Question 1

"Is my website PPC compliant?" - 10 Things That Might Delay Campaigns

Accepted Answer

In order to satisfy Google, there are a few of their policies that we must abide by as advertisers in order to gain the full scope of the platform's capabilities.

Google's primary goal is to keep its users happy, and Google has a plethora of people wanting to advertise to Google's users. In other words, Google gets to pick and choose which ads they present to their audience.

The bad news is that we have to compete against those other ads. The good news is that Google doesn't discriminate as long as you follow their guidelines and rules.

Individual "Thank You" page For All Forms

Essentially, this means that after a user has completed a desired action on your website (e.g. a purchase has been completed, or someone filled out a form) a "Thank You" page needs to be displayed.

Mobile Responsive

This is a big one. Have you ever visited a website on your mobile phone? We're positive you have. Have you ever visited a site on your mobile phone, only to have the end result be some "zoomed-in" portion of the main website?

Pretty annoying, right?

Google actually pays attention to these kinds of things, and classifies these seemingly minor things as "user experience".

Basically, the better the user experience is on your website, the higher your quality score for your advertisements. This, in turn, leads to happier users and better ad ranking for your advertisements (which oftentimes means more sales).

Site Speed

This is another factor that Google looks at heavily. According to a study done by the website Hubspot, if your website makes you an average of $100,000 a day, a 1-second decrease in page load time can increase your sales by about $7,000.

It seems like such an insignificant detail, but in the hustle and bustle of today's environment, people want things and they want them now.

Moreover, if your site takes too long to load, you run the risk of people bouncing off of your site. That means that they click on your advertisement (you pay for that click) and then they leave the website before it fully loads, before you have a chance to sell them your offer, all because it took just a little too long for the site to load for them.

Again a minor detail, but it has huge consequences.

If you would like to check your current site speed and get suggestions on how to boost the speed, check out PageSpeed Insights by Google.

Privacy Policy

A privacy policy is a requirement that indicates to your website's visitors how their personal information will be stored in your system. Things like website cookies, email addresses, credit card information all fall under this category.

Don't worry, you don't need to pay a lawyer the big bucks to write you one of these. You just need to explain to the website visitor, in a transparent way, where their information is being stored (if at all) and what is being done with that information.

Have A Physical Address On Your Site

This is something that Google looks for to see that you are a legitimate business and not some scammer who's claiming they're in California but really on the other side of the planet.

The benefit of this is that it satisfies Google, but it also makes your website visitors feel more at ease when they are considering purchasing your products/services. It instills trust in your website visitors, and often times more trust equals higher conversions and more sales.

Your Phone Number On Your Site Should Be Coded Text

This is a bit of a more technical detail. Google is very smart, but sometimes it needs some help. Having a phone number on your website is another thing that you can do to instill more trust in your website visitors, and possibly boost conversions.

However, from a technical standpoint, Google can't recognize that phone number if it's in an image and not coded onto the page.

If you have a web developer, they should be very familiar with the difference.

Have An Email Address Listed On The Site

Just like having a phone number and physical location, Google wants you to have a way for website visitors to reach you by email.

Again, just like a phone number, this needs to be coded into the webpage and not an image so that Google can read it.

eCommerce Websites

These next two points are specifically for eCommerce websites that sell physical items.

Have A Published Return Policy

A return policy is standard practice for physical stores, and it should be no different for online stores.

Just like the privacy policy, you don't need a lawyer to create this for you (although, by all means, if you feel more comfortable having a lawyer write it for you, have a lawyer write one for you).

A return policy can be very simple. It just tells the user what to expect should they want to return their item or get a refund. Questions that could be answered include: How long do I have to return my item? What's your policy if my item arrives broken?

Have A Published Shipping Policy

People want to know how long it's going to take for their item to arrive from the moment that the order is placed.

It's always a good idea to set expectation ahead of time. So be sure to tell your website visitors in your Shipping Policy how long it takes to process an order, and what kind of shipping speeds your business offers.

That was a lot! Don't worry though...

These are all seemingly minor things, but the devil is in the details. Not only are you satisfying Google's guidelines by having these things in place, but you are also boosting trust with your website visitors.

Higher trust with your visitors means higher conversions, which means higher sales.

Find out if your website is PPC compliant with a an Action Plan.

Question 2

How to customize the Montessori quiz

Question 3

How to update your lead magnet in the CRM

Question 4

Getting Started - General Overview

Question 5

Getting Started - Connecting Facebook Page

Question 6

How Crucial Is Your Website To Your PPC Campaign?

Accepted Answer

Your website is your online hub. It houses your products, services, and brand on the internet. It is absolutely critical that your website is optimized for user experience when considering PPC, in order to get maximum results.

What kinds of things might you consider when optimizing your website?

