What is PPC Management? a Beginner’s Guide

Definition: PPC Management or Pay-per-click management is the process of monitoring and optimizing the advertising budgets. A successful PPC Management involves implementing and structuring digital marketing paid ads strategies to provide the best return on advertising spend.

The birth of PPC Management started when companies needed to advertise online. Since the history of the internet, online advertising has been the dominant platform for businesses to get instant results. In comparison to other media advertising platforms such as television, radio, or building banners. Online advertising had the best return on investment with the quickest time to generate revenue.

Online advertising platforms such as Google AdWords, Youtube, Microsoft ads, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even online social platforms such as Facebook Ads, Instagram, and TikTok use some sort of pay-per-click PPC system to advertise various types of media online.

Before we dive into the details, let’s have a look at what PPC advertising is all about.

What is PPC Advertising?

PPC advertising is like an auction-based system in which various advertisers bid to target and reach users online with the goal to get the highest possible conversion rates. Whether you’re looking to find users through paid search or display advertising. Businesses of all sizes can use this type of channel to reach interested leads just to make a high possibility of driving valuable and measurable traffic without a costly ad spend on your landing pages.

So PPC is the real act of buying traffic on search engines, and for a lot of companies, it represents their primary metric for new customer acquisition.

You may have ever done a search before and you’ve seen ads or sponsored results at the top of the search engine pages. These are the ads that are called “searched ads” and they are the first part of the search engine a user sees when conducting a search.

Knowing that a search can show more than 6 billion search queries every single day. The goal then is to take some of these search queries(that are related topics to your business) and bring that traffic to your website. So you can get more and more customers (which translates into more sales and more turnover).

Ads can also be shown in multiple marketing channels such as the display network which are websites partnered with Google Ads or Bing to display online advertisements. Those sites enable you to show your ads without even being searched. Multiple types of media such as text ads, images, or videos are used and you can choose to have them displayed based upon words, user interests, or behavior.

That’s why PPC Advertising is an extremely effective tool to generate new customers at an affordable and profitable price. If you are still new to the world of online advertising or looking to seek more knowledge on improving your PPC management strategy.

This guide will give you an accurate plan to have a clear knowledge of a PPC campaign. From determining a goal to campaign structure optimization, also explaining why it is good and preferable for your business and what mistakes you should be avoiding.

Why do you need PPC Management?

Pay per Click Advertising is an effective way to bring targeted traffic to your website, especially when you want to attract local customers. A well-devised paid search ad campaign will enable you to target potential customers who are looking specifically for your services.

The aim of the game for businesses is to spend the smallest amount of money to acquire a sale or a customer. So the advertising budget is more profitable and the return on investment is high. Hence, why a business needs to hire a PPC specialist for them to grow and generate more profits.

On that note, this skill is one of the most in-demand skills that comes with a huge salary, and businesses have to choose to hire internally and pay huge salaries or hire a PPC marketing agency to manage the online advertising. However, the PPC agency will be handling the act of monitoring and managing a particular company’s ad spend so that you don’t have to worry about it.

What does PPC Management include?

A PPC specialist or PPC agency usually implements the following task:

1. Keyword research – Find out what keywords are popular on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are tools that can help you with this step like the Google Keyword Planner, which provides monthly statistics about popular keywords and their average cost per click (CPC). Mastering this skill can hone the correct target audiences and align the business with more potential customers.
2. Target channels – Identifying which paid media channels that work for the business model. A business can benefit from using diversified marketing channels such as Google, Bing, Google Shopping, Youtube, Pinterest, display network channels, and also social media channels.
3. Competition Analysis – Analyzing your competitors and closely observing their marketing techniques is a great way to make sure your online marketing campaign is more successful.
4. Campaign optimization – Monitoring your campaign structure and optimizing based on high-performing keywords to improve ROI.
5. Split testing – Is the method of experimenting with different ways of improving key metrics on a website. To improve clicks and conversion rates. This involves A/B testing different copywriting, media types, buttons, layouts, etc.

All of those skills combined need to have expertise in each field, that is why a great PPC manager has t-shaped characteristics and qualifications. Thus, experience also matters, as it can take time to master each specific task.

How much do PPC Management services cost?

This is the question that most business owners need to know, if you are looking to scale your business you have to look at the cost of hiring personnel or outsourcing the work to a PPC agency. We will calculate the costs of both types and figure out what is the best pricing to suit your business model.

Hiring a PPC Specialist

If your business has multiple staff and established for a number of years then this option would be an ideal solution. The median salary for a PPC specialist as shown on Glassdoor is around 60k AUD if you are looking to hire within Australia.

We can calculate that to be $60,000 divided by 12 months of the year is roughly around $5,000 per month plus taxes and other employee benefits. That could easily cost around $80k AUD of staff expenses per year, so in saying that, is it worthwhile to hire an employee?

