PPC Management – Control Your Ad Spend with These Tips

PPC management is a must when launching a campaign. Startups and businesses on a tight budget must especially use management services. What is this form of ad management, and how does it work?

PPC management is overseeing ad spending on pay per click campaigns to control costs and optimize the campaign for max efficiency. Strategies include calculating a budget, targeting the right keywords, optimizing your campaign, split testing, ad copywriting, and tracking metrics. Managing PPC campaigns leads to more cost-effective conversions and helps you identify valuable keywords.

This guide to PPC marketing and advertising will more deeply explain the facets of a management plan, including recommendations for platforms to use.

What Is PPC Advertising?

First, let’s get you up to speed on the ins and outs of PPC advertising. A pay-per-click ad model is a popular form of advertising for businesses of all sizes. Statista estimates that companies will spend $190.5 billion on PPC by 2024,

PPC ads work as follows: you pay a fee to the ad publisher when an internet user clicks your ad. The fee varies but is inexpensive.

WordStream estimates that Google Ad clicks cost $1 to $4 on average. For every dollar you spend, you should make $2.

You can create many PPC ads to suit your target audience and campaign style, including retargeting, display, and social media ads.

PPC Management Case Study #1 – Armazem

Mediaboom’s trusted PPC services can pay back dividends. Our work with Armazem Fusion Fitness increased website traffic by over 52 percent, leads by more than 500 percent, and new sessions by over 61 percent. Our services included paid ads, strategy, and website design and development.

PPC Management Case Study #2 – VB Events

Another successful example is VB Events, an Italian event-planning business that chose Mediaboom’s digital marketing services. Our paid advertising reduced their cost per conversion by 35 percent, increased clicks by 828 percent, and conversions by more than 2,100 percent.

What Is PPC Management?

With mid-sized businesses spending up to $20,000 per month and larger companies $100 million monthly on PPC advertising, PPC management is a must.

Management services help companies regulate their campaigns, measuring for effectiveness and overseeing spending to stick within a budget. It’s a multifaceted process but a must for increasing the efficacy of each campaign.

How Does PPC Management Work?

This section will be a deep dive into the many facets of PPC management.

1. Identifying PPC Campaign Objectives

All successful marketing and ad campaigns begin with identifying goals. What do you hope to achieve with this PPC campaign? Which audience segments will you target, and what action do you want them to take?

Next, you can identify the types of ads necessary to drive those goals and begin ideating the required keywords.

2. Searching for Relevant Keywords

You must do keyword research to determine the most sought-after search terms in your industry or niche. Keyword relevancy is paramount, as content no one searches for will hinder your campaign.

Today’s top PPC tools, such as Google Ads, have keyword research functions built in for identifying the most engaging, relevant, and valuable keywords your campaign can yield. These will include short-tail and long-tail keywords. 

3. Creating Engaging Advertisements

With many ads to select from, your company must narrow it down to the type most relevant to your campaign goals. Once you’ve selected an ad style, you can design your ad to captivate lead attention.

An engaging ad should be more than visually attractive. It must suit the platform it appears on, use relevant keywords, appeal to your target audience, and be oriented toward one goal.

4. Choosing the Advertising Platform

The availability of PPC advertising platforms continues to expand, giving marketers a surplus of options. Many stick to familiar, reliable services like Google Ads, but you can also branch off into social media advertising.

Your options there are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. Consider a PPC ad campaign on platforms like Amazon, Microsoft Bing, or Microsoft Advertising.

5. Defining the Campaign Budget

The next step is the most important part of PPC management services: calculating your campaign ad spend.

The cost of your campaign depends on its scope, goals, and targeted keywords. After identifying keywords, multiply the targeted search impression share by the monthly search volume for keywords to determine how many impressions your ads should generate.

Next, gauge the click volume by multiplying your average click-through rate (or your anticipated CTR) by impressions. Now you’re ready to narrow your ad spend by multiplying your average cost per click by the click volume.

Tools like Google Keyword Planner can indicate how many searches your targeted keywords generate monthly and the CPC.

6. Setting the Demographic and Geographic Targeting Options

The PPC ads you’ve created should target a specific audience segment. Now, within your chosen platform, toggle with the targeting settings to confirm the ad only reaches certain audiences. You can select geographic and demographic parameters to limit who sees the ad.

Using targeting prevents segments of your audience from seeing ads designed for other pain points, needs, and interests.

7. Determining Your Bidding Strategies

Keyword bidding is one of the most expensive parts of your ad campaign and thus one of the most important in PPC management. Use your goals and target keywords as motivators when determining your bidding strategy.

Marketers often bid on keywords by campaign or category, which controls bids and spending. You might begin bidding at the minimum value for keywords, but as you use keywords and understand how they perform, you can adjust your bids accordingly.

Use negative keywords to filter the noise. As the name implies, negative keywords are search terms you want excluded from your campaign. This hyper-targeting ensures your ads target relevant, interested users.

8. Creating Ad Groups and Optimizing Keywords

Upon successfully bidding for keywords, it’s time to organize those you’ll use in your PPC ad campaign into groups. If you bid by group or campaign keywords, you can skip this step or spend minimal time on it, as your ads should be mostly grouped already.

Keywords should go in groups based on relevancy and search intent. For example, a searcher looking for bakeries in Chicago might also be interested in birthday cakes or wedding cakes in Chicago.

