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The process of managing and optimizing PPC campaigns is very much like living a healthy life. To succeed, you need to have an organized plan, trust your gut while staying realistic, and when you go through phases when your plan doesn’t work, tweak a few details and improve your design along the way. It’s all about trying, failing, learning, and optimizing.
In this article, we will discuss some basic things that every new PPC specialist should know so that they can excel at their work.
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Embrace Your Dreams, But Don’t Let Them Consume You
There is often excitement around a brand-new campaign, offering the chance to bring your ideas to life. The act of reflecting on our own creations renders us incapable of being objective. This can be applied to a new product, an offering, an audience, or a message.
The marketing professional must balance both sides of their job, being both an artist and a scientist, to succeed.
As more and more data becomes available, it becomes more important to analyze the results of our campaigns and optimize, or if necessary – terminate them based on the data.
These Are Some Potential Solutions:
- Having a co-worker help in giving a subjective view of results and producing insights.
- Creating a variety of similar variations for our copywriting and/or creatives to find the exact match that works best.
- Replace falling in love with a product (our campaign) with falling in love with a solution.
Once we are eager to learn what intrigues and convinces our audience, a campaign that doesn’t produce optimal results isn’t a failure – it’s a chance to learn more.
To succeed in PPC, it's vital to remember the basic pillars of success, even as we learn about new platforms, tools, and optimization methods.
This, Too, Shall Pass
In keeping with the data-oriented theme, it’s important not to jump to conclusions too quickly since some campaigns take longer to reach their full potential.
With the rise of automated-bidding bidding strategies, such as tROAS (Target Return On Ad-Spend) and PMax (Performance Max), advertising platforms need to collect data for new campaigns to see what works best.
The virtue of patience is vital when developing new campaigns, especially for small-budget clients or those expecting immediate results. Therefore, setting expectations and establishing a line of communication is vital while exploring trends and effects of testing and optimization.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”
It is easy to get lost in details when managing large clients and managing campaigns on multiple platforms. Fluctuations are inevitable, whether the factors that caused them are in our control (risk-aversion, optimization) or not (supply, demand).
Aside from direct results, some campaigns earn their merit by targeting higher stages of the marketing funnel, raising awareness for a brand or product, or starting a consideration process for higher-involved purchases.
An example would be a generic Google campaign, targeting keywords such as “cheap flights.” Users targeting such keywords have the idea of traveling in mind. They might not know when or where.
We can’t expect those users to click our ad and book a vacation within 15 minutes.
A more reasonable process would look like this:
- Clicking a couple of ads for “cheap flights”, based on brand recognition, placement, and/or copy.
- Picking options for destinations offered on viewed sites.
- Reading and researching about a smaller amount of destinations.
- Considering a destination and date with travel partners.
- Comparing products based on prices, availability, and/or perceived quality.
Such a long process could end in a purchase and, based on chosen attribution models, might be attributed mostly to the last click – a brand campaign. Therefore, it is wise to check Google Analytics for Assisted Conversions and keep in mind that there is merit in investing in all stages of the marketing funnel.
Keep Your Eyes On The Prize!
As we create campaigns and look at their data, sometimes we find a positive statistic that immediately catches our eye. In this case, we have exceeded our expectations, and the single number shows us that we have been successful. Seeing this might make us feel good and might even make the client satisfied with the quality of our work. With that in mind, a single value cannot tell the whole story because it does not contain all the information. In addition, there is the possibility of skewing reality entirely by a single value.
An example would be if we created a campaign and achieved a low CPC. As we want to pay as little as possible, we might lose sight of the fact that those clicks are not resulting in a high CTR or AOV, and are generating a low return on investment.
Hence, we need to identify a KPI and a single clear goal that we strive for, even to the detriment of another value, before optimizing our campaigns.
Remember that you may be able to accomplish anything, but not everything at the same time. Focus on one goal, and optimize towards it.
Final Thoughts
To succeed in PPC, it’s vital to remember the basic pillars of success, even as we learn about new platforms, tools, and optimization methods.
The PPC manager’s value is derived from the ability to think creatively, assess information, and make judgment calls, especially with the rise of automation.
Over time, all of your efforts will start to compound upon themselves so that you’re always improving and enjoying your gains.
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