Pay-per-click (PPC) campaign management encompasses the entire process of managing a company’s online ads, from placing them to analyzing their outcomes. Continuous PPC management lets you tailor the ads to attract the most qualified audience, increase click-through rates (CTRs), and potentially boost conversion rates.
In this guide, our experts share the nine best practices for PPC campaign management and the benefits they can bring to your business. We’ll also guide you on how to test and optimize your strategy and provide three top examples.
Table of Contents
- What Is PPC Campaign Management?
- 4 Essential Steps of PPC Campaign Management
- 5 Bonus Tips To Fine-Tune Your PPC Campaign Management
- What Benefits Does PPC Management Offer?
- How To Test and Optimize Your PPC Management Strategy
- 3 Best Examples of PPC Campaign Management Strategies
- PPC Campaign Management Takeaways
- PPC Campaign Management FAQs
What Is PPC Campaign Management?
Pay-per-click management is the process of running and organizing your business’ PPC strategy and budget. Its goal is to get the most out of your PPC campaigns while ensuring they are set up correctly by optimizing and adjusting when and where necessary.
PPC campaign management involves, but is not limited to:
- Keyword analysis
- Competitive analysis
- Channel targeting
- Landing page creation
- Campaign monitoring & optimizing
- PPC testing
4 Essential Steps of PPC Campaign Management
The most important part of a successful PPC campaign management is careful planning and a clear definition of your goals. Your campaigns may run aimlessly without clear goal setting. Whether it is increasing website traffic, conversions, or something else, you need to define the objective and the metrics you will use to measure said goals.
To guide you, here are four essential steps you should follow in PPC campaign management:
- Find and pick the right keywords
- Monitor your competition
- Polish your copy
- Select the right landing pages
1. Find And Pick The Right Keywords
Keyword research is a crucial part of running a successful PPC campaign. The first step is to determine if and how your customers search for what you’re offering. You need to verify if there’s a keyword with a sufficient search volume for your product or service.
To assist you with this, use online tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs. These tools can help you derive relevant keywords from the list of phrases your leads may be using.
These tools will also tell you:
- How many people are searching for those specific keywords
- How competitive these keywords are
- Are they trending or declining in popularity
- What their related search terms and keyword variations are
- What keywords are your competitors using
You’ll need to optimize your ad copy with chosen keywords to ensure your ads are shown for the right queries.
Additionally, while selecting the right keywords is crucial, it’s equally important to prevent your ads from being displayed for the wrong keywords. Your ad may sometimes show up for keywords that are not at all relevant to your business or niche.
In this case, you need to use negative keywords to ensure your ads are not shown for these irrelevant terms. The main benefit of using negative keywords is to avoid wasting your budget by showing ads on irrelevant search queries.
2. Monitor Your Competition
Now that you have a list of potential keywords, it’s time to see what your competitors are doing.
By using the same product or service keywords and adding your competitors' names, you can check if their PPC ads appear as paid ads in search results. Pay attention to the copy and images they’re using and observe the ads’ landing pages.
You can also test your competitor’s retargeting PPC efforts by going to their website and looking at some of their product pages. If you are retargeted with the ads for these same products while browsing other websites, it indicates they have an effective retargeting PPC campaign in place.
Additionally, tools like Ahrefs provide insights into the keywords your competitors are targeting and how well they are performing.
3. Polish Your Copy
When managing your PPC campaign, ensure you have a robust unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP is what makes you stand out and gives your prospect a reason to choose you over your competitors.
In your copy, focus on the benefits your offering provides to users that solve their pain points. Identify what you do better than your competitors. You need to clearly, concisely, and effectively communicate your strengths to the person searching.
Here are some key sections of a paid ad and tips on how to optimize each:
Title/Headline
This is the first thing people see before clicking on an ad. Your headlines must be compelling enough to encourage prospects to learn more.
- Keep your titles concise, straightforward, and relevant to their search terms.
- Use attention-grabbing terms that entice a sense of urgency and Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) in your target audience (“last chance”, “only X more left”, “sale ends soon” etc.)
- Push forward the most important information.
Example: “Get Professional SEO Services with Exclusive Discounts – Limited Offer!”
Body
This is the main content of an ad that tells prospects what you’re trying to sell. You can use text, visuals, or a mix of these two in your ad.
