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Google Ads Costs In South Africa & PPC Management Fee Pricing

Google Ads Costs South Africa & PPC Management Pricing

Navigating the realm of Google Ads can be a daunting task, especially for newcomers venturing into the digital marketing landscape. Google Ads is a powerful tool that businesses in South Africa, and around the world, rely on to boost their online presence. However, it is essential to have a clear understanding of its cost structure and management fees in order to fully utilise its potential without depleting your marketing budget.

Google Ads Costs In South Africa & PPC Management Fee Pricing

Understanding Google Ads Cost

Google Ads costs vary depending on various factors. It operates on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, so you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This option offers flexibility and cost-effectiveness, making it suitable for businesses of any size. However, there are several factors that can impact the cost:

Competition in Keywords: Keywords that face intense competition, often linked to greater search volumes and user intent, usually come with a higher price tag. Optimising keyword selection involves considering factors such as relevance, competition, and budget.
Ad Quality and Relevance: Google values ads that are carefully crafted and directly related to the user’s query. Having higher quality scores can result in reduced costs per click and improved ad placements.
Bidding Strategy: You have the option to choose automated bidding strategies that can adjust your bids to achieve specific goals, such as maximising clicks or conversions. Alternatively, you can set manual bids for more control over your bidding process.

Need Help Understanding How Much Your Google Ads Might Cost & Your Expected ROI?

Try our Google Ads Cost Calculator

PPC Management Fees & Pricing

When it comes to managing Google Ads, businesses often seek assistance from agencies or consultants to enhance their campaigns. The fees charged by service providers can differ significantly depending on their level of expertise, the complexity of your campaigns, and the level of service you need. In most cases, fees can be structured as:

Percentage of Ad Spend: A popular approach where the fee is calculated as a percentage of your overall ad spend, usually falling between 10% and 20%.
Flat Fees: Certain providers offer services for a fixed monthly fee, which can be attractive for businesses with a steady ad spend.
Performance-Based Fees: These fees are not as common, but there are some agencies that offer them. They are based on the performance of the campaigns, which means that their success is directly tied to yours.

Get The Most Out of Your Investment

To maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of your investment in Google Ads, it is important to implement the following strategies:

Consistent Improvement: Regularly analyse and fine-tune your campaigns using performance data. I am responsible for fine-tuning keywords, ad copy, and targeting settings.
Enhance Your Ads with Extensions: Take advantage of ad extensions to add extra information to your ads, such as location, contact details, or product highlights, without any additional cost.
Emphasise Quality Score: Enhancing the relevance of your ad and optimising the landing page experience can lead to cost reductions and higher ad placements.
Understand Your Audience: Gain a thorough understanding of your target audience’s behaviour and preferences. Customise your ads and landing pages to cater to their specific needs and boost conversion rates.

Click Try Our Google Ads Agency Cost Calculator

Benefits Of Using A PPC Ads Manager For Your Campaigns:

Although Google makes it very easy for any business owner to open a Google Ads account and start running ads for their business, there are a number of pitfalls waiting for an unknowing marketer. With the ease of running ads, it is very easy to spend a lot of money on Google Ads without seeing much return.

We suggest that most businesses would see a benefit in using a PPC management company to run their Google Ads account.

Some of those advantages are:

Expertise in Targeting: It is important to understand how people use Google to search for your product or service as well as effective techniques to target them.
Optimised Ad Spend: Ensures your budget is used efficiently for maximum return on investment.
Up-to-Date with Trends: PPC managers understand the latest developments on the Google platforms which are changing all the time.
Time-Saving: Manages all aspects of your PPC campaigns, saving you valuable time and money.
Performance Monitoring: Regularly tracks and adjusts campaigns for optimal performance.
Conversion Tracking: The real power of PPC ads comes from conversion tracking on your website. Not many businesses know how to track conversions effectively not heir website. Even some PPC managers do not know how to set this up correctly. It is really important that you choose an agency that sets up tracking for your website.
Excessive Automation: When running Google Ads as a business owner Google automates many of the settings, as well as providing limited features for your ad accounts. This often leads to wasted ads budget as ads run on unrelated keywords or for services and products you do not offer. A PPC manager takes the time to understand your business and then uses their knowledge of PPC ads to run the most effective campaigns.
Avoid Common Pitfalls: Helps navigate the complexities of PPC advertising to avoid costly mistakes.
Strategic Planning: Provides strategic guidance to align your PPC efforts with your business goals.

When it comes to diving into the world of Google Ads in South Africa, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of the cost structure and the art of campaign management. Navigating the intricate landscape can be challenging, but the potential benefits of heightened visibility and business expansion are significant. Whether you’re a small local business or a large corporation, having a strategic approach to Google Ads can give you a significant advantage in the competitive digital arena.

