Data is the beating heart of any Phalanx campaign, we’ll provide analytics and conversion tracking codes for PPC and they can be installed by Phalanx as needed. We’ll work with your team to ensure tracking is accurate. We specifically monitor relevant conversion points, which should include a lead generation form and a newsletter sign up form.

Keyword Selection

Keyword research and selection are vital components to any campaign and we’re here to ensure it gets done right. This includes a comprehensive long-tailed keyword approach, as it has a positive effect in both reducing costs per click and increasing relevance. General terms are bid slightly lower because the conversion rates will be lower.

Competitors

A tactic we’ve seen work is to target competitors’ names as keywords. When someone searches for one of your competitors, it’s an opportunity to pull highly relevant traffic from them and route it through our sales funnel. We’ll need great ads and high-quality landing pages for this tactic to be effective.

Quality Scores

High quality scores are absolutely vital to the success of any account, so we regularly review quality scores and restructure campaigns with that in mind. Most of our campaigns have dedicated search, display network, and remarketing campaigns. These campaigns have dozens of ad groups built with tightly knit keywords.

Ad Variations

Phalanx recommends split testing a variety of ad variations. We create a series of highly optimized ads and continually split test them against one another. We also incorporate ad extensions into every ad group and optimize them as well, in an effort to improve click-through rates.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are important because they block bad traffic that is triggered by your keywords. We have a significant number of negative keywords identified from previous clients in your industry. Ongoing reviews of search queries and the addition of negative keywords are part of our standard operating procedures.

Bid Adjustments

Our proprietary bid management software and expertise allows us to bid specifically on the keywords and websites that best reach the campaign's target audience for the most cost-effective rates. We’ve found from experience that positions two and three are often the most cost-effective, but we treat each keyword individually and use our tools to push them to the optimal positions.

ToD/DoW Adjustments

We run the campaigns 24/7, but it’s important to adjust bids by time of day and day of the week. Campaign data will show us what time of day converts the highest and we adjust bidding to be more aggressive during these times. Again, we can pull on our experience in your industry, or you may have internal data that further refines these adjustments.

Phalanx Proprietary Tool

We’re constantly developing new and powerful tools to help our clients succeed. You’ll have access to our proprietary reporting tool, this does a fantastic job of showing trending data and we’ll send reports to you on a weekly basis.

Currently, our most powerful proprietary tool is the Phalanx Advanced Lead and Sales Engine (PALSE). PALSE is an advanced lead generation tool used for two primary purposes: to pull your current client database and connect that data to their current data points for hyper-targeted paid advertising; the second use is to build out hyper-targeted lead lists of people who are likely to be high converting prospects.

Example: We recently built out a list of 1.5 million US pregnant woman from 7 months pregnant to post-pregnancy of 12 months. These kinds of lists include dozens to sometimes hundreds of data-points. These lists are then broken down into hyper-targeted audiences.

Our programmers are standing by to build you a custom version of PALSE, to build your customer lists before they’re even your customers.

Remarketing

We believe that “remarketing” (sometimes called “retargeting”) will be a vital component to the success of your digital marketing efforts. Here is a brief explanation. With the exception of those few people who have cookies disabled on their computer, a cookie can be placed on the computer of any website visitor.

It doesn't matter how they arrived on the website. Those people can then be targeted with low cost ads when they visit other sites. This can be very cost-effective. The true ROI of any campaign is found in the follow up. Remarketing allows us to turn a one-time visitor into a customer, essentially multiplying our efforts towards target customers.

PPC Match Types

We recommend focusing on more exacting match types. We try to avoid broad matched keywords but there are times when a keyword proves to have exceptionally low conversion costs. Phalanx focuses on modified, phrase matched keywords, broad matched keywords, and exact matched keywords, with higher bids on the more exacting match type.

This allows us to micromanage bids, since the exact matched keywords are likely to convert better than the broad matched keywords and deserve more aggressive bids. More importantly, when Google sees that a keyword is present three or four times in different variation in an ad group, the relevancy between the keywords goes up. This creates higher quality scores, which in turn lowers our CPCs.

Management By Type

Ad Creation

Getting the messaging right is important. Content is king and plays a huge role in click-through-rates and conversions. It’s one reason we emphasize such a high level of client interaction when creating campaigns. You’re the expert for your business and we want to incorporate your knowledge with our skill and experience to create effective and compelling ads. We can either utilize existing image ads that you already have or create new and unique ads with images that you provide us. Part of getting the messaging right is making sure that we’re using proven images from your inventory.

Display Network

Initially, we recommend not devoting more than 10 to 15 percent of the PPC budget to the display networks. This network targets people researching information on relevant websites, but we’ve found the traffic quality to be lower than in the search networks. Display networks click traffic is often a fraction of the cost though and if it’s low enough, then we’ll adjust the campaigns based upon conversion data vs cost per customer. We’re always data driven through and are quick to adjust based upon what the data is showing us.

Social Media Advertising