There’s no denying that when you find the sweet spot in your marketing efforts, your business will significantly benefit from it. Part of getting that perfect balance is figuring out effective pay-per-click (PPC) management to achieve high conversion rates and maximize your return on investment (ROI).
If you’re a digital marketer or a PPC specialist, then odds are you’re intimately familiar with the fact that optimizing your ads to maximize ROI is a never-ending cycle.
How could it not be? Competition among businesses is very fierce, regardless of what industry you’re in, and platforms like Google and Facebook always have new updates that you need to watch out for.
Luckily, there are ways to achieve this consistently. We made a PPC management guide jampacked with tried-and-true ways to help you maximize your investment and see the results you want.
What Does PPC Management Entail?
PPC management is basically just making sure the ads you share online are performing well and are reaching the right people—your target audience.
There are a lot of things that go into doing this:
- Researching for the right keywords that people use when searching online and are relevant to your business.
- Deciding where you want your ads to show up on the internet, like on search engines, social media, or certain websites.
- Keeping a close eye by checking ad performance reports and identifying which keywords your target audience uses the most and where they can spot your ads.
- Checking out the competition and leaders in your industry and how they market their offerings gives you a better idea of which areas you need to fine-tune and what you can do differently to improve your ads.
- Testing out different ideas to see what kind of ads perform the best and get a pulse on the types that effectively catch your target’s attention and make them interested in your business and what you have to offer.
Why Is PPC Management Essential to Business?
The reason why PPC management is crucial for your business is that it enables you to get quick and measurable results while offering you much-needed control over your marketing budget. This is especially helpful for startups and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) who want to make the most of their resources.
In the highly competitive digital landscape, having the necessary tools is only a fraction of the equation. Through effective PPC management, you can apply the 80-20 rule, otherwise known as the Pareto Principle. By focusing your efforts on the top 20% or aspects with the most potential, you can achieve 80% of your goals.
This alone already underlines its importance to a business, given the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of digital marketing. Of course, given its benefits, it can also mitigate the common challenges and put SMBs on a somewhat even playing field with bigger organizations.
What Are the Benefits of PPC Management?
When you think of benefits, top of mind, you would think of increasing PPC conversion and maximizing your ROI—since it’s the topic of discussion. But these are the results that you want to achieve.
The benefits mentioned here are the things that you leverage when you’re applying proper PPC management to achieve your end goals.
Control Over Budget
Proper PPC management not only provides you with control over your marketing budget but also enables you to maximize it regardless of its size.
To be more specific, you can do the following:
- Easily break down your budget into small units dedicated to campaigns, ad groups, keywords, or audience segments to manage it more precisely.
- Have enough flexibility to easily allocate your budget when certain keywords or ads are performing better and generating more results and vice versa.
- Get a better idea of how your budget is being used and focus on areas that will be more profitable for your business.
- Have more budget to enable you to hire talented experts for your marketing team.
Compliments SEO Strategy
PPC and search engine optimization (SEO) are an amazing duo. Not surprisingly, these two overlaps in many ways, like the keywords you target, your audience, and the platforms used.
Moreover, these two in tandem enable you to achieve things like: Getting quick results short-term, like increasing the interest around your start-up company and your offerings, and long-term results, like organically maintaining your audience’s interest and ensuring your website climbs up the ranks to increase its visibility.
What’s surprising is that there’s no direct link between these two. However, if you pay attention and optimize for both, then you have a better chance of improving your overall SEO strategy.
Get Targeted Visitors
Another plus is that it helps your business to quickly get the right visitors. SEO takes time, so instead of waiting around for it to yield results, you can use ads on platforms like Google and Facebook—it’s like a fast tap to attract people to your website.
Since your PPC and SEO campaigns use the same keywords and target the same audience, your ads will show up fast. Of course, it’s a given that you need good products, a great site, and smart attention-grabbing campaigns for successful PPC conversion.
Easy Way to Do Tests
The best way to know if your website, offerings, and even ads are good enough is to conduct a test and get a beat if people will buy, visit, or do the desired action you want them to do.
PPC management makes sure you’re not doing things blindly and potentially wasting your precious time, effort, and resources. It simplifies the process and ensures you’re still on the right track.