Keep in mind that achieving success with Google Ads depends not only on the amount you spend, but also on how strategically you allocate each Rand. By adopting a strategic mindset and focusing on optimisation, your Google Ads campaigns can deliver impressive results while staying within your budget.

March 27, 2024/0 Comments/by clydet

AdWords, Blog, Google, Google Analytics, News, SEO, Websites

How to Grant User Access in Google Analytics

Once you’ve created your Google Analytics account, you can add extra users to access your information. This way multiple users can view your data. You can also create specific permissions per user, ranging from only viewing the data, to editing it.

If you want to only share information about your Google Analytics, it’s best to rather grant access to someone, instead of sharing your login details.

Step 1: Open the Settings in Google Analytics

After you have signed into your Google Analytics account, choose the site to which you want to grant access.

Next, click on the Admin option. This is the gear icon in the bottom left of your screen.

There are three types of access levels under the User Management option. Account, Property and View.

Account:this allows a user to add more users, extra websites, as well as link AdSense and AdWords data.

Property:this allows a user access to the tracking code. The user can also adjust the retargeting code and settings on a specific website.

View:this allows a user to view reports, add new goals and content groupings.

Step 2: Grant Access to a User

To add a new user, you will need to make sure that the person has either a gmail account, or that their email is registered in Google Accounts. You have to decide on which level you want to grant access (account, property or view).

Click on the “+” icon on the column you want to add the user to (account, property or view)

From the drop-down menu, click on “add new users”

Different types of permission can be assigned to a new user. You can choose between manage users, collaborate, edit or just read and analyze.

Manage Users: a user can add or delete users and assign permissions. This permission does not include the option to Edit or Collaborate.

Edit: access to administrative as well as report-related functions. This includes adding/editing/deleting accounts; access to properties, filters, views and goals. But it does not include managing users. A user with this permission can also see report data. This permission is required at the account level in order to create filters, and at the view level to be able to apply filters. It also includes Collaborate.

Collaborate: with this permission a user can create, edit, delete, as well as share personal assets. The shared personal assets include: dashboards, segments, conversion segments, attribution models, channel groupings, custom reports, and unsampled reports. The user can also collaborate on shared assets and it includes the Read & Analyze permissions.

Read & Analyze: the user can view report and configuration data. The data can also be manipulated within reports for instance to create a segment, add a secondary dimension, or filter a table. The permission allows the user to see shared assets, create personal assets, and share them. But it does not allow Collaboration on shared assets.

Enter the email of the user you want to add. You can send a notification email to the new user. Finally, click on add.

How to Modify the Permissions of an Existing User

Once you have created a user, you can modify the permissions assigned to the user at any time.

After you have signed into Google Analytics account, choose the site to which you want to change access. Next, click on the Admin option.

Choose the column of the level you want to change and click on User Management.

You can search for the user you want to change in the search box located at the top of the user list. Type in part of the email address or the full address.

Click on the user name, and then you can add or change permissions.

Remember to click Save.

How to Delete A User

After signing in to your Google Analytics, click on Admin and choose the account you want to change.

Click on User Management in the column you want to edit (account, property, or view)

Search for the user you want to change in the search box.

Check the box next to the user you want to delete.

Click Remove.

September 25, 2018/0 Comments/by clydet

AdWords, Blog, Featured, Google, Local SEO, SEO Online Strategy

Why SEO Is Important For Your Company In 2018

Why should you bother with using the best SEO tactics for your website? Consider the following SEO travel company example: You’ve finally saved up enough money for that dream holiday in Europe. The dreaming phase now moves into planning. But how do you plan a trip to the other side of the globe, to a place you’ve never visited before? You use Google.

Same scenario if you want to find the closest Indian restaurant to your house after relocating to a new city. Or if you want to research the best new running shoes on the market. When you don’t know something, you Google it.

Top 5 Benefits of the Best SEO Tactics

There are a variety of search engines out there, but Google has managed to become the top household name. People use it like a verb to describe a hunt for information. As a company, you cannot afford to not have an online presence. While there are other search engines as well, we advise that you allocate the biggest portion of your advertising budget to ensure a high ranking on Google.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a way that you can leverage the behind the scenes system of search engines to climb the ranks of the search results. Google Analytics is a highly sophisticated system that offers statistics about how users interact with your website.

You can also opt to activate Google AdWords to make sure that your website is featured at the top of search result pages. But an effective organic SEO strategy can help you achieve more sustained success. What can SEO do for your website?