- Visual content is generally more effective than blocks of text.
- Keep your selling points concise and precise
- Use an appealing and legible font
- Mention key points like your USP, benefits, or product/service features
- Make your ads responsive
- Add your brand logo to the ad
- Make sure your ad copy aligns with what is on your landing page
Example: “Get free proposals from top agencies to create a futureproof PPC strategy. Contact us for a free consultation and share your project!”
CTAs
CTAs are the conversion steps that urge your audience to click, sign up, or buy.
These need to be compelling, action-oriented, and clearly state what they will gain by taking the desired action. Here are several tested strategies to enhance them:
- Use power verbs (Enter, Jump in, Join, Try...)
- Make your CTAs interesting, visually and content-wise
- Place them strategically so they are visible
- Use FOMO.
- Example: “Get Started Now” or “Share Your Project”
4. Select The Right Landing Pages
The goal of every PPC ad is to drive visitors to a relevant landing page and encourage them to take the desired action. When creating ads, choose the right destination URLs (landing pages) that your ads will direct users to.
Sending your prospects to a general homepage or a blog section may be effective for conversions. Instead, you should direct users to landing pages with high conversion rates and that are specifically designed to attract leads. Your users should be directed to pages most relevant to the ad they clicked on and that deliver on the promise made in the ad.
5 Bonus Tips To Fine-Tune Your PPC Campaign Management
Having gone through the essentials of PPC management, here are some additional steps to make the most of your paid ad campaigns:
- Optimize your targeting
- Perform bid optimization
- Launch remarketing campaigns
- Track conversions
- Use A/B testing
1. Optimize Your Targeting
In PPC campaign management, you have many targeting options based on your campaign type (search, display network, video, etc.) For instance, keywords and audience targeting are the main targeting options for search campaigns, while display network campaigns offer a lot more targeting options, including placement targeting.
Other targeting options include:
- Placement targeting: This lets you select the platforms and types of websites where you want your ads to appear. You can choose websites from a specific industry or category.
- Audience targeting: This lets you select who you want to show your ads to, based on their demographics, location, behavior patterns, specific interests, devices they use, language, and more. This option is available for Google Display Network ads.
- Contextual targeting: It is essentially keywords-based targeting and applies to all types of PPC campaigns. It is the primary targeting option for search campaigns wherein your ads are displayed to people who search for specific keywords.
- Topic targeting: It allows you to display network ads on pages related to specific topics. However, unlike placement targeting, which focuses on the type of website or platform, topic targeting selects specific pages related to the topic at hand.
2. Perform Bid Optimization
One important optimization step in PPC campaign management is setting a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid, which is the amount of money you’re willing to pay for a single click on your ad. Your maximum bid should be high enough to give your ads a chance to compete for high-ranking keywords, but not so high that you quickly deplete your funds.
Additionally, you need to continuously adjust your bids based on your campaign performance. Some keywords may perform better than others, so you need to determine which keywords provide the most profitable conversions and how much you can afford to pay while still making a profit. This depends on factors like:
- Your customer lifetime value
- Your business objectives
- Conversion type (sign up, phone call, demo, sale, etc.)
Automated bid-optimization tactics can also help you adjust bids effortlessly. While most PPC advertising professionals prefer manual bidding, its automated counterpart offers a more streamlined option, especially to the uninitiated.
Here are some bidding strategies to consider:
- Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC): Automatically adjusts your bids for keywords that have a higher chance of conversion.
- Target CPA bidding: This lets you adjust your bids in real time to help you achieve your target cost per conversion goals faster.
- Maximize Conversions: This is a broader bidding optimization strategy that helps you get the most conversions possible within your budget across all eligible auctions
3. Launch Remarketing Campaigns
While attracting new prospects is the main goal, PPC campaigns don’t exclusively focus on new customers. They can also be used to retarget and retain existing customers, as well as re-engage those who were once in your conversion funnel but did not complete the purchase (for example, cart abandoners).
These individuals are already familiar with your brand and are more likely to convert. Remarketing can show them personalized ads to remind them of their interest and encourage them to complete the purchase.