- It eliminates the need for broad-spectrum testing.
- It takes out the guesswork thanks to tools that provide you with in-depth data and help you make an informed decision on how to effectively optimize your ads or website.
- It ensures you don’t overspend your budget, especially when you’re still in the testing phase.
Partner With Other Digital Marketing Channels
The success of your marketing efforts hinges on more than one marketing channel. You need the synergy of every avenue that you’re using to effectively market your brand and offerings. PPC, in particular, stands out because it seamlessly works well with all other channels.
It’s even regarded as a great helper since it amplifies the results. In a way, effective PPC management is like becoming a conductor masterfully harmonizing your digital marketing orchestra.
- Enhance visibility by appearing alongside organic listings on your list of keywords and key phrases.
- Enable you to target your ideal audience with pinpoint accuracy.
- Drive traffic to your posts on your social media and website.
- Nurture potential leads and drives traffic to your landing pages.
- Easily reengage with your existing audience base to increase conversion.
Fine-Tune Ad Campaigns with Ease
Lastly, you’re able to ensure your ads work with ease. Thanks to helpful PPC tools, you can look at the data and see what’s working and what’s not. More importantly, you can fine-tune them to perform better to get more clicks and get more value for your money.
Think of it this way: the PPC apps and your know-how are like your tool belt. While you’re the “mechanic” finetuning (PPC management) your “car” (ads) to make sure it runs smoothly. By taking care of all the bells and whistles, you can get to a lot of places (ROI) while also saving on gas.
9 PPC Management Tips to Maximize ROI and Conversion
With that said, how do you maximize your ROI exactly? To answer that, we listed below all the tried-and-true ways you can apply right now.
Create Compelling Landing Pages
Before you get to the nitty-gritty of your website’s PPC campaign, you need to make sure that your landing pages are on point. This doesn’t only mean it has to look great. From a glance, it should be clear-cut to people about what you’re offering and the action you want them to take.
If you’re just starting out, then here are a couple of things to keep in mind when you create them:
- Define exactly what you want people to do when they visit your landing page. For example, if you have a list of offers, then you need to create separate pages for each product or service.
- After you have identified the specific purpose, design the web page around that goal. Think about the experience and information you want to share since this will help “journey” people from just interested to invested and ready to do what want you them to do.
- Lastly, don’t overwhelm your web visitors. Remember to keep things simple—especially the action they will do. Simplicity lessens any mental resistance.
Of course, if you created them already, it doesn’t hurt to check again to properly optimize the landing pages.
Run Mobile Ads
These days, a large chunk of people around the world are usually on their mobile devices—much more than the time spent on desktops. This means you have more opportunities to reach your ideal customer when you opt for mobile-only ads.
Keep these in mind when you do:
- Target high-intent users. Assuming you already have audience segments, create ads that you meant for people who are really interested in your product or are actively searching for products similar to what you’re offering.
- Use only specific keywords that have transactional intent. So, instead of using key phrases like “How much for a laptop charge” you should go for phrases like “HP laptop original charge price.”
- Make sure it is mobile-friendly. This means you should keep it short and easy to read at a glance rather than making your ads long and sharing too much unnecessary information. Plus, it’s important to check how they look on smaller screens.
Know The Current PPC Conversion Rate
When it comes to ROIs, the straightforward thing to do is to check your present PPC conversion rate.
The frequency isn’t really set. But a good PPC management practice is to keep an eye on it as often as possible, especially if you’re running tests. You can take it a step further and just opt to set a schedule when you should check it so that it’s easier to remember.
So, why is it important? Aside from the ROIs, it’s a great way to gauge if your ads are working and performing well. Like a litmus test, when you have an idea of how your ads are faring then it’s a lot easier to make the necessary changes to guide back to the right direction.
Invest in PPC Signal
The need to maximize your ad campaign’s ROI is a fundamental goal since you’re making sure you’re getting your money’s worth. One way to guarantee it doesn’t go to waste is to take smarter steps in your campaign monitoring efforts.
