2018 AdWords Hack - The PPC Buyer's Journey

Billions of dollars are spent on Google AdWords every single month to drive foot traffic to local businesses. One of the greatest benefits of PPC advertising is the ability to reach people searching for your product or service, in the moment that they are ready to convert into a customer.

Let's take a local yoga studio in San Diego as an example to examine the PPC buyer's journey and how we can expand our Adwords reach by looking at the bigger picture.

While building local yoga studio PPC campaigns, the initial and most obvious keywords to target first are “yoga studios near me”, “best yoga studio san diego”, and “yoga classes near me”. While these are all amazing keyword choices and will be able to capture potential customers at the end of the funnel, there are many reasons to broaden your approach and constantly assess where users are in their buyer’s journey.

In the example above, one campaign could be dedicated to all local based searches for yoga studios in San Diego. Ad Copy and Landing Page content can be geared towards people ready to take action and sign up for a class today. This could include a CTA (Call To Action) which could be an exclusive promotion such as ‘1st class free’ or ‘Get $10 Off Today” to encourage searchers to take action.

The campaign above is an excellent strategy to increase your yoga class enrollment, however, the time will come when you need to expand your PPC reach. When this occurs, focusing on earlier stages of the potential customers buyers journey is a massive opportunity that can give you an edge over the competition. The earlier stages of the buyer's cycle begins with awareness and education, serving as the first touch points a user has with your brand or business. Before people are ready to make a purchase they search the internet using different keywords vs. when they are near the end of the buyer's journey. A rule of thumb is the larger purchase, the longer and more intensive the education stage is of their buyer's journey.

Incorporating a campaign focused on the earlier stages of yoga classes could entail targeting keywords searched in San Diego such as “health benefits of yoga” or “how to get started with yoga”. In this example the ad copy and landing page would reflect an educational standpoint with a different call to action than above. Since we know these users aren’t quite ready to convert a great strategy is to give the user some value here.

In order to get, you must give first. For this yoga studio they could focus their early stage call to action an infographic / downloadable PDF or sign up to a future webinar. Both of these examples would feature a “give” which is the educational content on the benefits of yoga. Your “get” is their name and email address. This is very valuable because you will then be able to add them to your contact list to send newsletters & promotions as they move further down the sales cycle.

Now is the time to tie it all together. Add all of the users that landed on your education based landing page to a remarketing list ands then run ads from our first campaign and target those users. By doing this you are able to comfortably bid higher because you know these users are warm leads that have already showed interest by visiting your website. You could also implement a Google Display Remarketing Campaign to retarget these users as they browse the internet for other yoga related content.

In the world we live in today users have many micro interactions with a brand before pulling the trigger and converting. By promoting your brand throughout the entire buyer’s journey you are able to maximize your exposure and ultimately improve your ROI with PPC.