4. Track Conversions
You’ll never know what exactly works or doesn’t work for your PPC campaigns without tracking their performance. To precisely measure the actual impact of your ads, you need to monitor metrics such as CTRs, bounce rates, and conversions.
Tracking how your prospects behave after they land on your page will help you identify which ads or ad groups are performing well and understand why. This insight can help you refine and improve your PPC campaign management strategy.
5. Use A/B Testing
A/B testing allows you to show one of your ads to a specific segment of your audience while directing another ad to the other segment. This enables you to compare both ads’ performance and see which ad resonates better with your target audience.
You can use A/B testing to evaluate different ad components, such as titles, CTAs, visuals, color choices, and more. Testing is a valuable investment as its results will help you create and design better ads in the future.
What Benefits Does PPC Management Offer?
Here are the most immediate benefits of managing and optimizing your PPC campaigns:
- Fast results
- Very precise targeting
- Measuring performance accurately
- Flexible budgeting
- Better brand recognition
- SEO algorithm independence
- Test different strategies on the fly
Benefit #1: Fast Results
One benefit of PPC campaign management is that it provides a quick path to driving traffic to your website, instead of waiting for organic traffic to grow over time. With proper keyword and competition research, you can launch your campaigns and start seeing the results within hours.
Benefit #2: Very Precise Targeting
Highly specific targeting is another benefit of PPC campaign management. You can narrow down your strategies on how to target your audience based on various parameters, such as where, when, and how you want to connect with them.
Consider asking questions such as: Do you want prospective consumers to find you via their smart devices or desktops? Are they searching for your product/service at a certain time of day?
The more you understand your audience’s preferred devices, keywords, search times, and general behavior, the better your chances are to provide them with exactly what they’re looking for.
Benefit #3: Measuring Performance Accurately
Another benefit of PPC campaign management is that it provides detailed insights into the performance of your campaign through key performance indicators (KPIs). These include visits, views, clicks (CTR), cost, bounce rates, conversion rates, and others.
KPIs provide an overview of how your budget is spent and how well your ads are performing. Additionally, proper PPC campaign management does more than ensure the success of your ads, as it also highlights areas for improvement in both your ads and your website’s UI/UX.
Benefit #4: Flexible Budgeting
When your KPIs don’t perform as expected, you can make changes to your campaigns immediately. You can reallocate your budget, move funds to new devices or different times of day, or boost the budget for a specific set of keywords. Setting daily limits on PPC campaigns also prevents overspending and keeps your budget under control.
Benefit #5: Better Brand Recognition
In competitive industries, PPC campaign management can help your brand stand out. One of the most overlooked advantages of PPC management is its ability to gain impressions. Even if users don’t click on your ads, you’ll still appear to them, increasing brand visibility. Over time, this repeated exposure can make users subconsciously become more familiar with your brand, thus, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
Benefit #6: SEO Algorithm Independence
The advantage of PPC campaign management is that ads are instant, and their success is almost guaranteed as you can ensure the campaign runs based on the set of parameters without any influence from search engine processes and/or algorithm changes.
Additionally, you can make changes to your ads instantly. With SEO, these changes would have to be gradual, meaning they’d take significant time and effort to implement them.
Benefit #7: Test Different Strategies on the Fly
PPC is an excellent platform for testing new strategies, whether you want to experiment with the copy on your website, introduce new bold visuals, or come up with a new hashtag.
Before you start implementing your ideas, test them using PPC. Set up a couple of campaigns, let them run for a month, and analyze the results. Which had the best CTR?
The data will speak for itself and tell immediately which one of your ideas is employable and beneficial to your website and/or brand.
How To Test and Optimize Your PPC Management Strategy
To ensure your PPC campaigns are effective and to determine when and if you should apply the strategies mentioned above, you should conduct PPC testing. This can involve various methods to ensure optimal PPC results.
Testing Methods:
- A/B Testing: This involves testing and comparing different versions of your ads to identify which elements most effectively resonate with your audience.
- Before/After Testing: This involves making adjustments or changes to your ads and strategy and then comparing the before and after performance.
- Experiments: This involves launching a test PPC ad with a minimal budget and observing how it evolves in a pre-set time frame. You can change the metrics to see how they affect the results. This helps you become more certain of which successful strategies you should apply to better and more expensive PPC ads.
