The things your ad company doesn’t want you to know.

Understanding pay per click advertising management isn’t that difficult, which is what makes it all the more surprising that so few organisations really master what it is that they are trying to do. The model is obvious enough - advertisers pay a small fee each time one of their advertisements is clicked on, in essence it’s a commission that a business pays on getting visitors. The mother of all forms of PPC is search engine advertising - a system that allows advertisers to bid for their advert’s placing in a search engines sponsored links. This means that when somebody searches on a relevant keyword, the highest bidding adverts show up in the top slots of the results page. Google is the one search engine that everybody competes to place on.

PPC is vital, but it’s not enough

This form of advertising is invaluable and irreplaceable, but it’s not the only way. Any e-commerce site that wants to succeed needs to focus on organic ‘earns’ as well as PPCs. And this is why - good conversion rates depend on the quality of your copy, images and offering as well as on the amount of clickthroughs you generate. Some advertising firms prefer not to bring your attention to this area of PPC advertising management because they want to keep your attention on your PPC budget, specifically on increasing it if they can - because that way they make more money. Sadly, you don’t generally get a commensurate increase in profit.

Fixing the problem

Good copy isn’t optional and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Get a professional to take a look at your pages to ensure you’ve optimized your words, especially headings and tags, and that you’re using every possible opportunity to maximize your web exposure. Don’t confuse the need to maintain your site’s architecture so that people can navigate it easily with the tendency to freeze the site’s image and text so that repeat visitors, in particular, never seen anything fresh and interesting. In the long term that’s a way to lose repeat business.

Using your PPC campaign metrics to continuously assess your success and refine your website to meet customer need is good business practice. It’s essential to be aware of the fine detail of your conversions, particularly as consumers move rapidly from one channel to another as their lives change - being on top of those movements means you ensure your offering is correctly placed in the correct channels to guarantee action. Calls-to-action need constant oversight, using granular detail from your PPC metrics to ensure that you’re using vocabulary that appeals to your identified audience and will incite them to action.

Just as important is the requirement to find and create landing pages for long tail keywords. Outbidding your rivals for general terms might spike your adrenaline but it’s not the most effective way to create sales. So called niche marketing simply means dividing your offering into precise areas where you can find cheap to bid and likely to convert long-tail terms, for example, ‘men’s trainers’ is a generalised bid term that will put you in competition with hundreds of thousands of retailers but ‘men’s fall 18 Japanese trainers’ leads to a much smaller competition group with lower bid prices and, if you’ve chosen your long tails with care and crafted pages that match them perfectly, to a marketplace that knows what it wants and is ready to buy.

PCC needs management, but not necessarily management oversight

The traditional way of handling PPC advertising management is to appoint an agency that will ‘oversee’ your campaign and ‘manage’ its effectiveness. We’re definitely not going to argue with the need for analyzing and fine-tuning your PPC campaign and the points that need to be constantly monitored and adjusted are:

• Reviewing keywords - whether you need to include additional keywords that will boost the relevance of your advert or examine the performance of your most expensive keywords to ensure that they’re generating enough traffic to warrant your spend, you need to be regularly examining your chosen keywords to be sure they are earning their way.
• Adding negative keywords - non-converting terms (ie terms that appear productive but turn out not to generate business) can be added to your PPC campaign. Improved relevance reduces your non-productive expenditure, which can be as important as improving your click through rate when you’re dealing with click fraud (see below).
• Dividing advertising groups - separating your ad groups into small, relevant area gives you the scope to created more tightly focused advertising text leading to highly relevant landing pages. The more specific the link between PPC ad and landing page, the more likely you are to improve your click-through rate which, in turn, is a natural producer of active purchase.

Fixing the problem

We may have made it sound as if you really need to have a dedicated PPC agency overseeing your campaign’s performance. That’s not our position - we believe that most of the donkey work of PPC advertising management should be done by your chosen software, not a flunky. Investing in a software system that can analyze and report on every aspect of your PPC campaign isn’t just smart thinking, it’s a way of having complete mastery of your PPC activity without paying through the nose for the privilege.

E-commerce moves with staggering speed - human capacity to keep up is limited. We believe that the successful online business of the near future will have developed the strategic capacity to divide ecommerce into two clear fields:

• Automated activity - bidding, monitoring, analysing, reporting. All areas in which 24/7 attention is needed and where algorithms can establish swift effective responses.
• Value added activity - customer service, creative endeavour, ‘white glove’ touches that personalise the online shopping and create great both great reviews and returning customers.

For each business these areas may be subtly different but for any online enterprise, core automation is the certain way to free up both budget and personnel to provide richly rewarding shopping experiences.

PPC works … but not always as expected

Novices to PPC and experienced Adwords campaigners alike can still be surprised by the extent of click fraud and engagement fraud. One reason that it’s difficult is that most ad agencies simply don’t nail unusual patterns in PPC, it’s not in their interest to point out that your precious advertising spend is being exhausted by fraudulent activity. Why not? Because while getting you to increase your budget benefits them, spending time reporting click-fraud to the search engines doesn’t generate income for them and is - to be fair - a largely thankless task.

The simple but unpleasant truth is that many businesses spend as much time disabling their competitors as they do ensuring their own success. Nothing could be easier than to use up a rival’s budget by generating clicks that lead nowhere.

Google monitors click fraud via a three level system that investigates invalid clicks, explores anomalies and interrogates your own analysis of fraud. Breaking down visitor engagement is a key determinant of discovering click fraud, but Google doesn’t do this in-house — and that means if you’re depending on your ad agency to spot and combat click-fraud, you may be wasting both time and money.

Fixing the problem

High performance software doesn’t wait for the search engines to investigate click fraud. It doesn’t depend on getting its clients refunds for their wasted spend. Instead, using an automated system of bid management it can pause keywords that are under attack, protecting the budget and moving spend into areas that continue to be profitable, all in real time. And that point we made about ad agencies not profiting from reporting click fraud? TEA Software generates the reports that win back any wasted spend without adding to your overhead.

PPC advertising management is an essential - and knowing how to go about it can move your business from middle of the road to pack leader without needing to break the bank.