Not all PPC campaigns are alike - and finding a way to manage yours effectively is the key to successful online commerce. PPC campaign management services are all too often marketed as a ‘one size fits all’ package, and that’s the least efficient way to choose a PPC campaign team to work with.

The painful reality is that most online entrepreneurs don’t have enough time, or expertise, to be hands-on PPC campaign managers. Optimizing an advertising account is a full time business and can require a set of qualifications that might not match the skills that successful business leaders possess. It’s an attention-to-detail job, a lot of the time, and one that requires a painstaking approach to fine detail that almost no Chief Executive can give. Research undertaken in 2015 reveals that only 56% of SME business owners got around to ad optimization more than four times a year. Once a quarter is not enough to retain any kind of value for advertising spend and for those businesses whose intentions are good but whose practice is erratic, their often substantial Adwords spend is probably going entirely to waste.

Where PPC campaign management services really deliver

• Growing online sales - it should be a no-brainer that this is the key function of PPC campaigns. Always ask what a specific action or activity is contributing to this single point. ‘How does this help us grow our online sales?’ should be said out loud whenever you meet or speak to your campaign manager.
• Targeting specific localities and/or communities or taking your business to new sectors of the global marketplace. This is one of the areas where working with a management team can help increase your business success. If they can offer an insight into niche markets and/or explain how to globalize your enterprise then they are worth investing in.
• Restore a suspend AdWords account - this is a place where the human touch is required. AdWords accounts do get suspended, as do Amazon vendor accounts, usually because in-house management of your PPC has led to some unintended consequences. It can also happen because you’ve listened to the advice of some black hat SEO specialist who’s left you in difficulties. There is nothing to replace the personal attention of a individual who can work through the steps to restore your account … but once that’s over you should be subjecting your management services to the same scrutiny as anybody else - resting on laurels is not an activity that will benefit your PPC campaign.
• Manage your call responses. The latest research shows that 69% of mobile searchers will call a business directly from Google search results - converting those calls is something that often demands the attention of a dedicated campaign management team with experience in successfully transferring traffic from the online to the human environment.
• From seed to long tail keyword research - you might imagine that this is one of the places we’d claim that automation is better but actually, our position is that you need both. Keyword analysis can best be undertaken through automated systems because the constant monitoring of keyword performance is a minute by minute process. But there’s another level of research that requires human intervention - it’s the intuitive, creative input of human intelligence to the process of identifying keywords. Sometimes it’s as simple as adding ‘pimp my ride’ to an automotive suppliers keyword list, because that supplier is aiming at a specific demographic who will have an ironic, but positive response to a term they associate with their free-spending youth.
• Finding the invisible problem. There are times when a campaign simply doesn’t work - the keywords are right, the placement perfect, the text carries a converting message but … nothing doing. It can take the input of a creative team to understand the problem. As an example, when a major PPC campaign was slightly tweaked by the client, it began to slide. Nobody could understand why but when a senior consultant was shown the landing page ‘before’ and ‘after’ the changes, she spotted it immediately - the tweaked page had a new photograph, much more masculine in approach than the previous one. The key decision-makers for the product were female and somehow the new image wasn’t in line with their preferences.

Where PPC campaign management services can, and should, be automated

If your campaign management team are offering you the following services, it’s a good idea to step back and consider whether you need a consultant to undertake these tasks or whether software can undertake all these tasks more rapidly and at less cost:

• Specifying adverts - a consultant shouldn’t be necessary to tune your advertising based on metrics. Yes, there’s a huge amount of data contained within the management of your PPC campaign and yes, it can seem overwhelming to mine it to establish what you should be bidding on. However, automated processes like those built into the TEA software can actually analyze and respond to every bit of data much more rapidly than a human ever could. Click-through rates? Conversion rates? Device segmentation? More often than not, this information can be processed, and acted on, in real time through your software, so that you’re freed to focus on more creative areas like demographics and expanding your marketplace.
• Controlling advertising spend - hmmm … this is an interesting one. Obviously budget is a key determinant and if you threw enough money at it, you’d always be top of the ad list. But when you need to balance spend and results, which almost everybody does, this is another process that can usefully be automated because advertising spend is a realtime process rather that needs constant and meticulous attention. Does your agency work 24/7? No, of course not, but good software can, and will, to ensure your spend is optimized.

Pay Per Click requires constant attention

AdWords need nursing. Bids that are too low leave you nowhere, adverts that once delivered slowly decline and their conversion level drops. A big player joins the market and shoves you down the list. A constant awareness of your position is required, but it’s not something that the average chief executive can offer. Finding the right balance of management services and automated oversight can give you not just the profit you deserve but the peace of mind that gives you freedom to grow your business.

PPC campaign management services are most valuable when they offer oversight of your campaign that gives you actionable information. What does that mean in practice? An example is a 2013 survey that discovered 46% of businesses didn’t add any negative keywords to their keyword list after their first consultation with their management company. It’s hard to understand what their ad management consultants were actually doing, if negative keyword refinement isn’t part of their daily activity. This is an essential activity that requires attention on a day by day basis.

Examining the bigger picture. Focusing only on your own advertising strategy rarely pays off. Recognizing and responding to the entire field in which you operate is vital to real success. It’s important to know what your rivals are doing: they may have moved into areas or services that are cutting into your market share, or their seasonal adverts may be delivering a much higher conversion rate than your more general ones. Perhaps they’ve gone to free shipping for high ticket items or offer white glove services that mean they get the customer even if you’re ad ranks more highly.

Adverts tank. Attacking the problem when a PPC campaign just doesn’t take off can’t be left for your next monthly or quarterly report, it has to be tackled immediately. On a well-managed campaign such things shouldn’t happen but they do - one of the most common reasons for an ad simply not performing is that somebody accidentally added a high-ranking term to the negative keyword lists. You’d be amazing how often this happens and it’s always a mistake, but it’s a mistake that can destroy a well-designed ad campaign. Another reason that advertising may fail is that somebody has tweaked a form or even the shopping cart, and left a vital element of the shopping process not functioning properly.

Spending creep happens, and it isn’t always a bad thing. Absolute spend is not a great measure of success - if you’re getting more sales or increased leads as a result of increased spend that’s great news. However, be being able to clearly relate spending increases to improved business performance means getting the kind of metrics you can understand and respond to. Google is notoriously opaque with its data so it’s essential that you have either PPC Campaign Management Services that provide this data or software that pulls out the relevant information and presents it in an actionable format.

So, campaign management is useful, but only if you’re on top of it, if it offers value-added information that improves your business ranking and if it couldn’t be done more effectively and more cheaply by software services.