How to Build PPC Campaigns For Every Marketing Funnel Stage
December 9, 2024
Creating successful PPC requires a well-thought-out strategy that mirrors the stages of your marketing funnel. In this blog post, our PPC Growth Manager will guide you through the essential process of building high-converting campaigns tailored to your audience's journey.
Creating effective Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns requires more than just selecting keywords and setting a budget – it demands a strategic approach that aligns with your marketing funnel stages.
In this blog post, I’ll draw on my 7 years of experience in the PPC field to guide you through the proven process for crafting high-converting PPC campaigns. These will resonate with your audience's journey – from capturing initial attention to driving them towards a purchase.
I’ll share actionable insights and best practices that can significantly enhance your advertising results, ensuring that each dollar spent contributes to your overarching marketing goals.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
First, you need to set concrete and realistic goals for your PPC. For instance, attracting the most relevant traffic to the new site and then converting them via remarketing, or using PPC campaigns for lead generation to gather a database of audiences to market them customized offers in the future.
I recommend setting concrete PPC goals for all 3 levels of your marketing funnel that range from awareness to decision stage – TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. Here’s the breakdown that my team and I use at Aimers for B2B campaigns:
Examples of PPC goals at each stage include:
- TOFU: Awareness, SoV (Share of Voice), Traffic
- MOFU: Sign-ups, Leads, Conversions
- BOFU: MQL, SQL, Deals/Purchases/Subscriptions
When pursuing the goal of maximum conversions, I often see marketers tending to over-focus on the BOFU level, wanting to “squeeze out” the most leads and sales out of it. Based on my experience in PPC, I can attest that if you focus only on BOFU, you get a limited number of purchases from the first touch. As a result, your CPC and CPL will be higher.
It’s important to build PPC campaigns for all stages of the funnel. By the time your audience arrives at the level of BOFU, it has to be well-informed and “warmed up”. If you form a demand beforehand, you’ll get more conversions.
Even if at some point your primary focus is on BOFU, you need to operate with a holistic approach. Use all previous stages of the funnel to influence an increase in demand and final conversions.
Step 2: Pick Relevant Platforms
According to Statista, the biggest ad platform right now is Google Ads, which gets a 39% of global digital ad revenue. Facebook comes second with 18%. Moreover, here are interesting stats from the AdConversion survey on which platforms B2B marketers investing in the most:
LinkedIn unsurprisingly gets the 2nd place, since it’s the main platform to target business professionals. But note that more niche platform like Capterra receives a decent share, too.
The thing is, the ability to potentially reach large audiences does not necessarily mean great PPC results. Sometimes, niche platforms like Capterra and Product Hunt can be very efficient and offer laser-sharp targeting.
When my team and I are tasked to enhance the PPC strategy for the specific SaaS solution, one of the first things we do is aligning advertising with platforms where we can effectively engage with their target audience.
In our recent project, we selected Meta Ads as an additional platform to scale our client's marketing efforts. Generally, Facebook tends to yield a higher return on investment compared to Instagram, primarily due to its larger business audience. To validate this assumption, we decided to test both platforms for gathering subscriptions, hypothesizing that Facebook would generate more subscriptions or attract higher-quality leads.
The results of our testing revealed that both Facebook and Instagram platforms demonstrated similar strong performance in terms of subscription acquisition. This outcome underscores the importance of conducting thorough testing of marketing hypotheses before drawing conclusions.
When choosing the most relevant platform, I advise relying on the following factors:
- Your spending range
- Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and their platform preferences
- Keywords search volume
- Predicted audience size based on targeting, geographical location targeting, and other factors
- Unique capabilities of the platforms – campaigns and targeting types, ad formats, and so on
- Creative assets (images, videos, and so on) that will be available to you.
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Get In TouchStep 3: Forecast and Set KPIs
The next stage is to make forecasts for conversions and other metrics for concrete platforms and campaign types for more efficient budget allocation. As a result, you should form a set of specific KPIs. These will allow evaluating the effectiveness of your PPC advertising efforts, and how well your PPC strategy is implemented.