Next, optimize your keywords to help you generate qualified website traffic. You’ll also have relevant keywords to insert into copy.

9. Writing Ad Copy Relevant to Each Group

With your keyword clusters or groups identified, you’re ready to begin writing relevant ad copy. Although your copy will be relatively short, you will produce a lot of it to reach each targeted niche you identified in your research.

Keep the copy snappy, engaging, and relevant to generate clicks.

10. Using Ad Extensions to Improve Visibility

Google Ads offers more than a dozen extensions that can increase visibility online, including in search engine results pages. The larger ad sizes give you more real estate to write copy and provide information that makes users want to click.

Here are the types of Google Ads extensions you can utilize for your ad campaign:

• Image extension
•  Video extensions
• Lead form extensions
• Promotion extensions
• App extensions
• Price extensions
• Call extensions
• Structured snippets extensions
• Callout extensions
• Seller rating extensions
• Sitelink extensions
• Product extensions
• Location extensions

11. Optimizing Landing Pages for Conversion

When internet users click your PPC ad, they will be redirected to a landing page on your website. The next phase of PPC management should concern optimizing your landing pages so they’re ready to move leads through the sales funnel and drive conversions.

Here are some optimization tips:

• Split-test your landing pages before they go live.
• Ensure your landing pages load as quickly as possible.
• Keep copy engaging and not too salesy.
• Break up long paragraphs with bullet points.
• Incorporate images and videos.
• Use social proof to build trust, such as testimonials and reviews.
• Incorporate contrasting colors for your CTA buttons so they stand out.
• The first instance of your CTA button should be above the fold, but the button can recur further down the page.
• Mobile-optimize your landing page.
• Make all CTAs clear so a lead knows where they’re being redirected when they click.

12. Setting Up Conversion Tracking

Google Ads offers conversion tracking for free. Conversion tracking allows you to measure the outcomes of your ads, such as whether a customer downloads your app, visits your website, calls your company, joins your email list, or buys a product or service.

Put more simply, conversion tracking determines how many leads successfully convert based on your PPC ads.

13. Launching the Campaign and Carefully Monitoring Performance

With most elements of PPC management planned for, you’re ready to launch your first ad campaign. The campaign will begin generating metrics within the first click, but allow some time for the numbers to build up, then review if your ad revenue matches projections and makes up for what you’re spending.

14. Adjusting Bids and Making Changes to Ads If Necessary

You might not get it right on the first try, but that’s fine. Your ad campaign is not set in stone. While your campaign is still ongoing, consider adjusting the ad and resetting some of your bids, lowering or raising amounts based on keyword relevancy.

Track how these changes affect your campaign, which should be on an upward trajectory after the adjustments.

15. Analyzing Data to Measure Campaign Success

Your PPC management services haven’t concluded yet. You must study the KPIs generated from your PPC ad campaign. Here are some to pay attention to:

• Revenue on ad spend
• Conversion rate
• Cost per acquisition
• Click-through rate
• Cost per click
• Impression share
• Quality score

16. Iterating and Optimizing the Campaign to Improve Results

With your first PPC ad campaign finished, review its performance on all levels, determining which optimization steps you can take to improve the positive results you generated so your next campaign performs even better.

The Best Platforms for PPC Advertising

The right platform can make planning and executing a PPC ad campaign simple and effective. Here are three to focus on.

Google Ads

Arguably the most popular PPC platform, Google Ads is a trusted platform for creating video, shopping, display, search, and many other ad types. It has built-in bidding and metric-tracking tools and uses the power of AI to help you target relevant keywords.

YouTube Ads

YouTube attracts over 2.70 billion active users per month in 2023, according to GlobalMediaInsight. Using YouTube Ads can help your company reach new audiences.

Some video ads you can create through YouTube Ads are masthead ads, bumper ads, in-feed video ads, and non-skippable in-stream ads.

Bing Ads

Bing Ads, also known as Microsoft Ads, is an advertising platform to have on your radar. The Microsoft Search Network has over 720 million monthly searchers, allowing your business to reach a large audience. You can test keywords, time your ads, and track your bids on this platform.

FAQs About PPC Management

These FAQs should help you decide where to take your next ad campaign.

How Much Does PPC Management Cost?

PPC management services cost between $350 and $5,000 a month, notes AgencyAnalytics. As a baseline, companies should anticipate spending 12 to 30 percent of their monthly ad spend on management services.

How to Hire a PPC Management Agency?

Hiring a PPC management company begins with researching your available options. Review the features the service offers and its pricing structure and fees. Select several engaging candidates, then meet with them in person or over the phone.

Prepare a list of questions for the meeting, asking further about the company’s services. When you feel confident about your choice, draw up a professional contract both parties sign and begin working with the management agency.

What Is Involved in Day-to-Day PPC Management?

Here are some ad management facets you can expect from the company you hire for PPC services:

• Planning the direction of current and future campaigns.
• Tracking and adjusting your budget.
• Bidding on relevant keywords.
• Targeting your keywords and campaign.
• Analyzing metrics and tweaking the campaign parameters based on performance.

Hire a PPC Management Agency Now

A PPC management agency can help your business launch a targeted, successful ad campaign that meets your budgetary parameters. Mediaboom is a premier choice for digital marketing expertise. We have a proven track record of excellence in ad campaigns.

Contact us today to learn more.