Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising is a popular way or driving new traffic and sales to your website. Essentially it’s a way of buying visitors to your site, rather than simply relying on customers finding their way organically. If you’ve ever used a search engine such as Google and seen sponsored ads at the top of the results, this is PPC marketing in action. If you click on one of those ads, the company who owns the site pays a small fee for that user. Depending on how competitive the search term is, the fee can vary. It may seem simple, but there’s actually a lot that goes into PPC management.

From deciding on what keywords to target, to how your campaign will run, and how your terms will be grouped, there’s a lot to think about. One thing that’s often forgotten though, is the quality and source of the traffic that PPC generates. In this article we’ll examine how PPC management works, as well as some issues that are often encountered. We’ll also discuss why our own software, TEA, provides an ingenious solution to some of the main issues.

How PPC Management Works

Perhaps the most well-known PPC management tool is Google AdWords. It allows users to bid on keywords to create ads that appear on Google’s search page and other properties. In order to determine which companies appear on the results page for a particular search term, Google uses two main metrics; the amount bid on the term, and the company’s quality score. The former, bid amount, is fairly self-explanatory. The latter is a bit more technical, and is a score given based on the relevance of the keyword to your company, the click through rate you achieve, and the quality of the content on your landing page. Regardless of whether you do it yourself, or if an agency takes control of your PPC campaigns, they generally tend to follow a fairly similar structure:

• Determine KPIs
  The first step is to determine what you want to achieve through your PPC campaigns. Presumably you want to drive more traffic to your website, but to what ends? It’s no use bidding on high-traffic terms that aren’t relevant to your business. Although you may get many new visitors, they’ll likely leave right after they land on your site. This will send your bounce rate skyrocketing, potentially to the detriment of your organic search ranking. Set a goal for metrics such as engagements, purchases, sales, and conversion. This way, once your campaign is running, you’ll be able to see how it’s performing. Once you have your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in place, you can focus on what platforms, devices, and locations you’re going to target.
• Define Your Keywords
  The next step is to work as a business, or with your agency, to create a list of keywords you can build groups and campaigns around. This can be a time consuming process. You need to start with a set of core keywords that are at the center of your business. From here you can expand outward, to capture long-tail keywords. There are many tools and resources you can use to help with this. You need to find relevant terms that have low competition and don’t cost a lot. This list will change depending on how certain terms are performing. Therefore, you’ll constantly be reviewing and refining it to discover the winning formula. You’ll also need to write ad copy for the keywords you’re bidding on. It should be unique, include the keyword, as well as a call to action.
• Launch Your Campaign
  Once you’re happy with the research and planning, it’s time to start setting your campaigns active. Your aim is to have a high click through rate from relevant traffic that will positively engage with your site. To do this, you can set up ad extensions and scheduling. Extensions show additional details on your ads. This includes contact details, locations, and sitelink extensions. All of these contribute to your quality score. In terms of scheduling, you can determine whether your ads show every time someone uses search, or only at certain times on certain days. This can help make sure you’re always available to deal with queries that may arise from the PPC ad.
• Analyze and Refine
  Once your ads are live, it’s important to keep track of how they’re performing. After all, you’re paying for the privilege. You can use negative keywords to ensure your ads don’t appear on irrelevant search terms, and filter out the keywords that aren’t performing for you. If an ad has an expensive cost per click and it doesn’t generate traffic that converts, it’s time to drop it. Most people use an analytics package such as Google Analytics, in conjunction with a conversion tracking code, to see how certain terms are working. Don’t be afraid to look at competitors to see what they’re bidding on and how their ads look.

PPC management is a task that requires constant attention. Good campaigns are the ones that are being analyzed and refined on a regular basis. However, even with the attention there are still some issues that can end up costing you more than it should.

Traditional PPC Management Issues

Despite the effectiveness of PPC, there are definitely some issues that can be experienced with it. Below we’ve outlined some of the most common ones:

• It can get expensive: although PPC marketing can drive new visitors to your site, it doesn’t guarantee that they will spend money. You can end up getting plenty of clicks through from your ads, without anyone actually converting. This means that you have to pay for each click on each term, so your costs can soon mount up. You need to make sure the traffic you’re getting is of a good quality, and that your budget is accurate.
• It requires in-depth knowledge: It’s not advisable to take an uneducated approach to PPC; it’s a highly refined marketing channel that requires expert knowledge. Again, if you don’t have this knowledge yourself you’re going to have to pay someone to do it for you.
• Click fraud: Perhaps the biggest issue with PPC is click fraud. This is where competitors and scammers will intentionally send traffic through your ad without the intention of making a purchase. This drives your costs up, and yields no benefits for your online business. It’s a very real issue, and many PPC management tools or agency won’t exclude this traffic from their reporting. The bottom line is click fraud costs you money, unless you take steps to prevent it.

TEA Software: PPC Management and Click Fraud Detection

With the very real problem of click fraud at the front of our minds, the team at TEA Software decided to take action. TEA stands for Threat Engagement and Analytics. It’s an innovative way of managing your PPC campaigns that keeps your advertising budget aimed specifically at customers who will engage with your site. We’re so confident in its effectiveness that we offer a guarantee that TEA Software will improve your PPC results in 30 days or less. If it doesn’t, you’ll get your money back. Here are some of the reasons we’re so confident in the ability of TEA:

• Automated Click Fraud Protection
  Perhaps the most useful feature of TEA Software is its ability to automatically detect traffic that comes from bots or other poor-quality or fraudulent sources. It then actively blocks such traffic from your AdWords campaign. You can cut up to 20% of your advertising budget by eliminating human-like botnets and other sources of click fraud.
• Engagement Trends and Analysis
  Using our in-depth algorithms, TEA can identify real visitors to your site and track their movements on your website in great detail. It can then create an engagement score based on this visitor behavior. From this you can observe how real users interact with your site; where they enter, where they drop off, and what converts. Our software will then create trends based on this data, allowing you to create actionable solutions to improve your customers’ experience.
• Automated Engagement Fraud Protection
  Google AdWords can automatically buy your traffic and adjust your bids on a daily basis. This is the way that most PPC management agencies will run your campaigns. However, the adjustments that Google make are often delayed by up to 18 hours, meaning that your bids are out of line with current trends and data. TEA Software monitors visitors and engagement data in real time, automatically adjusting your keyword bid costs, add location, and other key metrics. We’re confident that it will help your PPC campaign more than a Google AdWords expert can.
• The Best PPC Management Tool
  Hopefully this article has shown you the importance of staying on top of your PPC activity. There are some potential pitfalls that many companies fall in to, without even realizing. At TEA Software, our tools can help you manage your PPC campaigns to be as impactful and cost-effective as possible. It’s one of the reasons that eCommerce providers such as Shopping Cart Elite include our software in the platform.