Case-process: how we do contextual advertising for our customers

Do you know how advertising works? How to choose a good, reliable and efficient agency? What questions should be asked when choosing? How to go through the process of creating an AC and what should be taken into account?

We collected all the questions of our customers and wrote this longread for those who:

• does not fully understand what he pays for when launching the AC
• hopes to delegate everything and do nothing himself
• needs urgent sales with the help of context
• wants to be sure that his account and settings will remain with him after the work is completed.

Memo to the customer of contextual advertising

Write down questions that you should ask the agency BEFORE starting cooperation:

• What is the agency commission for running an advertising campaign?
• What is the minimum budget for cooperation?
• What combination of tools will give the greatest effect for your task?
• How can you reduce the cost per conversion?
• Has the agency already worked with projects from your industry?
• How will you be reported (format and frequency)?
• What performance indicators does the agency use?
• What account management system does the agency use?
• What important things for business are fixed in the contract?

List of other important things to consider when choosing an agency is the following:

• How many years have the agency specialists been setting up contextual advertising?
• What budgets does the agency work with? 
• Does the agency provide full access to the advertising account, Google Analytics? 
• Is the agency ready to work on the customer's account, if necessary?
• What will happen to the account and campaigns after the end of work with the agency?
• Who (agency or customer) is responsible for installing Google Analytics on the site, setting goals on the site? Is this included in the work budget?
• Does the agency audit the usability of the site's landing pages? If errors are found, who corrects them, within what budget?
• How is transparency ensured?
• Is there a separate manager for the project?
• Portfolio (especially for the segment/industry you represent).
• Customer reviews ("word of mouth", Internet).

Ask these questions to our manager and order RK!

We want strong partnerships with the customers of our services, so we try to work as transparently as possible so that at each stage of work the customer understands WHAT is happening now, HOW MUCH it costs and whether the advertising campaign is PROFITABLE.

It is important for us that the customer of contextual advertising services understands how everything works, what processes are included in the service and what to expect as a result.

Now we will answer the questions that customers most often ask us before launching an advertising campaign.

Question 1. What types of contextual advertising are there and what exactly to choose for your task?

Specialists of the contextual advertising department are preparing a whole article about this. We will publish it next week) If you are subscribed to our mailing list, you will definitely not miss it.

The main thing: we will help you to understand everything important at the start of work. Therefore, we will communicate a lot and productively.

Question 2. What makes up the price of contextual advertising?

The customer is always interested in what he pays for. So in the case of context, you, as a customer, will pay:

Question 3. And how, in this case, to understand how much money will be spent on an advertising campaign?

We can’t give a precise answer every time. Usually we tell the customer the amount with which we recommend starting an advertising campaign. Only after 2 weeks of active advertising work can you make a more accurate budget calculation.

What can we say for sure? We can tell how exactly we will work with you and what you can expect from our cooperation.

Question 4: Why check landing pages?

Before the start of an advertising campaign, SPRAVA specialists conduct an audit of the landing page, which is the page where the advertisement will lead people. Often work on an advertising campaign begins with the creation or refinement of a landing page.

We go to the customer's website in order to buy what we will sell through the context. If we:

• can understand what is being offered on the site in the first 3 seconds of being here;
• see prices for goods or services;
• can call and send an application from any page of the site;
• see how you are better than your competitors

- then you can start to draw up an advertising campaign strategy with our team.

If the landing page is not ready, then we give recommendations on how to prepare it for the start of the advertising campaign, and we make changes on the site ourselves!

Question 5. What if my site is not ready for contextual advertising? 

If the usability audit of the landing page or site shows that the connection of the AC will be ineffective without corrections, you will receive recommendations from us. We explain in detail how to improve the landing page to make it easier for the user to complete the conversion action.

You can do it on your own, or order such a service from us. We will provide: a designer, programmers, copywriters. Of course, the project-manager will lead the team, and will be responsible for your project. This means that he is ready to set and monitor the implementation of tasks so that the project is completed on time, efficiently and within the budget.

An example of a website landing page ready to launch contextual advertising.

