The Benefits of a Pay Per Click Management Service

October 16, 2012

One way you can improve your organic search results is to use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. There are two ways to go here: either do it yourself or outsource to a pay per click management service.

Going It Alone With PPC

With this option, you bid on keywords in a PPC engine (like Google Adwords) and create ad campaigns to advertise your wares. The higher you bid for a keyword, the higher your ad will appear on searches for that keyword. You only get charged when someone actually clicks on your ad (paid per click) rather than when your ad is displayed. For this reason, bidding for PPC keywords can be a very cost-effective strategy.

We’re all familiar with Adsense ads and what they look like. The ads you see in those Adsense ad blocks were created by marketers and advertisers in Google Adwords where they set the bid amounts for the keywords they’re interested in promoting. There are many other pay-per-click services available, and which one you use depends on what and where you want to promote your goods.

Affiliate marketers often use the PPC model as it’s a very good, and quick way to drive traffic to an offer. By investing in keyword bidding, you can create an initial, small income. Once profits start coming in, you can leverage them to build larger advertising campaigns to further increase profits.

Before beginning a pay-per-click marketing campaign, make sure you know what you are doing. Many affiliate marketers make the mistake of jumping right in to PPC advertising before they know how to avoid costly mistakes. In many cases this can wind up costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars virtually overnight with nothing to show in return. That’s why it’s so important to take the time to learn everything you can about setting up successful pay-per-click campaigns before you take the plunge.

There’s all kinds of advice online about how you should conduct your affiliate marketing business, and most strategies will work with patience and consistency. The key is to choose one course of action and stay with it. Focus. Use pay-per-click or e-mail marketing or blogging. Don’t spread yourself too thin by trying to do all of them at once. Master one form of marketing and get good at it.

Time is often an issue in any marketing effort and rather than wanting to spend time learning the ins and out of PPC marketing or putting time into building up and monitoring your campaigns, another option is to go for professional pay-per-click management. This frees you up for other tasks for which you might be better suited. Or maybe you’re just someone who likes to outsource everything. No matter – professionals know all the important tasks that it takes to market your website, product or service online to the fullest so that you can be successful.

Many companies and webmasters alike will attempt to underake PPC advertising on their own. Yes, it can be done but to do it well, you really do need to become an expert in your own right. This is a good example of a real-world “work smarter not harder” situation. Those working smarter will opt to outsource their PPC accounts to a pay per click management expert.

As an increasing number of businesses are beginning to place adverts each day on the major search engines, there has been a steady increase in the average bid amount for keywords on the likes of AdWords and adCenter (Microsoft) of up to 40% per year. Not many can bear those costs over the long-term. A pay per click management expert will be aware of strategies and techniques on the various PPC platforms that will cut your costs as well as maximize the effectiveness of
your ads and your success as a result.

What To Look For In a Pay Per Click Management Expert

Ok, so you’ve decided you need the help of a PPC expert, what should you look for and what should you beware of?

Your PPC manager should offer transparency – you ought to be able to directly access your accounts and your manager should be in a position to explain to you what he or she is doing with your account, and why. Don’t accept “I?m the expert” or “Just trust me” answers when you ask why a particular decision was made with your money. They are spending your money after all!

The better managers will educate you in the ways of PPC advertising as you go along. This puts you in a position where you’re better informed about what decisions to take with how money is spent. What you should look for is a manager who comes up with advertising ideas and explain the reasoning behind them but who involves you in the decision making process rather than leaving you out of the loop.

Your manager should use structured campaigns, with each being comprised of multiple ad groups that target tight, specific clusters of keywords. Keywords from within an ad group should be used as frequently as possible within the ad text so as to improve the relevancy of the ad group as a whole.

Your PPC manager should be well acquainted with the various campaign management software (like Adwords). Often, the “Settings” tab here is overlooked yet this is where your PPC manager can make a huge difference by targeting your audience in the right way. This tab includes all the “under the hood” options, such as Geo-targeting where ads will appear, what devices you want ads to appear on (e.g. mobile only), the times when you want ads to be displayed, and where ads should show up – on search pages and/or as display ads on websites. Get these settings right and it can mean the difference between a successful and a failed campaign. Get them wrong, and it could cost you a lot of money.

Your manager should also be aware of how tools change and developments in the advertising industry so that he can advise you of new or upcoming opportunities that you can take advantage of.

Your landing pages should be specific to the ad group that is being targeted. Avoid linking ads to your home page except for the most general of your ad groups. And, if you’re targeting both mobile devices and PCs, then do separate campaigns. All your ads should be spit-tested, and results analyzed so you can identify what’s successful, build on that and improve performance.

Each of your campaigns should have a different budget. Beware of PPC managers who set the same budget for each campaign. Some campaigns will be more profitable than others and it makes sense to allocate more funds to a successful campaign and reduce or terminate the budget for an unsuccessful one. It also makes sense to place higher bids on high-converting keywords.

Every business is different so no two advertising campaigns will ever be alike. There’s no template you can start with. Ant decent pay per click management expert will ask you a lot of questions about your business and the type of people you’re targeting with your offers so that they can tailor campaigns to your specific needs. Beware of any PPC professional who doesn’t ask such questions. If they don’t understand your business and where you;re coming from, how can they be in a a good position to target the people you’re after in an effective manner?

Conclusion

to sum up, it is definitely difficult to stay on top of all of the latest tips and tricks coming out about affiliate marketing if you go it alone. To make matters worse, information is constantly changing – making it nearly impossible to be an expert unless you make it a point to keep yourself up to date. Employing the services of a pay-per-click management service will save you a lot of heartache, time and, ultimately, money.