Many businesses struggle with PPC campaigns. When you’re spending that much money, you want guaranteed results. The best way to guarantee success in PPC advertising is to work with a PPC management agency.
What Is PPC Management?
PPC management involves launching and tracking a pay-per-click or PPC advertising campaign. This is done to ensure that the advertising budget is being spent in the best possible way. To maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS) using PPC management, you can either manage your campaigns in-house or outsource this area to an external management agency.
What Does a PPC Management Agency Do?
PPC management agencies cover the entire campaign process from start to finish. Here are some of the specific tasks undertaken by a PPC management agency:
- Keyword research: Identifying and quantifying the keywords that your ideal customers are searching for
- Target channels: Identifying the channels that your ideal customers are using and where you should place your content
- Competition analysis: Researching tactics and keywords used by competition to help translate strengths and exploit weaknesses
- Testing: Conducting testing of new ads and landing pages to ensure that they have the desired effect
- Campaign monitoring: Monitoring and measuring the results of the campaign to ensure that it’s not losing money
Should You Hire a PPC Management Agency?
Clearly, PPC management agencies take on a lot, if not all, of the burden of running a PPC advertising campaign. Removing these tasks from your plate allows you to focus on more important areas of your business. Furthermore, when you’re working with PPC management experts, you’re more likely to experience better results.
Outsourcing may cost you money up-front, but you will end up saving money at the end of the day through increased return on ad spend thanks to their work and expertise.
What to Look for in a PPC Management Agency?
While using a PPC management agency can go a long way towards ensuring a successful PPC advertising campaign, they aren’t all created equal. Instead, you need to look for an experienced and reputable agency that has proven results, preferably within your industry. Be sure to check out testimonials and reviews before making your final choice.
If you’re looking for an experienced PPC manager that can do more than just handle your PPC campaigns, look no further than Greg Gillman. Greg specializes in omnichannel growth strategies for direct-to-consumer brands. Using his expertise, he has helped his clients generate over $4 billion in annual revenue.
How to Use PPC Management to Target Quality Traffic
Here are seven different ways that you can use PPC management to target quality traffic for a successful marketing campaign:
1. Research Your Keywords and Audience
Before you launch your campaign, do your due diligence. Namely, you need to conduct thorough research surrounding your keywords and audience.
You need to know what your customers are searching for. Pay close attention to any keywords used by competitors, and be sure to incorporate those into your strategy.
Additionally, you will need to research your audience, so you know who to target with your campaign. Think about who would benefit from your product or service. From there, come up with specifications you can use to reach them. Don’t forget also to exclude any groups that you don’t want seeing your campaign.
2. Set Goals and Use Data to Your Advantage
Once you have the basics down regarding keywords and targeting, it’s time to set goals. While it may be tempting to reach for the stars, your goals should be realistic and based on previous data. For instance, if you achieved a conversion rate of 10% on your last campaign, your goal should be to meet or exceed that high conversion rate.
Some specific data points that you should keep in mind when running a PPC campaign include clicks, cost-per-click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), impressions, conversion rate, cost per conversion, and return on ad spend (ROAS).
3. Determine a Budget and Use It Wisely
Based on the information you’ve gathered thus far, it’s time for you to set a budget. At the end of the day, you should choose your budget based on your wider marketing budget and your goals. The good news is that with PPC campaigns, you focus on clicks and not impressions, so you can track your spend versus conversions more accurately.
That being said, you need to be prepared to pay a decent amount for the clicks that you do get. Generally speaking, you should expect to pay around $1 to $2 per click on your campaign depending on the platform, industry, keywords, etc. If you’re just starting out with PPC, you may want to begin with a smaller budget of $1,000 before working up to the average of $5,000.
4. Employ Retargeting Measures
One mistake often made in PPC campaigns relates to the neglect of retargeting. In fact, employing retargeting measures is one of the best ways that you can use your PPC budget. This is because when you “retarget” someone, you’re reaching back out to someone who has previously interacted with your business in some way.
Since you’re working with an established foundation, you’re more likely to get a conversion as a result. As a result, you definitely need to embrace cookies and pixels to effectively track your previous interactions with people so that you can target them again in the future to convert.
5. Format for Mobile Users
Mobile is all the rage these days but some campaigns still aren’t formatted for mobile. Depending on the platform, there are several ways that you can optimize your PPC campaigns for mobile devices. On Google, for example, you can set up a separate mobile PPC campaign that comes with different specifications. No matter which route you choose, the most important thing is to make sure that your landing pages are mobile-friendly.
6. Test Your Content Before Launching
To make sure that you have effective landing pages, you should test your campaign content before launching. A/B or split testing is a popular testing method that involves changing a single variable and comparing the two versions. This method of testing gives you clear results, although you may have to run dozens of different tests to gather accurate data surrounding multiple variables.
7. Track Your Results and Optimize
Even if you have done your due diligence and testing before launching your PPC campaign, it’s still important to track your results throughout the life of the campaign. You should never take a “set it and forget it” approach to advertising campaigns. Instead, you should constantly track the metrics you chose in the first step to ensure that they are performing well. If they aren’t, you can take action to address these inefficiencies and optimize your campaign.
Final Thoughts on PPC Management
As you can see, while it’s possible to manage your PPC campaigns on your own, these intricate and involved tasks are best left to the professionals within a PPC management agency. So reach out today for more information about how we can help grow your brand.
Sources:
The Complete Guide to Pay-Per-Click Campaign Management | Forbes
4 Keyword Search Strategies to Grow Your Business | Entrepreneur
What Is A/B Testing? Learn How to Run One Here | Business2Community
