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PPC Management: What Is It & Why Is It Important?

Written by Kieran Thomas on .
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Picture this; you’re the owner of a small business looking for new customers, but getting your business seen on Google seems like a daunting task, especially considering the fierce competition online. You’re looking for a way in which you could pay to advertise your business online, connecting with relevant people looking for the types of services you offer, who could become customers. A quick Google search leads you to discover what you believe could be a solution, and it comes in the form of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.

PPC advertising is a powerful tool for enabling businesses to reach their target audience and drive conversions. However, harnessing the full potential of PPC and maximising the efficiency of your marketing budget involves strategic planning, continuous optimisation, and a deep understanding of your audience and market trends. This is where PPC management comes in.

In this article, we’ll explore what PPC management is, why it is important and how PPC management agencies (such as ourselves) can help you avoid common mistakes and maximise the efficiency of your advertising budget.

A Very Quick Introduction to PPC

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising is an online advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. PPC advertising is an essential tool for marketers as it provides targeted reach, cost control, and measurable results, making it an effective strategy for driving traffic, leads, and conversions. As a marketing approach, it dovetails brilliantly with SEO which is better suited to organic long term growth.

Whilst PPC advertising has become synonyms with “Google Ads” for many businesses, the truth is it’s actually a wider term encompassing any pay-per-click solution, across various platforms, such as search engines, social media networks, and display networks. Popular PPC solutions include:

In most cases today, PPC systems such as Google Ads work on an auction basis whereby businesses “bid” for ad placement in search engine results pages (SERPs), social media platforms, and other digital channels. The higher the bid, the more likely it is that your advert will “win” a space, and/or potentially position 1 if multiple placements are available.You can often tell if a result is an advert as they will normally say “Ad” or “Sponsored” next to them.

Smeg google search

You can learn more about PPC ads, how they work, how to manage your budget and more in the following articles:

What is PPC Management?

We define PPC management as the ongoing process of setting up, monitoring, assessing and optimising PPC advertising campaigns to maximise conversion rates whilst also minimising per-click ad-spend.

In most cases (depending on the platform), the amount you pay for an ad varies on a number of factors such as:

  • your maximum daily or monthly budget
  • how much the competition is willing to pay
  • the quality of your adverts
  • the relevancy of your adverts to the user’s search and their “intent”

If you don’t know what you are doing, you will often fail in one or more areas of the above.

In contrast, effective PPC management can:

  • Reduce your per-click costs
  • Improve your campaign’s click-through rates (CTRs)
  • Improve your campaign’s successful conversion rates (CRs)

In other words; effective PPC management leads to maximising conversions and ad spend return on investment (ROI).

Take Note: PPC Management Knowledge Is Platform Specific

We’ve given this a dedicated section as it’s very important to understand. Not all PPC platforms are created equal.

Whilst the core fundamentals are essentially the same, each platform has its own nuances, and whilst anyone can claim to be an expert in a platform, you’ll find that you’ll only really get the best results from people who truly understand that specific platform.

For example, we are experts specifically in PPC management for:

  • Google Ads
  • Google Ad Grants for Charities
  • Meta Ads / Instagram Ads

However, we would not claim to be experts in (for example) Amazon ads. In fact, if a client approaches us for help with Amazon ads, we point them in the direction of an agency that specialises in that type of PPC management because we know where our strengths are, and it’s important to us that our clients do too.

Therefore, when looking for a PPC management company, we strongly urge you to evaluate which platform is most important for you and ask any potential digital agencies to provide evidence of success in that specific platform (ideally over a period of at least a couple of years).

Why Is PPC Management Important?

In our (extensive) experience, the brutal truth is… most small businesses who run their own PPC campaigns, do them wrong; and it’s totally understandable. Business owners have many plates to spin and as a result, when they try to run PPC they just don’t have the knowledge or experience to be successful. As a result, they end up wasting their already limited budget and are left thinking that PPC doesn’t work. Yet that’s not really true. As with anything in life, better results come with experience.

