5 Things to Consider Before You Start Your PPC Strategy

In this article, we explore five aspects that should be at the forefront of your mind when developing your PPC strategy. By taking these factors into account, you can ensure your campaigns are well-planned, targeted, and optimised for success.

Here’s an overview:

1. What’s your marketing mix and the goal for each channel? 
2. For paid ads, what channels are a good fit?
3. What’s your budget?
4. What’s your messaging?
5. Do you have tracking and attribution set up?

We also have a few quick pointers at the end to help you reach success! Let’s dive in.

What's your marketing mix

Your marketing mix is the combination of marketing channels you’ll use to reach your target audience. It’s common in B2B SaaS marketing to focus on:

• PPC
• Content
• Partnerships
• Product-led growth
• Email
• Referral

It’s helpful to know your marketing mix before beginning to understand where your paid ads fit into an overall strategy. 

And last, each marketing channel should have a different goal. For example, content marketing is for building awareness, Google Search Ads is for generating leads, partnerships are great for both, and email marketing is for retention.

Where to invest

Assuming you have a good grasp on where paid ads fit into your overall strategy, the next thing to decide is where you’ll invest.

Your options:

• Google Search Ads
• Social media ads, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter
• Affiliates (Comparison sites, content affiliates)
• Display ads 
• Video ads 
• Sponsorships
• Reddit ads 
• Quora ads 
• App Install ads 
• Microsoft ads 

So which channels are right for you? 

When B2B companies first hire us, we take time to get to know your brand before recommending which channels are right for you. For example, if you have a large audience and market fit, then Video Ads and Social Media Ads may be the best fit. On the other hand, if your product is more niche, Google Search Ads may be better as they will allow you to target a potential customer right when they're looking for a solution.

One of our clients wanted to start on Facebook, but we advised them to start with Google Ads. So far, we’ve returned 20x their ad budget! We haven’t yet implemented Facebook ads because of our success with search ads.

Budget per channel

Once you know your marketing mix and where you’re investing in paid advertising, the next step is determining your budget. We built a great tool that helps you determine your ad budget. Checkout our PPC budget spreadsheet.

Messaging

Your ad performance relies on having the right messaging. It can be time-consuming to conduct market, competitor, and keyword research, but we strongly recommend it. In fact, that’s how we start most of our client projects!

During the research phase, we get a sense of the messaging that already exists in the competitive landscape to see how your product differentiates you.

Your messaging needs to align with your target audience and their motivations for choosing a product like yours. It’s helpful at this stage to create and use buyer personas to inform your messaging.

You’ll also need your messaging to be cohesive in your ad, as well as our landing page. We often build our clients a landing page that we can then turn into a template for future ads. This system works well for us and we recommend it to others. 

And while writing ad copy can be time-consuming, there’s always AI that can help!

Tracking & Attribution: Google Analytics

Before starting to invest in ads, you need the right infrastructure in place so you can track performance, attribute where signups come from, and take note of how different audience segments are performing. We recommend setting up Google Analytics audiences so you can see how your ad audience performs over time.

Fun fact: a user usually has 7 or more touch-points before they sign up. If a user’s first click is on a Google ad and their most recent click is on organic search, which channel drove the customer to sign up? By tracking where users come from, you can choose how to attribute your signups accordingly so you accurately see which channel ultimately drives each signup. 

You’ll also want to pay attention to your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Some companies try to calculate CAC per channel, but we recommend a blended CAC that takes into account all the touchpoints a user has before signing up.

If paid ads are starting to sound like a headache and way too technical, you can outsource it to us. We work with many founders who want us to get everything set up correctly and running smoothly. Get a free proposal, no call required.

Words of wisdom before you start

We have a few final words of wisdom before you dive into the world of PPC:

1. Remember to be adaptable. You can't just put a campaign live and leave it. 
2. You’ll need to constantly monitor and refine your ads as needed. Pay close attention to your bid strategy, keywords, landing pages, messaging, creative assets, etc.
3. Don’t always take Google's advice at face value. They want you to spend money and most of their advice is geared towards that.
4. PPC is not going to fix all your marketing problems. PPC is just one aspect of online acquisition. You need to have a good product, good reviews, word of mouth, etc.
5. And last, it takes time to build momentum, so if you kill your ads too early, you won’t get the results you desire.