Advertising through pay-per-click or PPC is one of the easiest methods to expand your reach, get new customers, and boost your business.
However, it’s easy to waste money with PPC marketing, especially when you do not have a strategy or skills to optimize your bids.
In PPC you have to maintain everything candidly and in the correct manner because if you allow anything to go wrong, then it will cause much loss to your business.
If you are serious about embracing PPC as your advertising method, PPC management is the process of managing a company’s PPC strategy and budget.
With PPC advertising management, you manage your campaign in-house or utilize a PPC management company.
Regardless of who works on your campaign, PPC management concentrates on creating and optimizing your PPC campaign.
Truth is, you cannot make much out of your PPC advertising and campaigns without effective PPC management.
You have to be willing to spend time managing your account. Thankfully, PPC management doesn’t need to be a time-consuming procedure; however, it is important to note which areas of your account need work and which will produce the greatest returns.
This article will discuss the tools and processes you can use to make PPC management simple and more effective for your business. To start, let’s begin from the beginning.
What is PPC Management?
PPC management is where a team of marketers oversees a company’s whole PPC advertising strategy and budget. This can be performed by an in-house team of marketers and media buyers, or outsourced to an external company.
A PPC professional (or company) usually performs the following tasks:
#1. Keyword Research: Identifying the keywords that your target audiences are searching for.
#2. Target platform: Selecting which paid media platform to pursue your campaign’s objectives through. These can include Bing Ads, Google Ads, display networks, and social media advertising.
#3. PPC monitoring: Measuring every campaign and keyword for effectiveness, ensuring PPC efforts are producing positive ROI.
#4. Competition analysis: Looking at what the competitors are doing, which keywords they are targeting, and the advertising creative they are utilizing.
#5. Campaign optimization: Monitoring campaign formation and optimization based on the most performing keywords.
For instance, if 20% of keywords bring in most of the result, you may want to concentrate your budget on those keywords to boost your ROI.
#6 Split testing: round-the-clock A/B testing of new ads and landing pages. Regular experiments across the whole PPC funnel.
Not every company has the resources to contract an in-house PPC manager. Therefore it may make more sense to engage an agency especially if you are new to the world of PPC or lack in-house resources to handle it yourself.
Processes of PPC Management
#1. Keyword research
Keyword research is a basic part of search marketing, whether you are running PPC or paid search marketing campaigns, or you are looking to increase your organic search engine optimization (SEO) results.
Identifying and optimizing your site for the specific keywords that users are typing into search engines helps you take your product to the right audience at the right time.
If you want your website to get a favorable ranking for relevance and get massive organic traffic, understanding how to conduct keyword research and identifying which keywords are worth your attention is crucial.
When starting a PPC ads campaign, marketers often perform a thorough search for terms involving an organization’s products.
#2. Keyword grouping
Keyword grouping is a neglected part of the Google Ads workflow. Not marketer realizes that creating tighter, better-organized ad groups in their Google ad account can have a great positive effect on their overall account performance.
That is because well-organized keyword groups boost your account’s relevance, which improves your Quality Score and lowers your cost per click.
Effectively grouping and organizing your keywords enhances your PPC strategies. When you segment your keywords, PPC campaigns are more fruitful and cost-effective from end to end.
#3. Strategizing Marketing Channel
Marketers generally choose websites to host PPC advertisements. This may include multiple search engines and social media websites.
Businesses regularly select media platforms to use based on the type of products they offer. For instance, they may publish content on an affiliate network, which describes another organization that sells a similar solution.
#4. Ad Text
There are several metrics that PPC advertisers should concentrate on to ensure good ROI from their campaigns. The Click-through rate is among the most important.
The CTR of an ad is the percentage of users who click on an advert when it has been served to them based on the results of their search query.
Except your adverts are fascinating and well-written, your CTR will suffer, and that influences your Quality Score, cost per click, ad rankings, and cost per conversion.
#5. Monitoring campaigns
In a PPC management campaign, a marketer can monitor keywords using a function that allows them to view terms that give rise to an advertisement to emerge.
By recognizing which keywords are ineffective, marketers can choose a new set of words that may have more favorable results.
They also monitor campaigns to compare the worth of each keyword’s costs with a company’s budget for PPC advertisements. As a campaign’s requirements can change, marketers also inspect them daily.
#6. Split Testing
Split testing involves comparing and contrasting the main elements of PPC ads, like graphics or body text, to learn which alternative can help improve website traffic alongside a keyword search.
