A successful Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign can be a cost-effective way to connect directly with your company’s target audience. PPC campaigns are easy to measure and track, providing opportunities for analysis and adaptation that simply aren’t available for many other forms of advertising.
Hiring an effective PPC manager is the key to running a profitable campaign. However, it’s possible that some PPC managers are trying to fake competency. Dan Slagen writes for HubSpot, “Making a campaign look good on paper could simply mean opting into the content network and showing an Excel chart with increasing leads at a decreasing price, without ever taking the quality of said leads into account.” In light of these challenges, here are some tips on what to look for in a PPC pro.
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Perseverance
It’s one thing for a PPC manager to know how to manage an ad word campaign, but it’s quite another thing to be passionate about it in order to persevere when the work becomes frustrating, dull, or monotonous.
Sarah Goliger of HubSpot reminds readers that “paid search isn’t intuitive. You may think you know which keywords and ad groups are converting best, but you could very well be wrong. Sometimes the ads you don’t think will be effective end up having high click-through rates. Listen to your data when you make decisions for optimizing your campaign.” Only those who are committed to preserving through this difficult process will pull off a successful campaign.
Thinking Outside the Box
Anyone can learn how to research keywords, but the best PPC manager knows how to optimize those keywords into creative marketing copy for PPC campaigns. Rather than just adding to the clutter of Google’s advertising boxes, a great PPC manager knows how to capture the attention of readers and to capitalize on new trends and innovations such as using Facebook and Twitter to develop new PPC campaigns.
Dan Slagen writes for HubSpot, “in these days of differentiation, anything you can add to make your offer more unique will draw eyes away from other ads and onto yours. Does your soft drink have fewer calories? Use recycled plastic? Is it cheaper? The more you can set yourself apart, the better.”
Committed to Clear ROI
If a PPC manager is unwilling to establish clear, measurable ROI for a campaign, that should set off a red flag for clients. It’s very easy for competent PPC managers to track conversions and to improve the ROI over time. A PPC manager who doesn’t tie campaigns to ROI in clear, actionable reports is wasting time and money.
Mona Elesseily writes for Search Engine Land, “in one account, an imposter manager was tracking prospects who reached a lead form, with no measurement of weather they filled out the form. If managers are not using Google Analytics (GA) or customizing goals in GA, they are missing significant opportunities to optimize accounts.”
A Full Range of PPC Tools
From keyword strategies to writing strong ad copy, the best PPC manager has the full range of tools in his/her profession so that your campaigns can be adapted to whatever challenges may come up. Though passion and determination will certainly set the best apart from the pack, the basic PPC skills must be present in a manager.
A PPC manager without experience and knowledge of the particulars of running an ad word campaign could end up costing your company a lot of money without a lot of return. For example, Sarah Goliger writes at HubSpot, “Many people are easily misled by the quantity of the traffic they drive with broad match keywords, and they don’t look at the reporting to evaluate quality. Oftentimes, they’re ranking on totally irrelevant keywords and driving unqualified traffic from them, which just wastes their money.”
Don’t leave the fate of your PPC campaign in the hands of an incompetent manager. The competition for clicks online is too fierce to trust yourself with an amateur when only a professional can help you succeed.
This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that offers a app for individuals and businesses, and who also consults for the Master Security Studies program at the Tel Aviv University.
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