In this case, investing in tools like PPC Signal. It helps make PPC management a lot easier since it tracks your ad campaigns. What makes it such a great tool is its namesake, the signals. It sends you notifications for potential issues that would negatively affect the results and even opportunities to help you maximize your ROI.
Aside from these, it can also help you in other ways:
- Cut ad spending on poor-performing keywords.
- Maintain negative keyword list.
- Make necessary adjustments to ad bids.
- Refine location targeting.
- Optimize page experience.
Optimize the Purchase Funnel
Another thing you should make sure that’s always on point is your purchase funnel. All your efforts in making a great ad campaign would be useless if the whole process itself is so confusing and causes more hassle than your potential customers would have the patience for.
Naturally, when the process is pain-free and smooth then guiding people to make a purchase would be easy as well. Here are a couple of ways to ensure this:
- Study the customer journey. This starts from the moment they click your ad and are led to your product page.
- Spot the potential barriers. This can range from a complicated process or an ambiguous landing page.
- Make the necessary improvements to the purchase funnel. Once you have identified the issues, you need to resolve them as soon as possible.
- Always prioritize providing your potential customers with a smooth and seamless experience.
Enhance Ad Quality Score
Good PPC management practices can definitely enhance your ad quality score. When you achieve this, it can significantly lower click costs and boost the ranks of your ads.
With that said, there are three things you should always focus on when you do this:
- Make sure your ads closely match what people are searching for and your business by using only relevant keywords.
- Provide a great experience whenever potential customers visit your web pages. So, if your landing page is low and ambiguous then you need to boost your PPC landing page optimization efforts to avoid this.
- Put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes and think about the ads they are more likely to click on. From there, compare your current ads and make the necessary tweaks.
Incorporate Remarketing
For sure, you’re already applying remarketing strategies to guide back potential and existing customers to check out your products or services again and make a purchase.
To make sure your execution of this strategy is on point, here are a couple of PPC management tips to keep in mind:
- Create relevant ads that would pique again the interest of your potential and existing customers.
- Use multiple remarketing lists with different specific criteria to target them more effectively. For example, you can base it on the pages they visited, the products they have recently looked at, or the actions they did midway only.
- Reach them more effectively and remind them about your offerings by using different remarketing formats.
Select the Right Keyword Match Type
When it comes to PPC management, selecting the right match types for the keywords that you use is something you need to think about carefully. Simply because this will determine whether or not your ads will show up on a bigger or smaller pool of people in the search results.
Always remember these tips when you do match type the keywords and key phrases used in your ads:
- Consider your goals and your audience when you choose the match types and the level of control that you want for each keyword and phrase: Broad Match (lowest), Broad Match Modifier (medium), Phrase Match (medium-high), and Exact Match (highest).
- Before you launch your ads, make sure to filter out negative keywords to avoid unnecessary ad spending.
- Monitor the results to check if the match types fit and make the necessary adjustments to optimize your ads.
Enhance Impression Share
Last, but certainly not least, you can maximize your campaign’s ROI by enhancing impression shares. Basically, it’s a bidding strategy that will help ensure that your ads show more often in the keywords and phrases that you’re targeting.
When you do this, just remember the following:
- Select only the keywords, ad groups, and campaigns that yield more profit when you set your desired impression share.
- Take the time to manually adjust your bids to make sure nothing is overlooked—it will later help you avoid unnecessary costs.
- Before launching, check your ads again and their quality, like their relevance to your target keywords, to make sure they will perform well and save you the hassle later on.
- Think twice and check all metrics before you increase your budget. When you’re a hundred percent sure that you will get better results then that’s you increase it.
Final Thoughts
With all that said, you can view effective PPC management as your linchpin to success, especially in today’s highly competitive digital marketing scape.
Of course, it’s important to remember that you can have the best tools at your disposal, but everything still boils down to you. It’s important to follow the best management practices as well as be meticulous and adept. You’re not just a marketer ensuring that you maximize your ROI, you are the maestro. You conduct the orchestra that is your PPC campaigns to harmonize with your other marketing efforts to get your desired result.
Guest article written by: Frances Abejuro is an experienced SEO Specialist who works for Flexisource IT and Flexi Digital Marketing. Find out more about her expertise and how she can help your business with SEO strategies.