PPC Wisdom

Pay Per Click (PPC) management involves creating, managing, and optimizing the PPC campaign.   It is not SEO (search engine optimization).  PPC is only a part (front end) of your marketing system.  Your website needs to convert website visitors to taking the action your desire. All this requires a pay per click manager who understands the intricacies.  Our 17-Point PPC Checklist helps you understand what to expect from your PPC management company.  It can also be used to help formulate PPC interview questions when searching for your next pay per click manager.

Typical PPC campaign objectives are:
 • Awareness (brand advertising) – increase website awareness and traffic to the website
 • Lead Generation (prospecting) – collection of prospective information for contact and sales
 • Product Sales (direct marketing) – sell products directly from an eCommerce website

Regardless of the client’s objective, the over-reaching objective for the PPC management service is optimization for ROAS (return on ad spend).   This means that the campaign manager builds, maintains, and optimizes the campaigns to address the stated business needs, and that advertising dollars are are creating value to the company.  With prospecting and direct sales, the goal is to create more revenue / profit than the cost of advertising.  This means that for each ad dollar spent, the PPC marketing system returns more than one dollar of value to the company.

To accomplish this goal, PPC platforms like Google AdWords and Bing Ads (for Bing & Yahoo) are used to manage the accounts / campaigns, with some automation features.  While Google and Bing are more for information/ commerce activity, Facebook is geared more towards personal interactions, but it does have a PPC advertising system.

Bigger firms may invest in specialized software to ease the PPC management workload over many accounts and standardize reporting, yet doesn’t necessarily yield any better campaign performance – but their reports look pretty.

What exactly does PPC manager do all day for their clients?

The total PPC Manager workload depends on factors such as:

• Client expectations and campaign objectives
• The number of campaigns
• Number of campaign components – keywords, ad groups, ads, targeting
• The type of campaigns (such as basic Search, Display, Remarketing, or Shopping)
• Reporting requirements
• Customer requests and communications (volume and speed)
• Normal management tasks – changes, improvements, and problems
• Multi-platform management and implementation – “everything done twice”

The PPC manager provides a wide range of services related to PPC accounts and campaigns.

The 17-Point PPC Checklist: What a PPC Manager Could Be / Should Be Doing:

1. Daily monitoring 5 – 7 days/week for activity or lack of activity, significant deviations from norms, payment declined, etc.
2. Research – competitors, keywords, markets, market trends, new markets
3. Analysis – summary, and detailed as needed.  Looking for opportunities and trends for performance improvement
4. Reporting – periodic manual or automated, or specialty as needed
5. Negative Keyword management
6. Bid management and cost control – time, device, location
7. Keyword management
8. Add new campaigns – research keywords, build campaign, closely monitor performance, conversion tracking
9. Ad writing, rewriting, image ad creation, and ad extensions for performance and changing customer needs
10. Address Google emails for feature updates and account problems
11. Other campaign settings that can enhance performance such as:
    • Ad scheduling, campaign start / stop
    • Geographic placements
    • Networks used
    • Merchant center feed quality (shopping campaigns)
    • Remarketing, Gmail promotions, customer email lists
    • Advanced features and tracking implementation – IP exclusions, tagging, access authorizations, etc.
    • Experiments – create test campaigns to test improvements before implementation
12. Investigate and fix stuff that mysteriously stop working
13. Google support assistance calls
14. Make recommendations to client for changes outside the manager’s control such as:
    • Website improvements for quality score improvements
    • Landing page creation and improvements and conversions
    • Budget allocation
    • SEO information contributions
    • Mobile website observations and suggestions, etc.
15. Direct customer communications time
    • Changes
    • Questions
    • Reporting
    • Problems
    • Quality control feedback
    • Training
    • Emails, phone, texts
16. Create, maintain, and reinforce confidence that manager is adding value each month to the account to justify the investment
17. Non-direct PPC account tasks
    • Multi-platform Training – staying current on latest features, changes, tips & tricks
    • Account record keeping
    • Billing notices

Key Point:  Research and Analysis tasks often can take a relatively long time and sometimes yields no actionable results for the time expended.   Sometimes recommendations may be formulated for the PPC Manager to present to the client for approval.

This PPC checklist isn’t an exhaustive list of all possibilities, nor the details within each checklist item.  A well run and value-added account will be possible if many / most / all of these steps are accomplished.

As is clearly shown, PPC managers have got quite a lot of tasks / services to offer. Their knowledge and experience in the industry is an asset to any business that hires their services. They help alleviate all the hassles involved in creating and managing PPC accounts and campaigns.  It would therefore be prudent and a great idea to hire the services of these professional.

 

See also:  How To Choose a PPC Management Company