The main list of usability points that should be provided / checked on your site:

• Does the site load quickly? Be sure to check the download speed before launching
• Does the site display correctly on different devices and browsers?
• Is there quick and visible access to the call to action buttons? Buttons such as buy a product / order a service / make a call to the phone should be on every page of the site.  
• Does the visitor understand what you offer and who you are when he gets to any page of the site? Ideally, in 3 seconds, the user should see what kind of site it is, what subject it is, and understand what you are talking about and what you offer thanks to the slogan and images in the header, page title, and unique selling proposition. 
• Is there a text format for contacts? All contacts on the site, including those in the header, are presented in text, not pictures, so that the visitor can copy them. Phones should be clickable
• Is the price of the product visible on the site? It should be written in large print and highlighted. 
• Does the site have an interactive Google map with a marked location of the company?

Do you want a landing page checklist before launching an advertising campaign? Of course you do!

If all these points are checked and there are no errors on the site and landing pages, we get to work.

Work on the launch of an advertising campaign for the SPRAVA customer 

1. Acquaintance. We deal with the task, study the brief and draw up a strategy

When people get to know each other and want to cooperate and even be friends, they talk and ask each other a lot of questions. We are no exception. With each new customer we communicate for a long time. In order not to miss anything important, we wrote down all the questions in a special document - a brief.

There are many questions, so we help with filling out the brief. We can call each other and talk about your business and tasks until there is a complete understanding. It is always better to find out all the nuances BEFORE the start of work. This stage takes 1-2 days and you communicate with your manager.

Having studied your brief, niche, website, business features, needs, SPRAVA specialists first draw a conclusion - can we help you? Will an advertising campaign solve your problems? If yes, then we develop an individual promotion plan (strategy):

We offer the best combination of services for the task, that is, we suggest which package of services suits the goals of your business, taking into account the budget.

• We give an assessment of your resource after the audit and recommendations on how to make your site more user-friendly.
• We develop an individual media plan of work.
• We discuss key metrics for the project, obligations of the parties and guarantees.
• We are preparing a contract.

We surely agree on convenient ways of communication: instant messengers, skype, phone, mail.

And if “we cannot help"?

Then we will definitely explain why, give advice: what can help you, what needs to be done and which specialists to contact.

An advertising campaign cannot be successful if it leads to an unprepared site or landing page, if there is a drawdown in the client's business processes. And there is no one to meet ready-made leads and bring them to a purchase.

After the conclusion of the contract and payment, we begin to work on your advertising campaign.

2. Preparation for an advertising campaign

From this point on, read especially carefully. This is where the answers to the questions lie: “can I run a successful AC myself?” and “what to pay the agency for then?”

The process of preparing an advertising campaign looks like this:

• We conduct a deep analysis of the niche, your target audience and competitors.
• We reduce costs by screening out non-target audiences.
• We take into account the seasonality of the business.
• We do a technical audit.

3. Launching and maintaining an advertising campaign

The responsible PPC specialist checks all the settings before launch, coordinates all the nuances with the project manager, and the ad is sent for moderation:

• We develop the structure of an advertising account
• Specify GEO targeting
• Add extensions, specifying rates
• Set up the show schedule 
• Work on keywords
• Work on negative keywords (garbage, unnecessary queries)
• Set up an analytics system and set KPIs
• Prepare a feed for dynamic remarketing.

If the customer wants, we can also set up an online chat on the site for additional communication with the client and increasing the conversion.

Project media planning: team and process

What is the advantage of working with our team? By the way, get to know the participants.

• Your project-manager - the person who is the link between you and the company - knows everything about your business and knows how to solve all your problems. In addition, he knows how to convey these tasks to his team and monitor their implementation.
• A PPC specialist who will lead your project - creates, configures and analyzes a contextual campaign in Google.Adwords system.
• Head of the context department
• Head of Accounting Department
• Team Lead

Each new project is analyzed thoroughly and thoroughly by 5 highly qualified specialists. Project analysis is carried out by specialists with experience from 1 to 20 years in our team, which allows you to look at any project with both a fresh creative and an experienced look.