Let me give you some examples of KPIs for each funnel stage:
TOFU
- Reach and Video: Video Completion Rate, Cost per Video Completion, Reach and Average Frequency.
MOFU
- Engagement: CTR, Engagement rate, New vs. returning visitors
- Quality of traffic: Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Pages Visited
- Leads: Sign-up, Whitepaper downloads, Webinar participants
BOFU
- Leads: Cost per Lead, Lead Volume, Cost per conversion, Conversion volume
- Sales: MQL, SQL, Subscribes, Purchases
Please note that it’s important to correlate your KPI’s for different types of campaigns. For example, it’s wrong to evaluate Video Ad campaign by SQL. It’s much better to evaluate such campaigns by Completion Rate or Unique Reach.
Step 4: Create Your PPC strategy
At this stage, you can move on to creating a PPC strategy for achieving maximum conversions. The essential elements of your strategy will include:
- Ad copy
- Creatives (visuals)
- Landing pages
- Offers (lead magnets)
You’ll create these for each of your campaigns, but adjust the content accordingly to the funnel stage.
For instance, when you target a “cold” audience, you’ll use campaigns for TOFU and MOFU stages. They usually focus on products features, comparisons, educational materials, offers like guides, whitepapers, and so on.
When you target a “hot” audience at the BOFU stage, you base your campaigns on high intent keywords or remarketing, go deeper into product features, and advertise more valuable lead magnets like a demo.
When you create your PPC strategy, its elements must match the goals that you’ve set in the very beginning.
Ideas for lead magnets for various stages of your funnel
- TOFU: watch a video, visit a website, take a quiz, check out a product page, read a blog post or a guide, etc.
- MOFU: free trial, webinar, free sample, special deal or discount, product demo, downloadable e-book, reports, case studies, etc.
- BOFU: price (especially if it’s an attractive offer), special deals and discounts, amount saved
Step 5: Analyze & Optimize Your PPC Campaigns
After creating forecasts and setting your KPIs, it will be easier to match what you have planned and the results (the real data), compare these two indicators, and analyze your campaigns. Take time to test several hypotheses. PPC is all about constant testing, monitoring, and optimization – for instance, see the performance of various landing pages, offers, CTA’s, creatives, etc.
It’s essential to track the effectiveness of your campaigns on the levels of micro and macro conversions. Micro conversions (i.e. completed lead form) are the small actions that the audience takes as a result of your ads, while macro conversions (i.e. sales) indicate the campaign’s overall success.
Ideally, you need to have a CRM or a database that links the results from ad platforms to concrete business data and outcomes. This allows evaluating the effectiveness and profitability of your advertising in a more transparent way.
Takeaways
By setting clear goals for TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU stages, you'll create campaigns that connect with your audience at every step of their buyer’s journey.
Think of your PPC campaigns as a finely tuned machine built on top of your marketing funnel. Follow the steps I’ve outlined and keep improving – and you'll see some seriously impressive results:
- Set concrete and realistic goals for your PPC at all stages of your marketing funnel.
- Choose platforms that will engage your target audience and offer the types of campaigns, targeting, and ad formats that you require.
- Make forecasts and set KPIs to have absolute clarity of what you expect from your advertising.
- Create a comprehensive PPC strategy, using specific ad copy, creatives, landing pages and offers for each stage funnel.
- Constantly monitor, analyze, and optimize your PPC campaigns. Testing and frequent adjustments are a key to success.
I want to stress that PPC isn't a “set and forget” game. Keep analyzing and tweaking based on real data: What's working? What needs fixing? Test, test, test! This approach boosts your PPC conversions and makes your whole marketing strategy stronger.
Aimers specializes in creating PPC strategies that align with every stage of your marketing funnel. Our team of experts is here to help you create high-converting, results-driven campaigns.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation and start building a PPC strategy that delivers real business results!
Daria Ivanchik is a skilled PPC Growth Leader who excels in driving growth and optimizing campaign performance.