What Is Pay-per-Click Management and How Can It Help Your Business?

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While pay-per-click (PPC) marketing has tremendous potential to help your business thrive, it’s not necessarily a slam dunk in the competitive PPC landscape. That’s where PPC management comes in.

Website traffic is the bread and butter of eCommerce success. After all, if you aren’t driving your target audience to your website, then you aren’t making sales. While many factors come into play to attract website traffic—from search engine optimization (SEO) to email list building—one method shines at getting results. We’re talking about pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.

While pay-per-click marketing has tremendous potential to help your business thrive, it’s not necessarily a slam dunk in the competitive PPC landscape. That’s where PPC management comes in.

Let’s dive into PPC management and find out how it can help optimize your PPC effort toward maximum returns.

What Is PPC Advertising?

Pay-per-click marketing is a form of advertising that is exactly what it sounds like: Companies use keywords to create ad campaigns to generate traffic to their webpages. When internet searchers enter a keyword, they’re shown corresponding ads featuring those keywords. However, companies only pay for an ad if and when a user clicks on it.

PPC works on a bid system, allowing companies to set and stick to budgets regarding what they are willing to spend on advertising. However, competition for ads can be steep. This can lead to some fine-tuning, especially when you factor in that the more money you put into a campaign, the more likely it is to be displayed and get clicks.

Given PPC’s other benefits of speed, flexibility, consistency, and measurability, it has excellent potential as a complement to organic digital marketing methods like SEO. However, its effectiveness hinges on many factors.

Enter PPC management.

What Is PPC management?

PPC management is the process by which a company’s pay-per-click ad spend is overseen. Its goal? To minimize overall expenditure while maximizing return on investment (ROI) through strategic ad buys. While this can be handled in-house, many companies outsource to agencies with PPC management expertise.

It’s important to know that PPC management is a journey, not a destination. In the fast-moving digital marketing space, the “perfect optimization” is elusive and ever-changing. However, its pursuit can help companies enjoy better performance while simultaneously controlling costs.

What Does PPC Management Entail?

Pay-per-click management comprises a breadth and depth of tactics, including the following:

Channel Strategy

From Google ads and Bing ads to affiliate networks and paid social media placements, there are many potential PPC marketing channels, each with its own benefits.

Keyword Analysis

Which keywords and search queries will reach your target audience and result in the most qualified leads?

Monitoring and Measuring

Which keywords and queries are performing and worth further investment, and which are falling short?

Overall ROI

How far is your overall budget stretching, and what changes can be made to help it stretch further without sacrificing results?

Competitive Analysis

What are your competitors doing, what can you learn from them, and how can you best compete? Should you target the same queries, or can you identify a competition gap?

Negative Match

Are you paying for clicks from searchers who are unlikely to convert? This strategy filters out users who match categories that make them poor prospects, such as low-earners or those outside a restaurant or storefront’s geographic reach.

A/B Testing

Also called split testing, this method tests the performance of graphics and other variables to identify the ones that generate the highest conversion rates.

RELATED ARTICLE: HOW DOES A/B TESTING WORK?

What Are Some Benefits of PPC Management?

PPC management has many benefits, including the following:

Speed

PPC works much faster than organic digital marketing. You can set up campaigns, build traffic, and drive conversions with just a few minutes and clicks.

While there’s a learning curve for people without expertise, most advertisers provide step-by-step instructions for getting your PPC campaigns up and running. And once your ad is set up, you can make real-time changes to it.

Hyper-Focused Targeting

With digital marketing, the more precise your targeting the better results you’ll see. PPC campaigns let you deploy specific targeting to reach your ideal audience how, where, and when you’re most likely to get results.

Making use of PPC’s targeting capabilities ultimately relies on how well you understand your target audience’s wants, needs, and behaviors. This enhanced understanding lets you tweak campaigns to reach low-rate consumers through seasonal specials, flash sales, and other tactics.

On that note, the benefits of PPC management aren’t just limited to eCommerce businesses. You can also use geolocation to target local audiences.

Improved Brand Recognition

In some very saturated industries, you won’t always get (or pay for) clicks. However, even when a user scrolls past your ad, they’re still seeing it, which builds on brand awareness. This heightened brand familiarity can lead to long-term payoffs.

Excellent Analytics with PPC Management

PPC management lets you take advantage of search engine KPIs, including views, clicks, visits, and costs, to gain a 360-degree perspective of a campaign’s performance. A/B testing further enriches your ability to launch and run the most effective campaigns.

You can use these insights to adjust current campaigns and inform future ones. These metrics can even help you understand more about your website’s user interface (UI) experience.

Budget Flexibility

In addition to understanding what’s working and what’s not working, PPC management lets you make immediate changes to refine your campaign without needing to wait for it to end.

This can be accomplished in many ways, such as by increasing your budget, boosting a particular keyword, or adjusting the times/days of the week when your ads are shown.

Do You Need PPC Management?

While it’s possible to manage your own PPC campaigns, the reality is that most business owners lack the time and knowledge to effectively oversee PPC.

In addition to specialized expertise, PPC management can also utilize database and software systems. In many cases, working with digital marketing efforts can increase the efficiency of PPC to the point where it pays for itself, while simultaneously offering businesses the peace of mind that comes with knowing they’re making the most of everything PPC has to offer.

For smaller or newer businesses, PPC management can also mean the ability to compete with larger, more established operations. On the flip side, PPC management can help larger, established businesses maintain their competitive edge.

Ultimately, navigating the world of eCommerce hinges not on the size of your operation but on your online presence—and your ability to get your products and services in front of the right potential users at the right time. Investing in PPC management can be the key to achieving the results your business needs to compete, grow, and reach its goals.

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