By Timo Dinkelman – CEO of Prebo Digital 

Businesses that rely heavily on PPC advertising to acquire new customers often face rising costs due to increased competition. This can be a significant challenge for marketing and business leaders who need to find ways to reduce their dependence on PPC advertising while still maintaining and growing their inflow of new customers.

To address this issue, businesses should consider these key questions concerning their PPC advertising:

1. How can I reduce my dependence on PPC advertising while growing my business?
2. What should I do if CPCs for my paid media campaigns continue to increase?

At Prebo Digital, we regularly receive these questions from clients and are constantly working to help them find solutions for sustainable growth. For many of our partners, PPC advertising is the lifeblood of new customer acquisition. The moment a digital ads account goes down or competition increases, solving the issue immediately becomes a top priority in the business as it stops the inflow of new business. 

Many businesses have built their internal commercial processes on the expected inflow of sales/leads directly related to their PPC activity. Although this is understandable, given the short-term, measurable impact of this type of marketing, it poses a number of challenges. One example of this – if everyone in your industry relies on PPC ads, it drives up the cost and that’s something you have limited control over.

As a reference, here are some of the current benchmarks for industries in South Africa and how they have changed over the past 12 months.

Average Google Ads CPCs in South Africa 2023 

Search Category	Ad Depth  (avg no. of advertisers competing on a search query)	Avg CPC	Search Volume Growth YoY
Auto & vehicles	6.5 (up 15%)	R4.2	10%
Fashion	12.1 (up 21%)	R1.92	9%
Consumer Electronics	11.3 (up 12%)	R4.90	8%
Home & Garden	18.4 (up 12%)	R2.66	14%

Source: Google. April 2023.

Based on these stats, there has been a 15% increase in competition across major categories. This is not unique to South Africa but is something we’re seeing across countries, industries and platforms, including retail media like Amazon. 

Below are strategies and tactics to reduce dependency on paid media traffic and improve efficiencies and sustainable growth channels. 

#1 Nurturing & CRM

Gathering data through paid media campaigns is a great way to get lots of relevant data fast. This data, in turn, should then not only drive your business forward but allow you to learn from consumer behaviour, website and content performance. For example, you will learn that a certain type of campaign drives immediate impact in terms of a conversion (typically your lower funnel campaigns).

These are commonly the ones that everyone in your industry is competing for (with the exact same reasoning) – they convert the best! 

You want to build your business speaking to audiences beyond this market (for example, through omnichannel marketing). That’s where paid media can help you find strategies to identify high quality mid and upper funnel audiences that convert to actual customers in a reasonable amount of time, PLUS you learn what kind of nurture strategies work to drive them to convert.

This involves a clear, strong measurement setup across the journey. Identifying initial pain points and messaging towards these pain points and then a flow of communication that allows the audience to see how you can service them.

This necessitates multiple channels and touchpoints and is therefore a centralised measurement and data collection platform. 

Through this, you reduce dependency on PPC campaigns, improve ROI from mid/top funnel campaigns and build sustainable marketing strategies that you have more control over. 

The main takeaways are as follows:

💡Gather data on which mid/top funnel audiences convert best (not keywords but audiences)

💡Build a landing page and content journey for these audiences

💡Scale

#2 User experience – UX

Too many websites still perform poorly in terms of user experience. Whether it’s speed, checkouts, mobile usability or content for different audiences (there is so much room to grow). UX and CRO does not only apply to improving an e-commerce conversion rate. It also applies to metrics such as:

• Improving bounce rates
• Sign-up forms
• Click to calls
• Finding a store
• Improving engagement rates for different stages of the funnel. 

Continuously enhancing this is key for every business with a digital platform as it’s essential for customer acquisition to succeed at this and learn what your customers want and what works to bring them closer. 

In digital and performance marketing, many efforts are focused on improving the key interaction point of an audience, for example a form or a checkout process. However, much opportunity is untapped regarding ‘above the fold’ content on landing pages by analysing content elements, flow and layout and soft conversions. This helps significantly to enhance user engagement and boost the funnel from the top:

💡Define your key broad audiences

💡Develop content for these audiences and test what resonates with them

💡Offer something of value that gets them to enter their details into your CRM

💡Activate nurture activities 

In most of our projects, we were able to enhance conversion rates across add to cart, lower bounce rates and checkout progression, which delivers an excellent short and medium term ROI for marketing campaigns and improves SEO. 

#3 SEO

Every now and again you see the phrase “SEO is dead” in blogs or social platforms. Many have tried to make SEO a success for their site by targeting the same keywords on SEO that they target on PPC campaigns. Although there is nothing wrong with this strategy, it’s likely that your SEO success is limited to mostly people with ad blockers, which are a good few, and those who don’t click on ads out of principle. 

Where SEO really starts to capture additional value is through broadening your perspective on intent. Your potential customers’ intent is not only active when they search “buy xyz”. Rather the SEO focus should be for those non-commercial keywords that make up the majority of search volume on search engines. Keywords starting with “how to” and “what is”. 

These are classified as educational or navigational keywords and are used by many of us when we’re in the consideration phase, yet not ready to take action. Creating content and setting up your site to cater for these searches can significantly enhance your organic presence and traffic to the site, thereby reducing your dependency on paid media campaigns. 

#4 Building your brand

Do you remember the last time you saw a great search ad and clicked on it? That’s right, neither do I. 

Do you remember the last time you saw a great video ad and laughed or was impacted? I saw one today. 

Branding and building emotional connections with your broad target audience has been snowed under for the past 15 years with the rise of the effective search campaigns that make logical sense (everyone wants to show up in first position for the money keywords) and has proven to drive quick results and growth. 

The opportunity with branding is:

• You reduce dependency on people knowing about your product/service (and PPC advertising). With building a brand campaign, you educate the user about the possibilities to them, you speak to a need or sometimes you even create a need for something and you provide them with the solution in the form of your brand. 
• You build lasting connections, meaning you don’t have to acquire the same customers again.
  

Research by Les Binet illustrates the long & short term effects of branding vs sales activation campaigns excellently:

Read more here

Prebo Digital recently completed a 3 month test for a large self-storage company in Western Europe, where we found that combining YouTube Ads with brand search campaigns drove a 100% increase in brand search volume, while the blended CPA across YouTube Ads + Brand Search campaigns was on par with that of generic search campaigns. This proves that growing the brand is a sustainable long-term strategy to reduce dependency on non-brand search campaigns that continue to rise in cost. 

To sum up this point:

• Create a compelling message about your target market’s core needs. Don’t make it salesy, make it emotional. 
• Target it as broadly as possible, within the relevant parameters for what you offer. (don’t sell family cars to singles, for example.)
• Measure content and platform engagement as success metrics and build a nurture journey (see point 1).

To conclude, at one point we will be facing increasing competition on our paid media channels (and PPC advertising). Do not get alarmed. This is an opportunity to relook your overall marketing strategy and internal business processes to assess the strength of your value proposition.  This can, in turn, be transformed into content, an exciting brand, boosting the measurement game and improving the platform experience.

Timo Dinkelman is the co-founder, managing director and CEO of Prebo Digital, an expert performance marketing agency based in Johannesburg, which services companies across the world.