Pay per click, or PPC, is one of the most common forms of paid advertising for any marketing pro. Whether you’re a small firm or a multinational enterprise, this is a tried and tested way to get your brand noticed, drive traffic to your website and increase conversions.
However, it takes time and effort to get this right. You can’t expect to simply increase your spending on Google Ads and get immediate results. In order to see a sustainable return on investment, PPC activities need careful monitoring and management to ensure they are well-optimised, effectively targeted and provide the best value for money.
This can quickly turn into a full-time job, and it’s something many firms find challenging. This is especially the case for smaller marketing teams with limited time or expertise. Therefore, it can pay to have an expert partner to help take on this process.
Whether you opt for the services of an experienced Google Ads agency or choose to go it alone, it’s important to understand exactly what PPC campaign management involves and what benefits you can expect to see from a well-planned PPC strategy. Therefore, here’s an essential primer on what you need to know.
PPC campaign management refers to all the activities that go into overseeing and optimising paid advertising campaigns in order to ensure the best return on investment (ROI). This encompasses a range of activities, including keyword research, bid management, competitor analysis and channel strategy to determine the best placement and content for ads.
The purpose of these efforts is to ensure you’re selecting the specific keywords that can give you the best cost per click and conversion rate for your ad spend, and are displaying your ads to the most relevant target audience.
One aspect of PPC campaign management involves taking a high-level view of your activities to direct your overall strategy, such as your preferred advertising platforms, identifying your ideal target audiences and ensuring your landing pages are of the highest quality. However, there are also a range of ongoing, day-to-day tasks that must be completed. These include the following:
Keeping an eye on spending is one of the most critical aspects of good PPC management. It can be easy to simply set a monthly budget and forget about it, safe in the knowledge you won’t overspend. But if you haven’t planned your bidding strategy carefully, you may end up overpaying for key terms, which means you exhaust your budget too quickly – while on the other hand, an overly-cautious approach may mean missing out on valuable traffic. Getting the balance right, and making adjustments on the fly during a campaign is essential in ensuring you can enjoy a strong ROI.
Choosing the right keywords is another essential part of any PPC campaign, and this task should not be restricted to the planning phase. Once a campaign is live, it’s imperative that you keep a close eye on your chosen keywords. This includes adjusting any that are underperforming, maintaining an up-to-date keyword planner and looking for negative keywords you don’t wish your ads to be shown next to.
Effective A/B testing can give you huge insight into what aspects of your ad give the best boost to performance. There are a range of steps you can take, such as adjusting imagery or the call to action. However, it’s important that you only change one aspect at a time in order to gain usable results.
Keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing can also help you optimise your campaigns to better respond. Knowing where they’re focusing their efforts can help identify any opportunities they may be missing, or enable you to adjust your bidding strategy to be more competitive on your priority keywords.
It can be a lot of work to keep track of these activities, but fortunately, there are a wide variety of dedicated software tools to help with this. These include both free and paid-for options that can provide insight or automate key aspects of your PPC ads.
For example, Google provides a range of tools to help with PPC on its own ad network.
This includes offerings such as Google Keyword Planner to assist with keyword research, while Google Trends can help you plot interest in key terms or topics over time.
Google Ads Insights is another free tool that every business should be using to monitor PPC performance. This can provide a range of information about how your ads stack up to competitors, with details including how often you get outbid on your key terms, or when competitors appear above you on search engine results pages.
Elsewhere, tools such as SEMRush, AdEspresso and WordStream all provide premium services that can help with PPC optimisation, ad creation and budget management.
While it may be possible for you to handle all these activities in-house, the chances are you’ll quickly find them hugely complex and time-consuming – especially if you’re already working with limited resources. In this case, it can be hugely beneficial to turn to professional PPC management services in order.
Axonn’s Strategy Team Lead Ronil Mutha explains:
An experienced PPC consultant can handle every aspect of campaign management on your behalf, from selecting the right keywords to setting up bidding strategies. However, working with a full-service agency like Axonn can deliver much more than this. Some of the key paid advertising activities that a good partner can provide include:
If you want to learn more about how a skilled PPC campaign management agency can help give your paid ad efforts a boost, get in touch with Axonn today to start a conversation.
The best content marketing strategy has a mix of paid search and earned media that allows you to maximise your reach to your target audience. A PPC campaign should work alongside organic pieces that are used to create brand awareness on social media to turn a passing interest in your business into leads. While your […]
Google’s long-awaited Gemini AI model has finally been launched, with its first integration being for ads. So, advertisers are to experience this initial rollout, which is set to be followed by many more Gemini integrations. A chatbot-style conversational experience will now meet users of Google Ads in the UK and US. This will be extended […]