Marketers generally utilize split testing procedures to help create a functional home page on a company’s website. They also use it to help enhance a PPC campaign’s ROI and develop protocols a team can utilize in future advertising efforts.
#7. Analyzing competitors
When analyzing a PPC campaign, a marketer may track the strategies and methods other companies use so they can bid on relevant search terms before competitors.
If they examine the strategies of another organization effectively, they can determine ways to improve a company’s ranking in search engine results.
Marketers may also assess a competitor’s ads, as they can get insights into how to improve their content.
What is the Essence of PPC management?
PPC management is important because, with aggressive management of your campaigns, your business can attract strategic, data-driven decisions that enhance your PPC performance and ROI.
PPC management can also help a company ensure its advertisement content appears on the first page of a search engine query.
When a user clicks on an ad, the link takes them to a company’s website content. This allows consumers to research a company’s products more efficiently, which may motivate them to purchase its products.
How to Utilize PPC Management Effectively
1. Create a landing page
Creating a landing page for a PPC advertisement can help you monitor customers who click on your advertisements, allowing you to know how many individuals purchase products afterward.
Consider using the same language in both your landing page and PPC advertisements to create a close-knit experience for consumers.
If a company has a subscription service, it may also be beneficial to add a button leading to a sign-up page.
2. Set Goals
Successful PPC campaigns are built on defined roadmaps. In other words, you must know where you are going with your campaign and what you wish to achieve before you get started.
Develop short-term and long-term objectives for a PPC campaign to help the team conduct tasks and allocate funds correctly.
This procedure can also help you determine a helpful workflow strategy that better agrees with a company’s mission statement.
It may be beneficial to use numerical data to learn what types of goals a team can achieve, such as the total number of sales from one accounting phase.
Afterward, you can choose a specific measurement tool to determine the success rate of your PPC ads.
So, what goal exactly are you hoping to score with your PPC campaigns?
#1. To increase the number of purchases: If you are selling digital products or running an online store, getting website visitors to make a purchase should be your number one goal.
#2. To generate more leads: If you offer B2B, professional services, high-ticket products, or lead generation should likely be your top goal.
The focus of your PPC campaigns will be to convert these users into qualified leads that you can later nurture into customers.
#3. For brand awareness: If you are a new business or want to stay ahead in your industry, PPC can help you do that. Of course, this should always be a by-product and not the major goal itself, as brand building doesn’t always lead directly to fruitful ROI.
With this clear goal in mind, you can begin to create PPC campaigns that will work towards them. Identify relevant keywords with sufficient volume to attract the right amount and type of traffic you wish for. Utilize the data from your existing product and landing pages to forecast PPC conversion rates.
3. PPC Structure
The way you structure your PPC campaigns is exceedingly important. Your structure is the skeleton and the backbone of your account and a remarkable structure supports so many other crucial parts of your account, plus your account’s performance.
If you are new to the process, ensure you pause your campaigns as soon as you go through the onboarding process. This ensures that you are not spending money from the beginning and have a chance to adjust and optimize every part of your campaign.
Once you have gone through the initial setup, you can start optimizing and structuring your PPC campaigns for maximum success. Here are the fundamentals to keep in mind:
#1. Keywords: When you are getting started, you will need to see what sticks. Once your campaigns have been running for a while, you can create ad groups that target specific keywords. This has a huge influence on your whole PPC marketing funnel.
#2. Campaigns: Create a campaign for specific areas of your product. For instance, you could have one for branded terms, several for your multiple product categories, and another for competitor terms.
#3. Ad Groups: Below the campaign level, ad groups enable you to group ads together. This is tailored to manage which ads will be served with what keywords. For instance, digging into a campaign for a specific product type, you would create ad groups for each of your products.
#4. Ad Copy: Your ad copy must be optimized to attract the visitors searching for your target keyword. This means adding the keyword in the headline and adding copywriting features such as social proof, benefits, and urgency to motivate them to take action.
#4. Ad Extensions: These include location extensions, site extensions, and call extensions. By including Ad Extensions, you make your ads more fascinating and have a higher chance of improving your Quality Score.
#5. Landing Pages: You have to create specific landing pages for all of your campaigns. This is crucial, as it bridges the searcher’s query and the conversion. By addressing the specific intents of the searcher, you are more likely to build trust and turn them into customers.
Analytics: Every phase of your PPC funnel must be measured. This allows you to see which keywords, ads, and landing pages are performing as desired. And when you know what works, you can reapportion your budget to those areas to supercharge your ROI.