Good PPC management combines skill, knowledge and experience to maximise the success of campaigns. PPC management helps to:

  • Target the right users, at the right time
  • Maximise engagement, CTRs, and/or conversions
  • Maximise ROI for each campaign
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Provide you with a competitive advantage

Google Ads Management for Charities

As a quick side note, it’s worth us taking a moment to touch on the importance of Google Ads management for charities (If you’re a business, you can skip this section).

As part of recognising and improving its corporate social responsibilities, Google provides $10,000/month of free ad spend for eligible charities via its Google Ad Grants scheme.

However, their criteria for campaigns are much stricter than for commercial (paying) entities, and therefore correctly structuring and maintaining your campaigns is essential or it could result in your charity losing access to the scheme. If you’d like to know more about PPC management for charities, please do get in touch as we can run through this with you in more detail.

Do You Have a Professional PPC Management Strategy?

PPC management provides a number of benefits but only if it’s implemented with a coherent strategy behind it driving it. An effective PPC management strategy will:

  • Identify and create campaigns that utilise the right platforms for you
  • Perform research to identify competitors and required budgets/likely cost-per-click requirements
  • Ensure ad relevance
  • Display ads at the optimum time to maximise interest and engagement
  • Create ads that are engaging and compelling enough to convert
  • Create landing pages which maximise initial clicks to conversions such as sales, bookings, downloads, etc. depending on what your target goals are for a given campaign
  • Include regular monitoring, evaluation and assessment of the data
  • Regularly perform further refinements and optimisations to ensure each individual campaign is as effective and efficient as possible

If you don’t have a robust strategy, you could be wasting money, or missing conversion opportunities, without even knowing it.

What Do PPC Agencies Do?

PPC management companies and specialists such as ourselves consider the fundamental components of PPC management to create successful campaigns tailored to your specific business goals and objectives, including the following:

  • Demographic targeting & exclusion
  • Keyword research, targeting & exclusion (known as “negative keywords)
  • Ad creation
  • Bid management
  • Ad extensions
  • Landing page optimisation
  • Performance tracking and analysis
  • A/B testing

As touched on above, having a robust PPC strategy forms a major part of any PPC management campaign as without it, it’s too easy to waste money. Some examples of the activities which an agency will perform include:

Identifying and utilising the correct platforms

It’s important that you choose the right platforms for when your target audience can be found. For example, if your business is primarily B2B, you may find that Google Ads coupled with LinkedIn provides the best solution.

In contrast, if you’re a local hairdresser with a single salon and have a hyper-localised target audience, you may find that Facebook ads / Instagram ads with a tightly defined demographic and location targeting work better.

Identifying and targeting the correct audience

A common mistake for novices is casting the net too wide. As a result, you spend money displaying the ad to people who have no interest in what you have to offer.

A PPC agency will constantly (for platforms which support demographic targeting) monitor and refine the demographic aspects of the campaign targeting to maximise ad relevance.

Tailoring ad campaigns to target different users

Another common mistake of DIY PPC management is a lack of understanding of how campaigns need to be correctly structured in order to maximise relevancy for the individual. For example, if you live in Oxfordshire and saw an advert for “National Electricians - Professional & Reliable” or “Professional, Reliable Electrician - Oxford” which are you more likely to click? They both say the same in terms of service, but for someone living in Oxford, the latter resonates more strongly.

Targeting users at the right time, with the right intent

Understanding what a user is trying to achieve at that exact moment in time is key to maximising conversions. For example, a user searching for “how to install a radiator” has a very different need to a user who has just searched for “24hr emergency plumber, Oxfordshire”. The former is what’s known as an “informational” search intent. The latter is more of a “transactional” intent as it’s reasonable to assume that the user has a very urgent need and therefore, is very likely to convert today. As a result, you may be willing to spend a bit more on the ad to secure that business but more on bid management shortly.

If you’re familiar with the 3 C’s of content marketing, you’ll see how the 3 tasks above align with each of “Channel”, “Content” and “Context”. However, our approach also includes (and always starts with) the most important - “Customer”.

Creating compelling ad content with a strong CTA

The format of your “content” (eg. whether it’s image-based, text-based or perhaps a video) depends on the platform; but regardless of the format, you have to grab the user’s attention in less than 1 second. Therefore, a key skill of ad management companies is to create content that both grabs the attention of the user above all of the other “noise”, and encourages engagement, whether that be to watch a video, share a post, or click through to a landing page.

