In this article, we’ll explain what exactly PPC management is, discuss the different PPC channels and why you might want to opt for one over another, and most importantly, explain how investing in this advertising method can completely change (for the better) your business.
What is PPC management?
Pay-per-click (PPC) management is the process of monitoring and managing a company’s PPC ad spend. This includes ad strategy and ad buys while minimizing overall spend. This process can be done by the e-merchant or vendor themselves, or a specialist company can be contracted to manage PPC buys on their behalf.
PPC management is generally seen as an evolving art where perfect optimization isn’t possible but remains the goal.
How does PPC work?
Generally speaking, although each channel has its own method of operation, PPC campaigns work fairly similarly across all platforms.
The process is as follows:
- Choose the campaign type based on your goal (as mentioned above).
- Refine your settings and targeting (audiences, devices, locations, times, etc.).
- Set your budget and bidding strategy.
- Enter the destination URL (landing page).
- Create your ad.
An example of the budget step in Google Ads.
When you launch your ad on Google, its Ad Rank and cost per click are determined dynamically by Google’s algorithms. These algorithms consider factors such as your budget, bid, campaign settings, and the relevance and quality of your ad.
In the quest to maintain user satisfaction, PPC platforms favor advertisers who create relevant and credible campaigns, granting them greater ad placement at lower cost. Therefore, to maximize your PPC earnings, it is crucial to understand the intricacies of effective implementation on each platform.
PPC Channels and How They Work
When it comes to PPC management, there isn’t just one type of channel. There are tips and strategies you can use to make each platform work well for your business, and depending on your goals, you’ll likely prefer some more than others.
Search engine advertising
Search engine advertising involves running PPC campaigns on platforms like Google, Microsoft, and the like. This method of advertising is extremely powerful and cost-effective, but especially so for service and local businesses whose customers are actively searching for their products and services. Do you want your roofing business to appear first whenever someone searches for “roof replacement” in your area? Then you need to take advantage of search advertising.
Social media advertising takes place on platforms like Facebook (now Meta), LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Snapchat. Social media is an inherently more visual style of advertising than search advertising, and because of that, it has been a favorite of direct-to-consumer brands. It’s also a more passive style of advertising.
Instead of bidding on keywords that customers are actively searching for, marketers create audiences based on what people like, what they do, and actions they’ve already taken on their website, and serve ads to these audiences as they passively browse social media.
Due to its passive and visual nature, social media advertising can be an incredible tool for brand awareness. That being said, you can still generate huge profits on these platforms with the right strategy.
Display advertising
Display advertising involves running visual ads across a network of sites, such as the Google Display Network. Any site that has signed up for Google’s AdSense program can make money by featuring your business on their site. This means that with great creative, targeting, and the right messaging, you can put your business in front of highly relevant prospects who are browsing their favorite sites.
The key here, as with social media advertising, is segmentation. By targeting by demographics, interests, locations, and locations that overlap with your target audience, you can get great value for a relatively low ad spend.
Like social media advertising, display is a more passive style of advertising. As such, it can be harder to generate direct revenue here than, say, on Google Search. However, by using the Display Network, you can get your brand in front of a large number of relevant prospects with a relatively low ad spend.
Benefits of PPC management
Now that you know the answer to the question “What is PPC management?”, let’s explore some of its benefits and why it’s important for business:
Save money
One of the biggest benefits of PPC campaign management is that it helps you save money. Managing a PPC campaign involves monitoring the results of your ads.
As a result, your manager will be able to identify which ads are performing well and which ones aren’t. That means you won’t have to worry about spending money on ads that aren’t generating sales or revenue for your business.
Improve your return on advertising investment (ROAS)
Another important benefit of PPC advertising management is that it improves your ROAS. ROAS is the profit you make from your ads.
Your PPC manager will make continuous optimizations and improvements to your campaigns based on the results.
