Pay-per-click (PPC) continues to be an excellent option for reaching a highly targeted audience for immediate, short-term gain. Companies around the world combine to spend hundreds of billions on PPC ads annually. Some handle things in-house while others work with PPC agencies. That leads us to the main question for this post: what can a PPC agency do for your company?
We work with all sorts of small businesses, throughout Utah and across the country, which were doing PPC on their own before hooking up with Webtek. That’s fine. We get that companies do not want to spend more than they need to on marketing. But we consider PPC advertising an investment. And investing the right amount of money in the right kinds of services pays off in the long run.
We act as a PPC agency on behalf of some of our clients. We also do SEO, digital marketing, web development, and more. But for the remainder of this post, let us talk about what a PPC agency can do for your company.
1. Establish and Manage Ad Campaigns
Let’s start with the broadest possible application. A PPC agency can establish and manage ad campaigns for you. The agency conceives a new campaign, plans its implementation, and then makes it happen. Along the way, analytics inform the agency as to how the campaign is progressing.
Establishing and maintaining ad campaigns covers a variety of tasks including coming up with objectives, identifying the target audience, and setting up marketing goals. It is all done by professionals who specialize in this sort of thing.
2. Research and Manage Keywords
PPC advertising is considered a form of SEO. As such, keywords are critically important to PPC success. What makes PPC advertising different from an SEO perspective is that a variety of keywords might be chosen for multiple campaigns depending on the target audience. This is to say that both keyword research and management need to be more thorough.
PPC agencies have the skill, knowledge, and tools to conduct thorough keyword research. Through analytics, they can manage keywords on a per-campaign basis. Good management guarantees but the best keywords are used for each campaign.
3. Ad Creation and Optimization
After choosing the right keywords for an ad campaign, agency personnel shift their attention to ad creation and optimization. Ads are created based on keyword selection and target audience. Once ads launch, analytics provides detailed information to help the PPC team further optimize the ads. Optimization should lead to higher click-through rates and easier conversions.
4. Ongoing Ad Optimization
Throughout the life of an ad, modifications are almost always necessary in order to optimize performance. This ongoing optimization is critical to getting the most from a PPC campaign over the long term. On the other hand, letting an ad run for weeks on end without any optimization is more or less throwing away money.
It is the PPC agency’s responsibility to monitor and analyze active campaigns. It is the agency’s responsibility to continually optimize ads for as long as they run. An in-house team may have the same responsibility but fail to meet it for lack of time and resources.
5. Ongoing Bid Management
PPC advertising rates are based on bids. Advertisers bid on the amount they are willing to spend for their preferred keywords. But here is the thing: bid amounts are subject to change. An advertiser can change its bid amount without having to end the campaign in question.
A PPC agency manages bids even as it optimizes ads for better performance. Bid management is an ongoing process designed to ensure that an advertiser never spends too much on an ad.
6. Budget Management
Because PPC advertising is bid-based, budget plays a huge role in determining an advertiser’s reach. Remember the simple truth that PPC ads are billed based on clicks. Every click represents a charge. That means the amount a company spends on PPC could quickly get out of hand if someone isn’t paying attention to both budget and click-through rates.
Once again, the PPC agency proves itself invaluable here. With a defined budget to work with, the agency can be sure that every dollar allocated for advertising is spent wisely. Budget overruns can be avoided. In some cases, a company’s budget can be stretched even further.
7. Landing Page Creation and Optimization
Although there are exceptions to the rule, most PPC ads are linked to landing pages. A landing page might pertain to a seasonal sale. It might introduce customers to a new product or service. Whatever the case, landing pages are directly related to conversion rates. A PPC agency understands this. Agency personnel create and optimize landing pages with a goal of ensuring ad clicks ultimately result in conversion.
8. Click Fraud Monitoring
This next task is something that not every PPC agency does: monitoring for click fraud. Click fraud is the practice of fraudulently generating fake clicks for the sole purpose of driving up charges. It costs advertisers billions of dollars annually. It is not especially difficult to detect or prevent if you know what to look for. However, detection and prevention do require effort. A PPC agency is not going to detect and prevent something it is not looking for.
9. Platform Optimization
Finally, PPC agencies have an obligation to make sure they are up to date with what all the major ad platforms are doing. This includes platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and social media ad offerings from sites like Facebook and YouTube. This allows them to optimize the tools and strategies they rely on for each platform.
If you feel like we have presented a lot of information in this post, it is because PPC agencies do a lot for their clients. If you’ve been managing PPC in-house thus far and are not happy with the results, we encourage you to consider working with a PPC agency instead. We would be happy to sit down and show you what Webtek can do for your company.
