How to master Adwords PPC Management

Perhaps your business has outgrown its in-house PPC skills or maybe you’re considering a start-up ecommerce that needs solid PPC in order to achieve success? Finding effective PPC management for your organization can seem daunting, but our guide to selecting the best Adwords PPC management can help you sort through your options and find a solution that drives your business forward.

Background to PPC

If PPC has become essential for business, Google AdWords is the tool that converts PPC into a strategic imperative. For many small organizations, it’s easy to get lost in the complexities of either the jargon or the technology or both. In short, there are two basic styles of PPC management service that can help businesses rise above the nuts and bolts of Pay Per Click:

• Account management - often this includes a set up cost, and then there will be a monthly management fee plus advertising spend.
• Priced package - these are all-inclusive pricing deals that cover both the click costs and the management fees (there may also be an initial set-up charge).

So the first question to ask, when interviewing PPC management agencies is what their pricing structure is and how they’ll calculate things, inclusive or separate cost. Small businesses will often find that the cost of invest in PPC training in house and the cost of using a dedicated PPC agency are comparable.

Five reasons to opt for Adwords PPC Management

Obviously Google AdWords provides a powerful pay-per-click advertising opportunity, but it offers more than that. Simply using Google AdWords gives your ecommerce activity unique online exposure that amounts to global marketing - something even the largest companies find both expensive and complicated. In addition, there’s the AdWords Help Center, which offers free training in using the AdWords process and finally, Google makes a large amount of valuable data available, free of charge, to help you refine your approach to targeted AdWords advertising.

• Failure to convert isn’t always obvious - Whether it’s because your keywords are too general or because your advertising copy isn’t convertible, or any other reason, it can be difficult to ascertain why an ad is failing. Even worse, it can be difficult for a business to know whether the advertisement is converting as well as it could. In other words, an ecommerce can continue to invest in weak PPC without knowing that it could be doing so much better. The great power of working with a trained PPC expert is that they are specialists in checking how your business in performing against others in your field so that you know that you’re achieving your utmost. Copy, in addition, is as much an art as a craft, and PPC agencies hire expert writers to ensure that copy converts as many click-throughs as possible to buying customers. For a new business, or one that is growing rapidly, this kind of expertise can be difficult to locate and building in-house skills in either the area of competitive analysis or converting ad copy can be both costly and time-intensive.
• Keyword research is specialized - one of the most essential elements of successful PPC is keyword research. Selecting the wrong keywords is death to an online business. To identify the correct keywords, organizations use a range of tools. Some are free, others you have to pay for and some PPC management agencies have their own bespoke keyword research tools. Most PPC experts go way beyond simple keyword research using a range of data resources such as competitor analysis to create a wide view of the environment in which your business operates as well as a narrow view of your business and what will give it an online advantage.
• PPC is a fast-moving field - from its specific jargon such as CPM and DCM to SEM through to tracking and tagging campaigns, PPC has become an industry in which the rapidity of technological developments is matched only by the speed at which algorithms refine and re-rank web pages. This means that everything from the sophistication of analysis of campaigns through to fine adjustment of landing page copy to ensure maximum conversion, can be subject to constant changes in approach, to re-calibration and even to total overhaul based on new information. Because there is not static position from which PPC, and especially PPC AdWords, can be viewed, there’s a constant investment required to ensure your PPC managers are up-do-speed with the latest developments. For many organizations, the investment decision is clear - it’s more cost-effective to get expert help than to try and ensure that they have their own in-house expertise that needs to be endlessly updated.
• Testing and targeting are time intensive - a landing page needs to relate specifically and closely to the words that have generated the click through. Specific relation means that the page has to have a clear and precise linkage to the keywords that provoked the click while close relation refers to the logical progression of the page through from the provoking words (the ones that link to the clicked on term) to the CTA (Call To Action) that generates a purchase or other desired response, whether it’s a call for further information or a request for a quotation right down to the size and shape of the button that people will click. Testing every element of a landing page obviously takes a considerable period of time, and PPC experts don’t just investigate all the elements of a landing page but also do something called A/B testing. A/B testing means that they compare two or more different versions of a landing page to see which small changes in appearance or language generate higher conversion rates. Few businesses can invest enough time, or money, to properly engage with landing page testing, whilst for Adwords PPC Management agencies, this work is the bread and butter of their daily work and it allows them to constantly refine the landing pages that they oversee to ensure that conversion is maximised.
• Your PPC Management Agency knows you better than you know yourself - that may sound unlikely but we’re not claiming that your PPC agency are mind readers! Rather, we’re saying that PPC experts have often worked with other clients in your sector and therefore have already worked through a range of strategies and approaches that you haven’t even begun to consider. This saves companies a great deal of wasted expenditure as well as drastically reducing the time it takes to get a campaign from an initial concept to an income generating mechanism. It’s obvious that if you work with a specialist who already has knowledge of the field they are going to be equipped to rule some things out as having failed in the past and to recommend others that they know have a great track record, so working with a PPC management agency can save you a lot of effort that would otherwise be wasted on re-inventing the PPC wheel.
• Click fraud could be costing you money - the ability to monitor for click fraud requires several different components: expertise in spotting it, capacity to log it, instant action in pausing campaigns that are being targeted and finally, experience in creating reports for Google to action. Being able to monitor and recognize click fraud is increasingly important as search engines can be slow in actioning the block and refund process, especially if they have to undertake audit activities before agreeing there has been fraud. Controlling click fraud is a blend of analytics and action and if you’re not totally confident about it, it’s better to put this aspect of your business in the hands of a true expert.

Choosing the best AdWords PPC Management for you

When you’re shortlisting the organizations that might be able to help move your PPC forward, bear the following things in mind:

• Experience - check out who the agency is accredited by (Google, Bing?) and the services they offer, SEO, PPC, analytics etc.
• Charging and contract periods - establish what their minimum contractual term is, and how their charges are calculated and applied. Do they take a percentage of your profits or work to a flat fee?
• Technology - agencies vary widely in their technological investment, so dig deep to find out whether they have bespoke bid management tools, what reporting structures they offer and how they handle challenges to PPC - for example, TEA Software has a whole suite of tools specifically designed to neutralize click-fraud before it becomes a drain on business.

There are many other factors to consider, the complexity of your campaigns, your existing resources and - importantly - how well you are able to communicate with the agencies you’re considering. Above all though, it has to be a hard-headed business decision: to what extent will working with this agency benefit your ecommerce and how much is it likely to harm your business not to make this investment in online expertise?