The main stages of planning for the project:

1. First, the project-manager tells the team about your site and business, about the goals that you set for contextual advertising. In this way all participants get acquainted with the project and understand what are the advantages, what are the tasks of the project, who are the competitors, who are the buyers.
2. Next comes the brainstorm. We determine the main directions of queries - according to them, the PPC specialist then compiles the semantic core (the list of requests for which users will see your advertisements in Google).
3. We compose unique high-quality ads for advertising - indicate your advantages, USP, call to action. We use required and optional elements (extensions) such as clarifications, sitelinks, business cards, etc. - all in order to make the ad more attractive and noticeable.
4. Determination of the main contextual campaign settings - region and display time, audience, list of negative keywords, daily budget limits.
5. When maintaining AC, we test the most effective advertisements for each segment of the target audience, analyze them using Google Analytics, and set up the necessary goals for tracking conversion. 

Each project has its own manager. This is a person who knows everything about the project and can answer any question of the client, of course, during business hours.

Any advertising campaign, no matter how cool it is set up, requires constant maintenance and adjustment:

• bid adjustment - because, first of all, the context is an auction of bids, and here a lot depends on the strategies of competitors;
• adding new negative keywords
• expansion of search queries
• strategy adjustment - looking for additional opportunities to promote a product or service
• changing headlines, text ads - everything to increase the effectiveness and improve your campaign.

Schematically, the whole process can be represented as follows:

• audit of competitors
• making the necessary small changes to the landing pages
• choice of strategy and tools for work in contextual advertising
• setting statistics and goals (Analytics)
• adjusting campaigns depending on the result
• reporting

4. Analytics, adjustments, reporting

After confirmation of moderation and the start of a contextual campaign, a PPC specialist relies on analytics in his work - evaluates the main indicators of the number of visits, identifies ineffective search queries and ads, identifies errors in contextual campaign settings that can negatively affect the result - and this is his main front of work.

The project manager, in addition to similar use of analytics, also relies on feedback from his customer. That is, the project manager sees the situation from two sides: one is the side of numbers and percentages - CTR, impressions, clicks, CPC; the other side is the situation as the customer sees it from inside his business - how many calls and requests, what is the average bill of orders, etc. It is this approach to collecting analytics that allows you to run customer campaigns as efficiently as possible.

Reporting

Our company has a very useful rule - we prepare and send reports to our customers by the 10th day of each month. Even the most digitally inexperienced customer will understand our reports, because we do not just upload from automated applications, but individually customize each slice for the customer's goals, making a detailed description for each screenshot - everything is very transparent, clear and accessible.

What we know about reports and customers:

• it is important that the report is clear to the customer, which figure means what and affects what;
• in the report, we are sure to highlight a special conversion block, depending on what the customer wants to track;
• we do not send screenshots of graphs and charts from metrics without description and explanation - in our reports, explanations and comments are required;
• recommendations - we are responsible for improving the quality indicators of advertising campaigns from month to month, so the customer sees in the reports, in addition to assessing the current situation on the project, and recommendations for developing and improving the campaign.

If you have contextual advertising set up, but there is no effect. We analyze your advertising campaigns and traffic quality using statistical data.

If you have not set up contextual advertising yet, but want to launch an advertising campaign.

5 reasons to choose SPRAVA to run contextual advertising:

1. Experience - for more than 10 years we have been setting up Google Ads, working with completely different businesses - from law firms to rehabilitation clinics.
2. An individual project manager is a person who, in addition to monitoring the achievement of advertising campaign goals, knows how to make your business even more successful with the help of Internet marketing, helps you decide on a strategy and tools that will work for you when launching contextual advertising.
3. Full transparency - reports in a language you understand, full access to advertising accounts. Setting goals in Google Analytics so that you really see the effectiveness of the context.
4. We set up campaigns not according to a template! Each campaign has a very individual approach, most of the preparation for the campaign launch involves an audit of the customer's niche, getting to know the business and the most important advantages so that the advertisements are written in the language of your target audience. We constantly adjust campaigns depending on the result that we have already managed to achieve and are always “in touch” :)
5. Preparing landing pages for the site - it is important for us to turn a potential client who clicks on your ad into a real buyer. Therefore, we take responsibility for improving the usability of your landing page, so that it is easier and clearer for the site visitor to make a purchase decision and complete a conversion action.