Note: Google’s suggestions can be an excellent way to seed your keyword research, but you should not follow them blindly. Conduct your keyword research and choose the ones which make the most sense to your business goals.
4. Don’t Be Afraid To Flush Your Budget Down The Drain In The Beginning
Marketing is often a game of testing the waters especially when you are trying your hands on something new. You won’t always get it right at first attempts until you have some insights to work with.
It is the same for PPC management. When you begin setting up campaigns for yourself or your clients, you are going to need to flush some cash to see what works. But don’t agonize over this: the consolation is that when you finally get it right, you can make it all back again with a positive ROI.
Over the first 30 days, it’s crucial to cast a wide net to read the pulse of the market. The data you will gather over this period will drive your long-term strategy and dictate which keywords, ads, and landing pages to settle for.
One way to do this is to launch both exact and broad match modifier keywords at the beginning. You will get that wide net from the BMM keywords while seeing which exact match keywords are driving conversions.
This can help with budget allocation from the beginning since you can allocate money to both and get two very different types of data to help carve a strategy while not burning through the budget.
Pay keen attention to your search query reports over the first month. While on that, you ought to look out for the following:
#1. New keyword ideas: Are there keywords appearing that perform well that you didn’t consider targeting during the setup phase?
#2. Negative keywords: Google will serve your ads on keywords that have zero relevance to what you offer in your industry. Include these to your list of negative keywords, which are keywords you want to remove from your campaigns.
#3. Top-performing keywords: These are your “moneybag” keywords, those that generate the majority of the results.
Once you have identified your top-performing keywords, you will want to move these into their ad group. By doing this, you will improve your quality score.
A high-quality score means a higher ranking on the SERPs at a lower cost, which implies a greater ROI.
To do this, create a new ad group under the relevant campaign by clicking the Create Ad Group button as shown below:
#5. Continuously Measure and Optimize to Boost Results
With a strong lasting strategy in place, you have to optimize your campaigns for long-term success. Now there are two ways you can do this:
#1. Broaden your PPC strategy with new campaigns, target keywords, and ad groups.
#2. Split-test your existing assets to improve performance
Note that every stage of your PPC marketing funnel can be optimized for greater efficiency:
#1. Test new keywords and see how they perform against existing relevant keywords
#2. Split-test new ad variations with new description copy and headlines
#3. Split-test landing pages components such as headlines and calls-to-action
Before you begin testing, define which metric you are aiming to optimize. Is it CPC, CTR, or conversion rates?
The metric you select will define your experimentation. For instance, a test to optimize CTR will possibly revolve around target keywords or ad copy. While a test to boost conversion rates will obligate you to optimize your landing page.
Once you know what you are optimizing for, it’s time to determine your hypothesis. This is simply a statement that forecasts the outcome of your A/B test. For instance, “By optimizing and testing new headlines or ad copy, your quality score will increase and CPC will decrease.”
Your hypothesis should then tell your A/B test ideas. Making use of the hypothesis stated above, these ideas may include:
#1. Adding the target keyword
#2. Adding social proof, for example, the number of clients served
#3. Different value propositions.
#4. Customer results
Select your idea by measuring the outcome of the idea if it works, how confident you are that the idea will work, and the ease of execution, otherwise known as the ICE framework. With this in place, it is time to run the test.
Choose what your sample size will be and how long the test will run. You can do this by deciding on a particular timeframe or ending the experiment when it gets to statistical significance.
Note: When running fresh ads, Google has a state-of-the-art feature that makes running experiments easy. In Google Ads, scroll down to “Drafts & experiments” in the left-hand menu:
Under Ad Variations choose New Experiment. This is where you will create your new ad variation against an existing ad from the campaign you are aiming to optimize.
For landing page experiments, Optimizely is a wonder tool you can use to easily split-test various components. Simply include the shortcode provided by Optimizely to your website and you can test new elements on your landing pages effortlessly
Once your experiment has run for the allocated time frame (or gets to statistical significance), it’s time to measure results.
Which variation came through as the clear winner? If your experiment was fruitful, roll it out as an indissoluble change. Then begin the process again.
Conclusion
As you must have noticed, PPC management is a strategic endeavor, not a string of growth hacks or a bag of tricks.
This manual should get you started on the road to beneficial PPC management. Utilize the data available as well as what you gather over time to boost your ROI continuously.
