Ever wonder why you should hire a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or AdWords expert when you can do your own PPC bid management?
It’s for the same reason you hire a professional accountant to handle your corporate finances and taxes. Sure you can do them yourself, but who wants to do that, and are we as skilled as a professional? We all know we do not have the time and expertise to do them as efficiently and expertly as a good accountant can.
You want the best results possible, not a poorly prepared financial statement that could lead to trouble down the track. The same reasoning applies to online PPC marketing otherwise known as Google AdWords.
You might have part of the puzzle solved, and be pretty good at writing powerful ad copy, and you might even know how to create ad groups and why. But then lumping this with all the other ads out there, throwing some money at it and hoping for the best isn’t going to get you too far, nor will it yield you the best results.
To achieve the results you expect, you must team up with an experienced AdWords specialist who knows everything about PPC bid management, and has the certification to prove it.
Pay Per Click/AdWords Management
PPC ads provide an excellent opportunity to connect with potential prospects exactly when they’re looking for specific information or products. Although paid search marketing is incredibly useful, bringing in the traffic you need to grow your business, it’s not easy.
If you believe that throwing an ad somewhere on the Internet will help you boost revenue, you’re in for a shock. There’s a big difference between traffic and revenue, and this is part of the art of understanding AdWords properly, and how it works.
Throwing your hard-earned money into campaigns, ad groups and keywords that generate traffic, does not mean increased sales unfortunately. You need to understand all of the elements that make an AdWords campaign work, and what to do when issues arise.
If this isn’t a good enough reason to outsource your PPC activity to an AdWords specialist, review the following sections to see if you’re up to the task.
PPC Terminology
Although advertised as user friendly, PPC bid management includes terms that beginners may not understand, such as accelerated ad delivery, ad auction, ad rationing, CPA, CPC, CPM, average position, quality score, etc.
Key terms like “Google Search,” “Remarketing,” and “Google Display Network,” can influence your PPC campaigns. For example, the “Google Display Network,” allows you to choose the most relevant websites for your business so that you can reach your target audience without too much hassle.
Without understanding the impact that “Google Display Network” can have on your campaigns, could cause you to run out of budget real fast with little to no results at all. A specialist will guide you through this process, and navigate the campaign along the right course, to deliver you the best results possible for your budget.
Keyword Research
Effective keyword research and analysis is the foundation of a successful ad campaign. With the help of advanced analytics tools, PPC experts are able to select the most appropriate topics for campaigns, create seed lists of starting keywords, refine these lists, and then develop ad campaigns around them.
By using these tools to analyze keywords, ads and campaigns, experts can also identify specific elements that attract consumers. For instance, if not too long ago short-form ads were favored, more and more consumers seem to prefer funny ads.
Since the success of an ad campaign depends so much on keyword research, you certainly don’t want to use a free tool, which may provide false or misleading information, that in the end only leads to wasted money being spent.
Time
Good PPC bid management takes a lot of time – a luxury most business owners do not have. Creating and managing PPC campaigns include a series of tasks, ranging from developing seed.
You might also consider keyword lists, optimizing copy, creating landing pages and optimizing for better conversion rates, researching the competition, continued research to find opportunities to maximize sales, running A/B tests, reviewing performance metrics and making relevant changes, and keeping up with the latest Google algorithm updates.
Technical Expertise
PPC bid management goes far beyond creating campaigns and tracking results. You need to know how to apply results toward funnelling your advertising budget, how to identify and correct the problems that make your campaigns fail, how to fine tune ads to increase quality scores along with click-through rate and conversion rate so that you can earn more money, and so on.
A PPC expert knows how to do all these and has plenty of HTML knowledge to perform more complex tasks, including installing and setting up classified ad scripts and tagging campaigns to get valuable insights from specific analytics tools.
How To Boost Your AdWords Copy?
While SEO is more sustainable when it comes to boosting your site’s rankings on Google, a successfully implemented PPC bid management will almost certainly deliver an immediate response.
Better yet, Google has made it incredibly easy to establish an AdWords campaign. Simply select a few target keywords, enter your credit card details, and off you go. Unfortunately, however, it does take some time and effort if you actually want to achieve results.
Like writing compelling ad copy, for example. With hundreds of businesses out there bidding on similar keywords, many ads are beginning to look the same. Here lies the opportunity to stand out.
Offer Prospective Customers a Solution
Don’t forfeit headline space on simply reiterating the search term/ keyword phrase. Instead, offer prospective customers a solution to their search query. For example, if someone were to search for “carpet cleaning Cardiff”, don’t merely ask visitors if they “Need Carpets Cleaned?”, because we already know that they do.
Write something that shows visitors that you are the solution to their problem, and the best at that. In this scenario, we’d want to go for something along the lines of “Premier Carpet Cleaning – New Again in Under an Hour”. By doing so, we are addressing the end goals of the prospective customer, giving them a reason to click on your ad.
Establish Urgency
Nothing generates interest like instilling a little bit of FOMO in the eyes of potential customers. Luckily, Google now offers a countdown timer that you can incorporate in your ad, featuring a real-time countdown to a specific event relevant to your product or service.
This addition has become especially useful for PPC bid management. Especially, if you’re focusing on e-Commerce websites. By customizing your ad to state that there are only “2 days left” on a sale, or “only 1 week until Father’s Day”, click-through-rates have proven to soar.
Be Specific
Ads which include numbers are significantly more appealing to online visitors than those which use generic copy in their PPC management. By doing so, visitors will be able to easily digest the message you’re trying to get across. It also makes ads look more credible, giving prospective customers confidence in your product or services.
For example, our “Carpet Cleaning Cardiff” ad description should state something like this: “Over 1500 carpets cleaned in less than 2 hours” or “3 Rooms for Under $80”. Lengthy or ‘spammy’ language may deter clients from clicking on your ad. So keep it specific and accurate.
Localize Ad Copy
Take advantage of Google’s location targeting setting, allowing you to display ads to customers in a selected geographic location. In conjunction with this, it’s highly beneficial to target potential customers with geo-specific language, even if your services are offered worldwide. The goal is to let visitors know that your business is “conveniently located” for them.
Format & Spell Check
Ads that haven’t been properly formatted and edited look unprofessional and lazy, which in turn, makes your business look unprofessional and lazy. Avoid this at all costs. For instance, use correct casing when it comes to your headline. The first letter of each word should be capitalized.
Moreover, check the spelling and grammar in your ad copy. If this isn’t necessarily your forte, there are a number of online tools available that can do this for you, such as Grammarly – an extension of Google Chrome and personal saving grace of my own.
Conclusion
Creating Google ad campaigns can be a fun and rewarding activity. With a lot of training and ‘real world’ experience, it’s even possible to become an expert at it over time.
However, it will be more profitable for most business owners to spend their precious time on closing deals and building their business instead of going through the intricate PPC bid management process.