Then you have to add the costs of advertising spend on top of your staff salaries. The average median company usually needs to spend around about $5,000 to $20,000 per month on advertising spend. So your overheads need to be double or even triple before breaking even and start making a profit.

Let’s just say your staff cost is $5k AUD per month plus an average advertising budget of $10k AUD per month. This equates to $15k AUD per month or $180k AUD per year of overheads before making profits. This figure is hard to comprehend for most business owners that have a medium-sized companies. This is why you need to make sure you hire top-tiered PPC specialists for this role.

Now let’s look at how the cost differs from outsourcing to a PPC marketing agency.

Hiring a PPC Agency

When you hire an agency, PPC management rates can vary greatly. Some companies will offer a set fee while others will charge by the hour, and how much you spend on advertising.

The average PPC agency can cost between $500 to $5000 per month on top of your advertising budget. This figure is already worthwhile to consider when compared to hiring staff to manage your advertising.

The advantage of hiring a digital marketing agency is performance-based and can be on a contractual basis of up to 3 to 6 months. Therefore, it is easier to replace an agency if the performance to manage PPC campaigns is not at your agreed KPI standards.

If you are looking to hire an agency for PPC there are tons of agencies in the market, whereas it is harder to find employees to replace since Australia is currently having a skills shortage.

For detailed pricing, you can check Digitexe PPC Management costs, or contact us for customized pricing and speak with a PPC strategist about our PPC management services.

Now, if you are still learning how to optimize your campaigns below are some helpful tips on how you can improve your key metrics and avoid mistakes.

PPC Campaign Structure 

When building a PPC campaign it should be simple to understand and easy to explain. Many advertisers usually have problems with an unorganized account, lacking naming structures and labels, keywords overlapping, and a clear lack of strategy. 

Here we are going to explain to you how a “clean account” for an advertiser would be beneficial. When it comes to creating a PPC campaign, the first thing you should care about is having a good structure. Another important part of having a good structure is to avoid confusion when other personnel is needed to handle the accounts.

A successful PPC structure can be set up in a simplistic way and easy to understand.

Here are some simple tips for a simplistic and efficient PPC campaign:

• Using a hierarchy setup of Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords, and Ad Media with clear labeling.
• Define your business’s key metrics and create a strategy based on the advertising budget.
• Merge overlapping keywords, or set up a simple keyword campaign structure.
• Increase top-performing ads, turn off poor-performing ads, or add negative keywords that don’t perform well.
• Monitor optimization scores to make sure it’s high.
• A campaign should be easy to explain to another person.

As you may know that accounts are composed of different types of campaigns that include an ad group. An ad group will always hold a set of keywords as well as the ads that these keywords will affect

PPC management campaigns should be focused on higher-level core service or product offerings, while ad groups can be leveraged to expand on variations of those core offerings. 

A PPC ad structure can be set up complicated by a PPC expert but can also be easily explained. However, the most important thing is the foundation of a successful campaign set up on any PPC platform.

What tools can help with PPC Management?

There is no fully automated PPC management software that can successfully run campaigns on autopilot with no human intervention. Not now, maybe in the future, so what tools can help you in optimizing your campaigns?

There are thousands of tools that can help with PPC management ranging from third-party management software, to help with tracking, competition research tools, AI copywriting tools, and media designs. Some examples below can help with ad optimizations and research.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Adwords provides a free research tool called Keyword Planner that makes it easy to find the perfect keywords. It displays information such as monthly search volumes and keyword trends and conducts comparative searches too, so there are tons of ways you can use it to your advantage.

Google Tag Manager

Since the era of antitrust privacy laws, personal privacy has been a major challenge for advertisers, especially in iOS and similar operating systems. Tracking customers has to be implemented the right way to have successful lead generation campaigns.

Another free tool provided by Google is called the Google Tag Manager which can overcome the personal tracking issue. This is necessary to implement remarketing campaigns and can be used with nearly all the website platforms and applications.

This tool needs expertise in coding experience and also an understanding of the backend of hosting platforms. Although there are other third-party applications that can integrate with the Google Tag Manager so it can be easily installed by a novice. However, for more controlled tracking it needs to be set up with the correct tags, triggers, and containers.

Semrush

One of the top-tier PPC management tools that have a number of marketing tools at your disposal. Begin with a simple keyword research tool when you launch your website and then graduate to more comprehensive ones as it expands.

Semrush offers an extensive amount of tools under a multitude of categories from keyword researching to search engine optimization to rank your websites to the top of the search engines. It also features a customized automated reporting system ready to take on any level of business.

Not only that, they are expanding to provide a marketplace for content services such as copywriting articles, designing creatives, or hiring experts in the digital marketing space.

Other PPC Management Tools

Another third-party PPC management tool that controls the advertising platform is called Adespresso. This is a full-service digital marketing software that can control a variety of advertising platforms in one dashboard. We will cover more of these tools in another comprehensive guide.

