The digital marketing landscape and the tech it requires grow more competitive by the day. This means that, as an agency, keeping up with the most innovative and robust PPC account management solutions has become imperative in order to keep up with the competition.
Every week, your team spends hours working on menial, repetitive and time consuming procedures that are prone to errors and put your overall sales—and profit—at risk. But what would happen if you automated click-intensive tasks, streamlined your workflows, and supercharged your ad campaigns?
When implemented correctly, the right PPC automation strategy can optimise your ad campaigns, thereby increasing your business’ efficiency, performance, and overall success. Perhaps most importantly, PPC advertising increases your agency’s visibility on search engines, bringing you more traffic and potential sales.
Read on to find out exactly what PPC account management involves, as well as how your agency can automate it to achieve the best results!
What is PPC Account Management?
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management is the process of managing a company’s PPC ad spend, strategy and budget. Whether a business manages its PPC strategy in-house or hires an external agency, the process usually includes a variety of tasks, such as keyword research, competitor analysis, target channels and account optimisation.
PPC account management is a crucial aspect of digital marketing, as it allows agencies to expand and build on their digital marketing efforts.
Why Do You Need to Optimise Your PPC Accounts?
So we’ve established what PPC account management entails, but why exactly is it important, and how can it be used to maximise efficiency and grow your online sales?
In a nutshell, optimising your PPC account is imperative when it comes to making data-driven decisions that result in an increased return on investment. Marketing automation can involve implementing simple scripts that eliminate and automate click-intensive tasks, combining data from multiple sources in one data warehouse, creating e-commerce feeds for specialised platforms, and much more.
By implementing automation scripts, you save both time and resources—and you simplify your agency’s workflows in the process. By using automation scripts, you can also combine data from different sources, generate reports, and deploy campaigns in just a few clicks.
What Do PPC Account Managers or PPC Agencies Do?
#1. Paid Keyword Research
Keywords are terms or phrases that users search for when using search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, and are ultimately the basis for everything in PPC.
While it’s certainly possible to perform keyword research and PPC management in house, it tends to be less effective this way. Many agencies choose to pay for professional PPC services to efficiently target keywords that result in their ads appearing at the top of a page—thereby increasing their visibility.
#2. Competitive Analysis
One of the principal aspects of effective PPC account management is keeping an eye on your competition, or, in other words, agencies that are bidding on the same terms and phrases as you. The first step is determining who your PPC competition actually is, as this will influence the way you pay for your ads as well as how they are shown online.
Then, PPC account managers or agencies will look at metrics such as impression share, overlap, outranking share, position above, and top of page rates. By doing so, your agency gains valuable insight into your competitors’ metrics so you can actively improve in certain areas.
#3. Negative Keyword Research
Negative keywords prevent your ad from being triggered by a particular term or phrase and reaching the wrong audience, and they can drastically increase your agency’s profits by filtering out any unwanted traffic.
Picture this: your business is selling brand new Samsung Galaxys. In order to avoid attracting clicks from browsers wanting to purchase second-hand versions of the phone, the appropriate negative keyword for your campaign would be “refurbished.” What this does is eliminate the chance of any irrelevant traffic, helping you reach your target audience.
#4. Strategy Planning
In order to create a successful PPC campaign, PPC account managers or agencies start by coming up with a clear-cut strategy and goal, which may not always be so obvious.
At this stage, it’s crucial to consider all of the available options and what you really want to accomplish. This planning phase involves significant research around brand awareness, product and brand consideration, leads, sales and repeat sales.
#5. Creating Ad Landing Pages
A landing page is essentially a dedicated page where visitors “land” once they’ve clicked on a PPC ad. To maximise the results of a PPC campaign, managers and agencies will avoid pointing paid traffic to the website’s generic homepage, for instance, because the visitor doesn’t instantly find what they were looking for.
To ensure each click results in conversion, then, having a relevant landing page is key. This way, the consumer is instantly met with more information about the particular product they showed initial interest in and is one step closer to making a purchase.
#6. Testing and Optimization
Testing and optimisation are both hugely important when it comes to launching a PPC campaign and are a crucial aspect of a PPC account manager’s role. It’s important to note, however, that the way an agency reaches success through PPC management varies and is definitely not one size fits all.
Testing and experimenting with new keywords, landing pages, and marketing channels before launching a campaign, for example, allows managers to identify high-potential ROAS campaigns to mesh into their PPC strategy.
#7. A/B Testing
Also referred to as split testing, A/B testing is a key element of any successful, data-driven marketing campaign. It allows you to compare and test two individual variables of an ad component against each other in order to work out which is more effective—and helps you identify what kind of message resonates best with your audience.
#8. Launching and Monitoring PPC Campaigns
Monitoring, tweaking and optimising are all essential when it comes to maintaining a robust PPC management strategy that actually drives sales and keeps up with the competition. This includes continuing to experiment and research more potential keywords, as well as looking for new opportunities at every point of a digital marketing campaign to maximise conversion potential.
How to Manage Multiple PPC Accounts
If you’re facing having to manage multiple PPC accounts at once, then a Manager Account is an incredibly powerful tool that can save you the headache of having to constantly switch between campaigns.
With a Manager Account, you can easily view and manage all your individual client or in-house accounts under a single, cohesive umbrella account. Some of the benefits include a dashboard that shows you key metrics for each account you’re managing and the ability to set up negative keyword lists that can be applied to multiple accounts with a single click!
How to Manage Your PPC Campaigns the Right Way
There are several ways to effectively manage a PPC campaign, and the route you choose may depend on the size as well as the long-term goals of your business. Some agencies choose to hire a PPC manager, while others may opt to outsource the task and work with an external campaign management agency—but both of these options may prove costly.
Alternatively, you can access several free guides, templates, planners and automation scripts online that outline how to use Google Ads to optimise your PPC campaigns and implement them yourself—if you have the workforce for it, that is. While this is definitely the more economical option, it may require time that your team simply does not have, which leads us to the next option!
Automate Your PPC Accounts With the Help of Acuto
At Acuto, we believe that every agency deserves to unlock the full potential of effective PPC account management.
We create custom automation scripts for businesses so that they can spend less time on monotonous tasks and more time on the stuff that really matters.
We do this for just about any web app, including Google Ads, Google Sheets, Meta for Developers, Authorias and more. By working closely with your team, we develop automation solutions that are tailored specifically to your business.
Acuto can help you launch promotion campaigns with automation scripts that save you time, labour and money. We can automate your ad bidding with custom scripts that keep up with the competition, customise your ads based on external factors, and create specialised feeds for your agency.
So why work with us? We’re a team of developers and data engineers with extensive backgrounds in digital marketing and paid media. This enables us to create powerful automation scripts that get the job done, so you don’t have to.
Ready to automate your business? Book a meeting with an expert!
Key Takeaways
In an increasingly tech-forward industry, it is almost impossible to grow as a marketing agency without having a fully optimised marketing strategy, and productive PPC account management is absolutely vital to this.
To recap, here’s what we’ve covered:
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management is the process of managing a company’s PPC ad spend, strategy and budget.
- PPC account management is a crucial aspect of digital marketing, as it allows agencies to expand and build on their digital marketing efforts.
- PPC advertising increases your agency’s visibility on search engines via keyword research, bringing your website more traffic and potential sales.
- Marketing automation can involve implementing simple scripts that eliminate and automate click-intensive tasks, combining data from multiple sources in one data warehouse, creating e-commerce feeds for specialised platforms, and much more.
- There are several ways to effectively manage a PPC campaign, and the route you choose may depend on the size, as well as long-term goals of your business.