Common Optimization Methods:
Testing your PPC campaigns will indicate when and how you need to optimize them. Commonly used optimization methods are:
- Optimizing landing pages: They should be relevant and informative to effectively improve UX and conversion.
- Improving ad copy: Refine your ad text to make it more relevant, compelling, and engaging to your target audience.
- Following the competition: By analyzing your competitors’ strategies, strengths, and performance, you can identify new opportunities and stay competitive.
- Improving Google’s Quality Score: Improve your landing pages, ad relevance, and CTR to enhance your Quality Score, thereby reducing costs and achieving better ad placements.
3 Best Examples of PPC Campaign Management Strategies
1. Skyscanner
Whenever you search for a flight destination anywhere in the world, Skyscanner is always among the top search results on Google. Its PPC ads are optimized with keywords such as “flight” and “tickets,” ensuring they appear regardless of the combination users enter.
Skyscanner’s pay-per-click management plan is simple and doesn’t require many changes over time. The company focuses on tracking the ads and making small adjustments to add new deals and holiday promotions while maintaining a consistent strategy centered around keywords and user intentions.
2. Converse
One of the best PPC campaign management ideas came from Converse’s “Domaination” campaign in 2010. In partnership with the marketing agency Anomoly, Converse took a unique approach to utilize online traffic to spread the word about its brand.
Rather than targeting traditional product-related keywords like “sneakers” or “shoes”, Converse went in a completely different lane — using keywords that had nothing to do with the brand or its offerings but were highly relevant to popular searches.
Some ideas they used were:
- That year’s spelling bee competition
- Teens searching “how to talk to girls”
- People looking for “summer solstice”
By creating simple yet engaging videos linked to these unexpected keywords, Converse generated significant profit and spread out its marketing efforts to various other topics. Check out the video below to learn more about this inventive approach to PPC campaign management:
3. Snickers
A brilliant PPC campaign strategy by Snickers in 2013 targeted common misspelled words in Google’s search bar to skyrocket their marketing efforts. Partnering with the AMV BBDO ad agency, Snickers discovered over 25,000 frequently misspelled terms online. They seized this opportunity to correct these errors while simultaneously promoting the brand.
In a clever twist, Snickers incorporated their slogan, “You’re not you when you’re hungry!” into their PPC ads to play on the idea that “you can’t spell right when you’re hungry." Whenever users misspelled a search term on Google, the first ad that appears is the misspelled word, leading to Snickers’ campaign website, yourenotyouwhenyourehungry.com.
In just two days, Snickers managed to reach over half a million people. Here’s the video to see their ingenious PPC management strategy in action:
PPC Campaign Management Takeaways
Pay-per-click campaign management may be challenging, but it's indispensable to your marketing efforts. By creating and following a PPC checklist, you can streamline your PPC campaign management to achieve effective marketing and great results.
However, a lot of work goes into PPC campaign management, and most businesses that don’t have the time or resources may benefit from collaborating with experienced PPC professionals who can get the job done.
PPC Campaign Management FAQs
1. How to manage a PPC campaign?
To properly manage your PPC campaigns you need to:
- Define your goals
- Select the right keywords
- Research your competitors
- Work on your ad copy
- Select the right landing pages for your ads
That said, PPC campaigns need to be constantly monitored and optimized by employing:
- Targeting optimization
- Bid optimization
- Remarketing ads
- Tracking conversions
- A/B testing
2. What is the best strategy for running effective PPC campaigns?
The best strategy for running effective PPC campaigns involves thorough keyword research, compelling ad copy, optimized landing pages, strategic budgeting, continuous performance monitoring, and regular adjustments based on data-driven insights. Focus on clear goals and stay informed about industry trends to maximize campaign success.
3. Can you manage PPC campaigns on your own?
Of course. There are plenty of tools online that you can use for PPC advertising management. Google Analytics is the obvious choice, but you can also turn to other options like AdEspresso or Ahrefs.
4. Should you hire a PPC agency for PPC campaign management?
Managing a PPC campaign on your own takes a lot of time and effort. If you don’t have the resources to analyze your PPC ads, find issues, and tailor your strategies on top of your other tasks, then hiring PPC agencies is an effective solution. These experts can take the burden off your shoulders and help drive traffic to your site and with that, more profit.
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