PPC for Funeral Directors: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for funeral directors in Google Ads and other platforms helps to target people people who are actively searching for funeral services online.

As funeral directors you’re able to easily set up new campaigns and use the automated tools to save time and target your audiences as they search.

However, setting up a targeted campaign is not enough. It’s important that it is managed in the right way to gain the most benefit from your budget and drive highly qualified visitors at all time.

So, I’ve written here seven tips that will help you manage your ads and campaign for exceptional results. Some of these you’ll have to update regularly, either weekly or monthly to ensure that your campaign is working at its best.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

PPC marketing for funeral directors is highly effective when leads and enquiries are being tracked. So, setting up conversion tracking in your Google Ads account will help you to see which keywords, ads, campaigns, ad groups and more are driving these conversions.

And if you see some of these not converting, you should either remove or block them or take action to improve them.

Another option is to set up goal tracking in Google Analytics. This will provide you with more reporting data as you’ll be able to see how your PPC traffic works with other sources to drive conversions.

In Admin, in your Analytics account, you can use one of the templates to create your goals.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

As you manage your campaigns, you should always aim to improve the search targeting. One of the main ways to do that is by blocking searches that are not relevant by adding them as negative keywords.

Doing so ensures that you achieve a high click through rate and an improvement in conversion rates.

In the Keywords tab in your Google Ads campaign you’ll see the search terms report. In there you’ll see the actual searches that you’re getting and you can select and add the irrelevant ones and add them as negative keywords.

 

3. Check Recommendations

One of the easiest ways to manage your campaigns is to update your Recommendations page. This page shows recommendations that help to improve your campaigns based on the machine learning system’s analysis of your account.

First, you should analyse all the recommendations. And then apply all that are relevant and dismiss all those that are not relevant for your campaigns.

Updating Recommendations this way will increase your account’s Optimisation score.

 

4. Find new keywords

PPC marketing for funeral directors is at its best when the most relevant keywords are being used. You should make sure of this at the beginning by using a keyword research tool like the Keyword Planner tool in your Google Ads account.

And as you run your ads and manage your campaign, you should look for new keyword opportunities to add. This will help you to target a wider range of searches that will help you drive more clicks and more enquiries.

Another place to find new keywords is in the search terms report. Here you’ll find search queries that may not actually be keywords, but will be triggering your ads because of the match types you are using.

So, you can add them as keywords and then control how they appear in your ads and also control their bids if you’re using manual bidding.

 

5. Update bid strategy

The best PPC bid strategy for funeral directors launching a new campaign is Maximise Clicks. That’s because this strategy focuses on getting you as much traffic as possible for your budget. But you may need to rethink your bid strategy as you manage your campaign over the weeks and months.

It may be worth changing to a conversion-focused bid strategy like Maximise Conversions with a target cost per action (CPA). This is an automated bid strategy and it helps to maximise your leads while aiming for a specific cost for each conversion.

 

6. Consider broad match type keywords

Adding some broad match keyword versions of your phrase and exact match keywords helps to increase click volume. This is especially important when you want to get more visitors and increase enquiries.

Broad match keywords will also drive some long tail search queries that your other match types are not targeting.

Just be sure to add some negative keywords to block any searches that are not relevant. That’s because broad match keywords will also send some generic searches that are unlikely to convert, so you’ll need to block them.

 

7. Check Quality Scores

Your keyword quality scores help you to see how your ads are performing. They help you to see how relevant your ads are to the keyword and if this is average or below average you can take action by updating the ads. They also help you to see how engaged people are when they reach your landing pages.

Using your Google Analytics reports, you can check your bounce rates and average session duration to see how engaged visitors are.

If bounce rates are high, like the example above, then you should update your landing pages to improve this. Check your page speeds with a tool like PageSpeed insights and make sure they are good on mobile devices mainly.

Also, update your pages so that the most important content is at the top and visible above the fold. And less important content should come lower down the page.

 

Case Study

Ivan Fisher are Norwich based funeral directors that began in 2005. They were referred to me by another client that I was working with because they were struggling to run effective PPC campaigns. I set up a new campaign in Google Ads and their click through rate (CTR) increased by 150% and their average cost per click (CPC) dropped below £1. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

I’m a Google Ads PPC expert for funeral directors and funeral homes and I’d be happy to discuss your advertising plans. Please use the form below to contact me to discuss.