Increase Traffic to Your Website

This is one of the biggest reasons why you should invest in a SEO strategy. Ask yourself how many times you’ve clicked through to the second page of the search results. Chances are, you usually click on one of the first five pages that appear.

Potential customers will be able to interact with your company much quicker after your SEO strategy kicks in and your website consistently ranks high on search results. If your website appears at the top of the search results page, people will assume you’re the best at what you do. Whether it’s true or not, being at the top of Google search results create industry authority.

Return on Investment (ROI)

With the help of software like Google Analytics, you can monitor every little step of your SEO strategy, ensuring that you are heading in the right direction. If you notice your website is not gaining any traction online, you simply adjust the strategy. Aspects that can be monitored include increase in traffic and search results ranking, as well as sales conversions. A SEO streamlined website will also attract more high quality clients looking for your specific product/service.

Cost Effectiveness

Setting up a good marketing campaign oftentimes feels like a hit and miss undertaking. For example traditional methods such as cold-calling or flyer distribution can be very pricey, with a very low impact. Investing time in creating a dynamic website with a solid SEO foundation can yield much better returns. It’s also a more targeted marketing approach.

The digital marketing trend is on the rise in South Africa. You want to remain at the forefront. By optimising your website with the best SEO tactics, you can quickly move up in the rankings and not get left behind. There are still many industries that don’t have competitive online campaigns. You can be the first company to move to the top in your specific industry. Once you’re at the top, it will be much harder for your competitors to catch up.

Increase Your Website’s Usability

There’s nothing more annoying, than landing on a website that has nothing to do with the search criteria you put in! You want to attract users that are interested in your unique product/service. And by adding the correct SEO keywords, you can access potential customers that are keen to do business with you.

Increase Brand Awareness

This lines up with the idea that you automatically gain credibility with potential customers when they see that you are at the top of the search results page. People trust the information provided by Google. By adding small little tweaks, such as an accurate meta description (the short piece of information below the website link) you can access the customers that will become passionate brand followers.

Why SEO Optimisation Is Important

SEO optimisation is all about showcasing your company effectively on search engines, with Google being the most popular one. You want people to click on your website link because they find your product/service most useful. This way you will attract potential customers that can benefit from interacting with your company, instead of having to sift through endless amounts of useless leads.

Search Engines Are Acquiring More Market Share

Stats show that between 80 to 90% of people first research a product/service online before deciding which company they prefer using. If you don’t optimize your website with the best SEO tactics, your competitors will snatch up the market share.

Local Search Optimization Is On the Rise

You need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly, displaying correctly on Smartphones. Mobile web users have steadily increased the last few years. It opens up a whole new aspect of SEO tactics, you can effectively target potential customers in your specific area.

A Bad Content Profile Can Damage Your Brand

Creating a website once-off and leaving it static for years, will get you penalized on Google. The search algorithm also takes other online platforms into consideration when ranking you, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. You need to be consistently active online, on various platforms. Sporadic social media posts, or blog posts once in a blue moon, is not enough. Google wants to know that you are actively engaged with your brand followers. Creating an SEO strategy that reaches across online platforms will be the best way of staying at the top of search result pages.

Your Competitors Are Definitely Using It

Search engine optimisation remains a never-ending process. You need to tweak your SEO strategy on an ongoing basis. Depending on your industry, keyword competition can be fierce. By thinking a little bit outside the box and using unique long tailed keywords, you can steadily inch ahead of your competitors.

Internet Usage in Africa vs The World

The Miniwatts Marketing Group estimated in June 2017 that Africa makes up 10% of the world’s internet users. In 2000 the South African population was roughly 44,900,000. On 31 December 2000, there were an estimated 2,400,000 internet users in the country. In 2017 the South African population was roughly 55,400,000. The latest estimate on 30 June 2017 of internet users was 29,935,634. This is a 1,147.3% increase in internet growth between 2000 and 2017.

Currently the internet researches about 54.0% of the South African population. And on 30 June 2017 it was estimated that 16,000,000 South Africans were using Facebook. For more African internet statistics, visit internetworldstats.com.

Storyteller Design Loves a Good SEO Challenge

If you created your website before SEO tactics became a crucial element of digital marketing, you don’t have to recreate your site to jump on the bandwagon. All you need to do, is assess your content and optimize it to include relevant SEO keywords to almost instantly push up your Google ranking..

At Storyteller Design we stay on top of all the new SEO trends, ensuring that our client websites consistently hit the first page of search results. We can assess your website and inform you of changes needed.

To continue with the SEO travel company example, people research and plan their trips online. They might use websites such as TripAdvisor or Airbnb, but they are most likely to enter very specific keyword phrases. By using a combination of an organic SEO strategy and an AdWords campaign, you can effectively target a niche market of potential customers.