Quick Article Summary:

Page Speed
Mobile Optimization
Webpage Layout
Clear Call-To-Actions (CTA's)
Cleary Displayed Contact Information
Separate "Thank You" Pages For Form Submissions
Have Google Analytics Installed
Quality Content

Page Speed

Page speed is the biggest factor when it comes to optimizing your website. If there was 1 thing that you focused on as far as website optimization, it's page speed.

Basically what page speed is just as it sounds. It's how long it takes for your website to load when users click onto any of its pages.

Here's a cool tool called PageSpeed Insights by Google that you can use to test how long it takes for your website to load. It will also give you insights into what you can do to reduce the time it takes for your website's pages to load.

Mobile Optimization

Does your website show up nicely formatted when someone searches for it on a mobile phone or tablet? Or does it look like someone zoomed in to the page, with text flowing off the screen and not wrapping lower to fit the size of the screen?

If you fall into the second category, you might want to take a closer look as to what might be causing this.

In the modern age of instant gratification, if your website is not perfect (or as close as possible) people will leave your website without given it a second chance or a second thought. It's a big issue if your website is not mobile optimized, because you're still paying for those ad clicks.

Imagine the difference in your bottom line in these 2 scenarios:

Scenario 1 - Your website is not mobile optimized. A user on their phone sees your ad on Google and clicks. The website takes too long to load, but they're patient. Finally the page loads, and it displays some obtuse, zoomed in portion of the page. As soon as they see this they get frustrated and move on to a different website, costing you the price of the click and the missed opportunity to sell them on your amazing offer.
Scenario 2 - Your website is lightening fast and mobile optimized. A user on their phone clicks on your ad, the page loads instantly, and it's a nicely formatted version of your normal website. The user is amazed at the visual quality of your site and spend a few minutes searching through what you have to offer. They're loving it.

In which scenario do you think a potential customer is going to make a purchase?

You're exactly right! The great thing too is that most website platforms (especially if you're on WordPress) have preloaded mobile optimized themes.

Webpage Layout

Webpage layout follows the same theme as mobile optimization. Having your webpages (i.e. homepage, blog, sales pages, etc.) formatted for "ease of access" is key.

In other words, you want to make it easy for users to navigate your site. A few benchmark questions you can ask yourself are:

Are my pages too "busy", or are they clear and clean?
Are my pages relevant to what people are looking for?

Clear Call-To-Actions (CTA's)

A call-to-action is essentially a button or a link that tells people what they should do on your website. Here's some examples of CTA's:

A button that says "Buy Now".
A callout in your blog text that asks a user to do something.
Hyperlinked text that prompts a user to click through.

It's important that these things are clearly displayed on your website. One of the worst things that could happen is to have a bunch of people on your website not knowing what to do next. The website should help guide them through their customer journey, and CTA's one of the biggest ways to do that.

It's also important to note that you shouldn't overdo it with CTA's on any single webpage. You do not want to ask your users to do 100 things on one page. In fact, the standard recommendation is that you have less than 3 CTA's, and ideally just 1.

Cleary Displayed Contact Information

Sometimes users want to reach out to your business via email or telephone. They might have a sales or technical question, and it's important that they have a way of contacting you.

Having your contact information clearly displayed at the top and/or bottom of the page is common practice, and what most users are used to.

Google will also disapprove any ads that are running to websites without contact information displayed.

Separate "Thank You" Pages For Form Submissions

The benefits of configuring might not be obvious at first, but setting up separate "thank you" pages for form submissions can add a new dimension of data. Here's the reasoning.

If you were to have all your forms direct to 1 "thank you" page, you'll be able to track your conversions. No problem there. The issue is that you won't know which page those conversions were made on.

By setting up an individual "thank you" page for every form, you can track which forms are getting conversions and which are not.

Have Google Analytics Installed

Google Analytics is a free tool by Google that allows you to track your users as they use your website. This is absolutely critical to the success of your campaign.

Just like brick & mortar stores have associates and clerks that can physically see what actions customers take in the store, Google Analytics allows you to do this digitally on your website.

We also set up certain goals in Google Analytics that are counted as conversions to be imported into AdWords.

Lastly, PPC Campaigns can NOT run remarketing campaigns, unless they are tied to an active Google Analytics account.

Quality Content

This is a no-brainer. Quality content is what attracts and keeps users engaged. Without quality content, users will get frustrated with your brand for its lack of helpfulness and flee to your competitors. It might sound like an exaggeration, but would you really want to chance that?

In Summary...

That wraps up this article. Hopefully, you have a better understanding of why your website is important to PPC campaigns. It really all comes down to user experience.

If you have any other comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to click on the chat button in the bottom-right corner of this screen and reach out!

Question 7

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Question 8

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Question 9

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Question 10

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