Technically, a wedding planner is an event planner, but event planner as a keyword can attract users that have zero interest in wedding planning. People use event planners for all types of gatherings and celebrations.

For this reason, you may want to add negative keywords for birthday event planning, private event planning,  etc. This will ensure that any user who uses those negative terms, or any combination of those words, will not see your ad. It's simply a more effective way of targeting your campaign and gaining a more qualified audience.

Don't Forget About Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are long, highly-specific keywords that typically have a low search volume. The last attribute is typically a reason that many will avoid using a long-tail keyword. This is a mistake.

While these keywords do generate fewer clicks, the quality of those clicks is typically much higher. Jewelry is a very broad, vague keyword, but affordable wedding anniversary diamond jewelry targets a highly-specific user. The user that goes out of their way to use that long-tail keyword demonstrates a much higher motivation to engage with your ads and convert.

Long-tail keywords are also highly affordable due to their low volume, meaning that there is little risk. However, when used effectively, that can make a positive impact on your ad campaign results and improve ad quality score.

Hack #2 - Always Research Direct Competitors

Competitor research goes hand-in-hand with keyword research, whether it be for your paid ad campaigns or for organic website content. Even if you curate excellent content that is worthy of a high ad score, your ads still might not get featured if a bidding war ensues.

This is particularly important if you're a smaller business without much SEO history. You can always expect there to be bigger businesses with much larger ad spend budgets than you can currently afford. The last thing you want to do is overpay for keywords and decimate your marketing budget before it actually generates any results.

Instead of always going head-to-head with direct competitors, research their keyword usage and look for opportunities to exploit their mistakes. Most SEO and keyword research software will allow you to quickly research top keywords used by the domain and page you enter. You can use this to come up with new angles to improve ad rank without facing as much direct competition.

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As you begin to improve your page rankings and online presence, you can revise your keywords strategies to incorporate more competitive keywords. Always keep an eye on the CPC (cost-per-click) of keywords over time and leap when the opportunity arises.

Hack #3 - Always A/B Test

Never expect the first draft of your ad to be a smashing success. There's always the possibility, but there's a greater chance that some aspect of your campaign can be improved. In fact, you should naturally look to create new ads and revise old ones as your campaign gathers valuable data from your targeted audience.

The most effective way to determine what parts of your ad campaign work well is to run A/B tests. This allows you to simultaneously run two versions of a similar ad while experimenting with changes to the design or copy.

Furthermore, Google Ads will automatically divert users to the higher-performing version of your ad and landing page once it gathers enough useful data. You can then use this information to determine what aspects of your campaign are grabbing your audience and what you might be able to do to further refine future ads and improve your ad rank.

A significant part of what makes an ad campaign successful is gathering as much useful data about your audience as possible and making use of it. There's no real effective way to do this without A/B testing your ads and landing pages. You can set an ad to turn off after a period if it underperforms, and you'll never need to worry about burning up your budget on a failed experiment.

Hack #4 - Use Automatic Ad Rotation

While setting Google Ads to automatically, you can choose to override this setting to automatically rotate all the ads in a set for equal viewing. While the former strategy can help you focus on the better ad, a regular rotation can potentially provide a better analysis of your entire campaign.

The A/B optimize setting will always display the ad that receives more clicks. More clicks typically mean that Google is going to improve your ad quality score and ad rank. However, as we discussed with keyword intent, more clicks do not always mean that you're earning high-quality impressions. Let's look at an example:

• Ad A - 3,000 Clicks - 600 conversions = 20% conversion rate
• Ad B - 1,000 Clicks - 300 conversions = 30% conversion rate

While this is a bit of a crude example, you can see what we're emphasizing here. While Google might technically give Ad B a lower quality score due to the lower clicks, we can see that it technically was more valuable thanks to its higher conversion rate. More conversions from fewer clicks also mean that we were able to obtain a much better ROI for our campaign efforts.

This creates a dilemma for even experienced paid ads managers. The answer typically lies in the overall goal for the campaign as well as the resources you have available to refine and optimize your ads. Defaulting to the higher click count is a safer bet as it will improve your Quality Score, while still maximizing the use of your ad budget.

However, taking advantage of ad rotation at the right times can be your ticket to establishing a killer marketing campaign. When you obtain more raw data and effectively make use of the knowledge, you have the potential to deliver superior ads than you might otherwise with the alternative method.

Hack #5 - Always Monitor Your Quality Score

As mentioned several times throughout this article, your ad quality score is significant for maximizing your ad campaign efforts.

Google automatically gives every ad you publish an ongoing Quality Score that measures the following:

• Expected clickthrough rate (based upon historical impressions for exact keyword searches)
• Ad relevance (our discussion on keyword and user intent)
• Landing page experience (the value that your landing page brings to the user)

Anyone can access their Quality Score through their Google Ads account and navigate to the Keywords section.

The reason for emphasizing the Quality Score section is that it is your most powerful barometer for gauging the effectiveness of a given advertisement.

Is your ad relevance score low? You likely need to revisit your keyword research and target better keywords with your ads.

Is your landing page experience score low? You may need to A/B test versions of the landing page to determine what's hurting the user experience. The fix may be as simple as coming up with a better call-to-action or there may be more severe issues with the overall design.

Your Quality Score can improve or degrade with time as Google gathers more information from users and learns more about your campaign. However, it's in your best interest to use your score to guide your future campaign behaviors. Without effective analytic analysis, you can expect to waste a lot of time and effort, especially in competitive industries.

To learn some effective tips on how to use your Quality Score to improve ad rank and improve ad relevance, check out this excellent article courtesy of Google.

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Conclusion - Paid Ads Require Care and Investment

In many ways, running a paid ad campaign has never been easier and more accessible for businesses. Tedious, painstaking tasks are now entirely automated through the digital advertising platform. With that said, amassing all of this valuable consumer data will amount to very little unless you invest the time and care in managing your campaign effectively.

Revisit your keyword research, keep an eye on competitors, and take advantage of the automation tools available within the platform. Finally, keep up-to-date with your ad quality score for suggestions on actions you can take to improve your campaign immediately. Doing so will help you to avoid unnecessary ad spending and help you maximize your ROI.