Other than using PPC management tools to optimize your campaigns we will look at some common mistakes in PPC management.

PPC Management mistakes

An important step to maximizing your PPC budget and making it as cost-effective as possible is managing it properly. For instance, not managing it well can be detrimental to the success of your business by showing you up for the wrong search queries, lowering the quality score of your ads, and the worse thing a business can deal with is loss of revenue.

Recognizing early these mistakes could save you hours of time, or thousands of dollars every month. So what are the common PPC management mistakes and how to fix them?

Here are our recommendations to avoid and fix these common mistakes by following these 5 steps:

1. Running a campaign with no specific goals:

Before starting any campaign, a buyer persona of the potential customer should be created. Then you should be able to create clearly defined goals for your ads based on that analysis.

To put it in simple terms as an example, how can you find a location without using a roadmap and no directions? This is precisely the same with developing a PPC strategy when a roadmap is laid out with clearly defined goals and targets. Then it is easier to reach the destination which in this case a paying customer.

To help you avoid these mistakes, and understand how these metrics can affect your PPC campaigns. You should consider taking into account these necessary metrics:

• Business goals and revenue targets
• Overall marketing goals and targets.
• The digital marketing channels, whether it’s PPC Ads, content marketing, email marketing, or CRO, how each additional channel can impact.

When you factor all of these into your plan then you can map out what are the expected reach, click rates, conversion rates, daily budgets, and other key metrics. This will give you clear specific goals on how to grow your business short term and long term.

2. Tracking is not set up properly

The easiest way to overspend on most PPC platforms is to run traffic campaigns with no tracking.  In simple terms, you are directing the PPC platform to target a broad keyword and hoping for potential customers to convert.

How PPC platforms can optimize their campaigns is to utilize and feedback the data of all the online traffic back to the audience manager. This feedback loop can work with the algorithm of the PPC platform and in return, it should optimize the ads. This issue is very common and you should fix and debug it before running any campaigns. By not having this tracking integrated then the PPC platform is just randomly guessing who is next to the target.

To avoid this issue, make sure to implement correct PPC tracking that can communicate between the PPC platform and the website. Free tools such as Google Tag Manager can be used to handle this, there is also other third-party software that can overcome this problem.

By making sure your potential customers are tracked properly without breaking any privacy rules, then you can optimize your ads and help your PPC management run efficiently.

3. Targeting the wrong keywords and demographic

Certain PPC platforms can easily set up your PPC ads in no time with the aid of recommendations. Most of the time these are not a very efficient way of controlling targeting and budgets. Recommendations can randomly be suggested as broad keywords, which can use up your daily budget very quickly.

How customers are found is by targeting the correct search queries and correct demographic locations. So there needs to be some level of research involved before attempting to run campaigns. Combined with your defined goals and your PPC campaigns should hit key metrics the right way.

A free keyword research tool is usually included in most PPC platforms, an example is the Keyword planner for Google Ads. Avoid the mistake of using high-volume broad keywords that will bring in toxic traffic and mess up your data.

In Digitexe, we use high-quality research tools to overcome this problem. A full-service digital marketing tool such as Semrush can help analyze competition and find out what keywords are used for conversions in many particular niches.

If you need help with keyword research, get in touch and book a free consultation with our PPC strategists and avoid the targeting issue.

4. Set and forget your PPC campaigns

Online ad campaigns are always needed to be looked after, well managed, and optimized regularly. To improve your campaign performance, many changes and optimizations should take place.

Campaign management should be done on a daily or weekly bases such as reviewing search terms and keywords, adding negative keywords, A/B testing new ads, and figuring out different bid strategies.

Avoid this mistake by regularly optimizing your PPC campaigns. The most common one is not adding negative keywords in the search queries. Negative keywords should be monitored when it is allowing a lot of toxic traffic with zero or very low conversions. In saying that, let’s look at how conversions can be affected with the next topic.

5. Not having a functional website

Focusing on keyword search and ad copies on your PPC campaign is good, but have you thought about where your searchers will commonly end up?

The answer is your WEBSITE of course.

That’s why you have to take care of your website in many terms like:

Good design, and most importantly a better user experience than your competitors.

If people who get the conversion to your website have a bad and poor experience when visiting it may damage all the work that you have put there and you will soon ask the question “ what is the point of paying for traffic to send people there?

You always have to make sure that your website can handle the amount of traffic and conversion rates by being fast, well-optimized, good looking.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you have learned the foundations of a PPC campaign as a beginning for your guidance, starting from getting a clear vision of the right structure that you need to make to the importance of establishing a PPC campaign and not forgetting about the mistakes that you should avoid.

If you need any help on your PPC campaigns don’t hesitate to contact us, so that we can solve your problems and help you reach your goals, Also check out regularly our website, because we will be talking about the best tips for better PPC management.