PPC for Tech Companies

Does PPC work for tech companies? If you are launching a new tech business or your marketing department desperately needs inbound leads, you’ve probably been wondering that very thing. PPC (a common acronym for pay-per-click) is a marketing strategy that usually refers to search engine marketing such as Google Ads or Microsoft Ads (although LinkedIn Ads can work wonders in the tech vertical).

Tech Startups, by their nature, are behind in the race against established competitor sites. Enticing visitors away from rival sites can be a challenge, but PPC allows new sites to start attracting traffic and customers right from the onset.

How does PPC for tech companies work?

Keywords can be targeted to trigger an advert when the user inputs a query into Google.  For example, you may want your company to show in SERPs (Search Engine Page Results) for “Dell SD-WAN”. Achieving this would take months of SEO work and need a huge amount of content to compete against established players in the industry. And, because of brand terms, in this case “Dell”, the keyword may never rank well.  This is where PPC can be used, or more precisely Google Ads, to reach the top four sponsored ad positions on the first page of Google. Prime real estate within the SERPs.

Bidding on keywords

Google Ads ask you to bid on certain keywords. When someone searches for these keywords, your ad will appear if your Ad Rank is high enough to trigger an Ad. Machine learning can be implemented to adjust bids at the time of the auction, bidding lower or higher based on user intent, contextual signals and historical data.

Ad Rank – Winning the ad space

Your advert will only appear on Google if your Ad Rank is high enough. Ad rank is calculated by using your bid amount, quality score (which includes expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience), the competitive bids and the context of the user’s search query.  When you have a high-quality ad, served by a relevant keyword which links to an optimised landing page, you can drive the cost per click down.

Converting users to prospects

Once your ad has been triggered and the user has been enticed to your website, the page they land on should answer their search query. If the user is searching for “Fortinet Network Security” they should land on a page about “Fortinet Network Security” and not just “Network Security”. Otherwise, the user may bounce off the site, your quality score will increase and your bid will be higher. After all, even though you are paying for the Ads, Google still wants the end-user to be happy with their search results. The companies that answer the query well will find it more cost-efficient to run Google Ads than the companies that don’t.

Tracking

The user is tempted by your offering and submits a form for more information, requests a demo or downloads a white paper. Hurray! With Google Ads, you can track every lead and enquiry to see which campaigns, keywords and ad creatives triggered the successful form submission. You can also take advantage of Google’s call tracking, which is easily installed with one line of code. This code changes any mention of your telephone number throughout the site to a similar, dynamically generated telephone number. Meaning you can also see which campaigns, keywords and ad creatives generate a telephone call too. However, generally speaking, potential prospects in the tech vertical will initially enquire via a form for more information or book a demo.

This is where machine learning really comes into its own – when you start generating conversions Google can optimise for more of the same. Taking into account user intent, contextual signals and campaign historical data, the more conversions you have, the better Google becomes at predicting which users will convert and which users are just browsing.

Comprehensive strategy

Before an enquiry, your prospects may connect with you across a variety of touchpoints. Some services have a better ROI (return on investment) on social channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn. A tailored combination of these touchpoints should be considered when developing a marketing strategy based on your marketing KPI’s.

It’s super fast. It will take some time for your tech keywords to rank well in organic search (if they rank well at all). PPC helps to expedite the process, obtaining targeted traffic to your website immediately.

It’s agile. Should you need to change marketing tact, it can be done almost instantly.

The insights. Campaigns that don’t perform well can be paused and the budget moved to more successful campaigns.

A/B testing. Campaigns can be optimised within an inch of their life.

Cost-effective. Cost per lead can be surprisingly low

Most importantly, it’s measurable. Because every metric can be tracked, a return on investment (ROI) can be calculated. If the ROI is positive then there is a real business case for PPC.

Skills required. It takes years to learn the skills to create and manage effective PPC campaigns. To give PPC a fighting chance to compete at auction with well-established players within your market, either a Digital Marketer will need to be brought in-house or works outsourced to a Digital Marketing Agency.  The agency you choose should be able to show success in the tech vertical, as there really isn’t any other industry like it.

Cost. The cost-per-click for tech keywords is high, there’s no denying it. These are high ticket items with low search volumes and companies are willing to big high for a lead. This pushes the cost-per-click up. However, cost per click isn’t a metric you should judge PPC by. It’s better to pay for one user that converts on your website, rather than pay for 10 that don’t. Cost per conversion (cost per acquisition) should be the real metric to use – this will help with the overall ROI formula.

We’re a PPC Agency for Tech

We’ve been working with tech clients for a while, developing specific sector knowledge. Drop us a message or chat with us online if you need help with your digital marketing – we are able to work with you on anything from Google Ads to Search Engine Optimisation, and everything in between.

We can even provide you with a detailed Google Ads audit free of charge.