For example, staying with the plumber example, imagine you’ve just had a pipe burst in your bathroom and water is pouring everywhere. Which of the following would you be more likely to click?

“Next Day Plumbers Oxfordshire
Award-winning Plumber in Oxfordshire’s. Over 50 years experience.”“Emergency 24hr Plumber - Oxfordshire
Need help fast? We offer FREE callout and can be with you in 45 mins from Oxford”

“Jake’s Plumbing Services
We provide a range of services from radiator replacement to new installations. Emergency callout just £45”

There’s not necessarily anything “wrong” with any of the companies behind any of those ads. Each could be a perfectly respectable, professional and reliable plumber.

However, which one are you most likely to click? Which one clearly understands our needs at that exact moment in time and provides us with a strong reason to contact them? Guess which one probably gets the most clicks despite not being in the top position.

Bid optimisation

Bid optimisation is the process of determining how much you are willing to pay, based on your goals, for a given ad. For example, in the case of the above, you know that someone requiring urgent plumbing assistance is very likely to convert right away without needing to “shop around”. As a result, you may be willing to pay significantly more for that advert compared to someone searching for “bathroom installation, oxford”.

However, what you are willing to pay is only part of the picture. You also need to compete with competitors to “win” the auction in order to have your advert displayed.

As a result, part of bid optimisation is researching, understanding and defining what your minimum and maximum budgets are for each keyword, ad, ad group or campaign so that you strike a balance between not paying more than you need to, whilst also maximising your chance of “winning” the auction. After all, there’s no point setting a budget so low that your advert is never displayed, or is only displayed when everyone else has used up their budgets.

Performance tracking, monitoring and evaluation

Whilst you can run campaigns without tracking any metrics, it would be like walking into a room with the lights off and trying to achieve anything meaningful. You might get lucky, but in reality, actions are always faster when you can see what you’re doing.

We’re a very data-driven company and so all of our decisions are informed by what that data is telling us, coupled with our years of experience. Sometimes that also means being able to determine what the data isn’t telling us and other anomalies. Again, this only comes with experience and something which is missed with DIY PPC management.

Ad & campaign optimisation

A huge amount of time goes into ad and campaign optimisation. Not only do better adverts lead to more conversions, but they can also (depending on the platform) result in you actually paying less for a higher position ad than a company with lower quality adverts. Why? Advertising platforms not only need to make money; they need to keep users happy. They know that no one really likes adverts, and as a result, the adverts that they opt to display either need to add value to users, or pay more for the privilege. That’s why lower-quality adverts can actually cost you more, and this is just one reason why hiring a company to manage your PPC management can actually save you money in the long run.

Why Should You Hire a PPC Management Company?

Whilst many small businesses start out with a DIY approach in an attempt to save costs, this often works out to be a false economy. That’s because sadly they make many of the mistakes which most of us probably made ourselves when learning the basics, and as a result, they miss opportunities, plus end up spending more per click and per conversion than necessary.

As a result, when you hire a digital marketing agency who have PPC experts who are specialists in your chosen platform(s), you’re paying not just for their time but for their knowledge, expertise and experience, and their ability to ultimately save you money and generate leads faster.

If you’re wondering how much PPC management costs, check out our dedicated article.

Outsourcing your PPC management works well for organisations:

  • who cannot afford to waste advertising budgets
  • who need to achieve results, fast
  • who don’t have time to invest in the correct monitoring and management of PPC campaigns themselves
  • who don’t have sufficient internal resources to perform the work in-house
  • who aren’t yet large enough to warrant investing in dedicated PPC management, bidding or keyword research tools

Case Study:

Discover how we helped SMEG UK achieve a 17:1 return on ad spend via our Google Ads Management

Read the case study

Our PPC Experts Create Successful Campaigns To Maximise Your Ad Spend ROI

At Beyond Your Brand, our PPC experts create campaigns which stand out from the crowd and achieve results. If you feel you could benefit from our expertise to reach your PPC goals, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us to discuss how we can help you.

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