For example, if they notice that one landing page design drives more conversions, they can improve the rest of your landing pages to maximize your earnings.
Helps boost business growth
With the right PPC management strategy, your business will be on its way to generating incredible results with PPC.
Your manager will help you research the highest-value keywords to target, optimize your bidding strategies, research your competitors’ ads, and much more to ensure your ads always generate revenue.
How PPC Management Can Improve Your Business
We’ve talked a little bit about what PPC management can do for your business. Now, let’s dive into some details. Here are the top six ways PPC management can amplify your business.
1. Expand your reach and visibility
Unless you already have a huge market share, chances are a large segment of your target market doesn’t even know your brand exists. And if you haven’t yet tested PPC as a viable channel, that will almost certainly be the case.
Why? Because every day, people in the market for your products and services are actively searching for them on search engines. They’re using commercial intent queries that show they want to buy now. They’re browsing Instagram with the quote they just got from your competitor in mind. Or they’re reading an article in their favorite online publisher.
With properly placed PPC ads, you can capture a substantial percentage of your market that is browsing online right now, many of whom will be being exposed to your brand for the first time. That kind of brand reach is irreplaceable in today’s business landscape.
2. Get qualified traffic
Here’s the thing, though. This isn’t some roadside billboard you’re buying into. Through keyword targeting, every person you serve a PPC ad to on Google is 100% demonstrably in the market for your product. That’s a level of lead quality that doesn’t exist anywhere else in marketing.
Similarly, if you’re leveraging the Display Network or even Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network for advertising, you know, by virtue of audience targeting, that the people who are seeing your ad have interests strongly correlated with your product.
3. Develop a list of potential clients
In traditional advertising methods, prospects who see your ad and don’t call your business or buy something right away don’t forget you exist. But you have no way to contact them after the fact.
In PPC, you have the ability to serve ads to anyone who has previously clicked through remarketing. Additionally, every person who fills out an interest form on your site but doesn’t immediately purchase is entered into your CRM (customer relationship management) platform.
At that point, you have the ability to contact them and sell to them whenever you want. List building is a surefire way to keep your sales funnel full, and it’s another big draw of PPC marketing. Nothing goes to waste!
4. Diversify your audience
The prospect who sees your ad on nytimes.com may never have searched for your product or service on Google. And the person who searched for it on Google may not be the same person you’re targeting with that perfect Facebook ad.
This is another great benefit of PPC: each platform has a unique profile of users. By experimenting with different types of PPC campaigns, you’ll likely discover people who are interested in your business that you would never have discovered if you had stuck to traditional methods.
5. Get measurable results
As we’ve emphasized throughout this article, everything in PPC is measurable. This means that when you run a campaign on Google, Facebook, or any other platform, you know exactly how much you’re paying for each click, lead, impression, and sale.
This is an unprecedented level of reporting, allowing marketers managing PPC to constantly evaluate data and optimize. For budget-conscious business owners, this is a huge plus: every penny counts, and if you know which levers to pull, you can tighten profit margins like you couldn’t anywhere else.
6. Maximize your budget
We mentioned that PPC provides business owners with unprecedented visibility into performance. Bidding strategies play a critical role here. Knowing how much you’re paying for each click is fine, but what if nothing happens after that click? Isn’t the goal supposed to be to generate tangible revenue?
That’s where automated bidding, available on most PPC platforms, can really pay dividends. Business owners running PPC campaigns can optimize their campaigns for things like:
- Target Cost Per Action (CPA): Increase conversions while targeting a specific cost per action (a completed form, newsletter signup, or any other important website action).
- Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): If you’re an eCommerce operator looking to optimize conversion value, you can use Target ROAS to help increase conversion value while aiming for a specific ROAS.
Remember when we mentioned PPC being low risk, it is this ability to set daily and lifetime budgets, and spend only what is necessary to achieve the exact outcome you desire, that makes PPC an extremely viable option for business owners looking to maximize value on a tight budget.