Click here for a free SEO audit of your website.

February 7, 2018/1 Comment/by clydet

AdWords, Blog, Contact Form 7, Conversions, Development, Featured, Javascript, PHP, SEO, WordPress

How to redirect Contact Form 7 to a thank you page.

How To Redirect Contact Form 7 To Thank You Page

UPDATED 14-02-2019

We love using the WordPress plugin Contact Form 7 for the websites we build for our clients. It is extremely easy to use but very powerful and has reasonable documentation. A big plus for us is that it is a much loved plugin in the WordPress community and so answers and solutions can be found for almost all issues on sites like Stack Overflow and WordPress support.

At Storyteller Design we help out clients drive traffic to their sites through SEO and Google AdWords as well as the other search engine marketing like Bing Ads. One of the most important metrics for us is the conversion of these visitors to our client’s sites. A conversion is whenever someone completes a contact form, downloads a pdf or information sheet or calls the client.

We use Contact Form 7 for most of our contact forms and download forms. Once the form has been completed and the submit/download button clicked we want to redirect the visitor to a page where we can log that conversion in Google Analytics and pass that information back to our Google AdWords campaign.

Contact Form 7 used to suggest using an easy copy and paste technique to redirect to your thank you page. However this method has been depreciated by Contact Form 7 and will no longer work after the end of 2017. This leaves two options.

See Old Depreciated Method

Go to the “Contact” menu item in your WordPress back end side bar, click on the form you want to redirect and then click on the “Additional Settings” tab.

Add this code into the field provided:

[javascript]
on_sent_ok: "location = ‘http://www.example.com/thank-you/’;"
[/javascript]

You need to replace the http://www.example.com/thank-you/ with the url of your thank you page.

If you are not familiar with coding you can use a plugin called Contact Form 7 Redirection. They have both a free option available through WordPress but their Pro version adds some fantastic functionality that we often use for our clients.

This plugin uses the “wpcf7_mail_sent” action hook to redirect to the thank you page, and this hook shouldn’t be depreciated soon. This plugin has been tested to WordPress version 5.0.3 so it will continue to work well for you. It requires Contact Form 7 version 4.8 or later.

We suggest you try this plugin first and if it doesn’t work then move onto the second option.

Use some php in your child-themes functions.php file.

The method now recommended in the Contact Form 7 documentation is to use javascript to redirect when the wpcf7mailsent event occurs. The code to use is:

<script>
document.addEventListener( 'wpcf7mailsent', function( event ) {
    location = 'http://yourdomain.com/thank-you';
}, false );
</script>

If you only use one contact page, or only use on thank you page then all you need to do copy and paste the code below into your child theme’s function.php file.

//This function prints the JavaScript to the footer
function cf7_footer_script(){ ?>
 
<script>
document.addEventListener( 'wpcf7mailsent', function( event ) {
    location = 'http://yourdomain.com/thank-you';
}, false );
</script>
 
<?php } 
 
add_action('wp_footer', 'cf7_footer_script');

Again remember to replace the http://example.com/thank-you with your thank you page.

However we often use multiple contact form 7 forms on a website with multiple thank you pages. This is because we want to know exactly which pages, forms and calls to actions are converting our website visitors into leads so we send more traffic there, and optimise our conversion funnels.

In order to redirect different contact form 7 forms to different thank you pages you need to use the code below:

<?php
//This function prints the JavaScript to the footer
function cf7_footer_script(){ 

//if page name is contact.
if ( is_page('contact')) {?>
 
	<script>
	document.addEventListener( 'wpcf7mailsent', function( event ) {
			location = 'http://example.com/thank-you';
		}, false );
	</script>
 
<?php } 
	
}
add_action('wp_footer', 'cf7_footer_script');

Here is an example of the code for two different pages.

<?php

//This function prints the JavaScript to the footer
function cf7_footer_script(){ 

//if page name is contact.
if ( is_page('contact')) {?>
 
	<script>
	document.addEventListener( 'wpcf7mailsent', function( event ) {
			location = 'http://example.com/thank-you';
		}, false );
	</script>

<?php } else if ( is_page('download')) /* if page name is download */ {?>
 
	<script>
	document.addEventListener( 'wpcf7mailsent', function( event ) {
			location = 'http://example.com/thank-you';
		}, false );
	</script>
 
<?php } 
	
}
add_action('wp_footer', 'cf7_footer_script');

We hope this helps. It is important to note that this code will redirect all contact forms one a page to the same thank you page.

Please let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.

October 16, 2017/1 Comment/by clydet