Monthly Myth Buster:
Anyone can manage pay per click campaigns.
You may be familiar with pay per click (PPC) marketing. You may have also heard
that it is easy to manage pay per click marketing campaigns. But if the person who
handles the campaign is unfamiliar with the proper steps to start, supervise, and
optimize a successful pay per click program, your attempt at PPC marketing may end
up costing you time, money, as well as lost revenue.
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Pay per click is designed to help drive traffic to your website which it wouldn’t
normally receive through natural search listings. Unlike these, pay per click
marketing can cover all keywords related to your product or service and predict
when and where a potential buyer will see your advertisement. In addition, if your
PPC program is properly administered, cost is easily controlled and trends are readily
recognized. This is where most search marketers fall short. PPC management isn’t
just about buying keywords for the sake of driving traffic or being listed on the first
page of search engines. That’s what most specialists would like you to think, but
there are cost effective strategies that include keywords selection, ad copywriting,
targeted audience selection, and most importantly, individual bidding strategies.
Keywords cost money, and if you’re not careful on what keywords you’re bidding on,
and where, when, or how they are being displayed, you could very well be wasting
your monetary resources one click at a time. Comprehensive PPC marketing requires
research tools, tracking software, knowledge of how and when your advertisement
will be displayed, and understanding which advertising channels have effective
conversion rates. Most important is the person who is actually managing your PPC
campaign. Thousand of dollars a day can be unnecessarily spent on pay per click
marketing if the person managing those campaigns is unfamiliar with the platform
for which ads are being displayed.
Over the last five years, pay per click marketing has turned into a billion dollar
industry. Many marketing companies have based their income solely on revenue
generated through paid search campaigns. Large and small companies are shifting
advertising budgets to online channels because of how effective and cost efficient
paid search is. In its simplest form, you can pay as little as $.01 for a term that
could bring in exponential revenue. Compare that to traditional forms of advertising,
perhaps an ad for $5000 in a print publication, where there are limited ways to track
the effectiveness of dollars spent. In paid search marketing, you can tell within 24
hours the keyword costs, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend. Tracking
tools can also immediately identify trends of your customers and potential
customers, giving you valuable insight into their search patterns, which will then
assist you in positioning your campaign around those trends. Trained, knowledgeable
search marketers can accomplish the desired results through testing, evaluating, and
optimizing search campaigns.
Here are the top three mistakes pay per click marketers make when managing a PPC
campaign without the necessary education and practical experience.
- Organization: Some PPC marketers lack the knowledge of how search engines
work. The amount you pay is based on the performance of a campaign, and
if not set up properly, you could possibly be paying too much for a term,
which is irrelevant to the message a searcher is viewing. - Keyword research: Statistics show long tailed keywords convert at a higher
rate than one or two word phrases. Why? Because long tailed terms are
more specific and correlate to a buying cycle searchers go through when
selecting a product or service. The more specific a searcher gets on their
search queries, the more likely they are to find exactly what they are looking
for. Once you accomplish that, a purchase is more likely to follow. - Optimization: Recognizing keyword winners and losers is the most difficult for
search marketers to identify. This is due to lack of tracking technology and
proper training in terms of the metrics used to evaluate the performance of a
campaign.
Properly managing paid search campaigns has big payoffs; a long time client of
RezStream was managing their own PPC campaign before using our services. Since
that time, RezStream has reduced the property’s yearly pay per click resource fees
by approximately $6000, reorganized the campaign to display highly targeted ads,
and focused on the key driving factors of reservations by testing and evaluating
keyword performance. The result has been an increase in reservations and a
decrease in the total investment of the campaign. Lowering costs and increasing
revenue is a plus for any business model!
It is important to note this article highlights some basic guidelines of pay per click
marketing. When it comes to actually managing the day-to-day terms of a PPC
campaign, there are numerous strategies and many advanced techniques that can be
implemented. But first things first, the initial steps in a pay per click campaign are
the most crucial to its success. Don’t let just anyone manage your pay per click
operation; you could end up turning an extremely profitable marketing tool into a
costly mistake.
This month’s myth: Anyone can manage a pay per click campaign…is BUSTED!
About the author
Betty Bramlitt is a Senior Account Manager for RezStream, Inc. She specializes in pay per click marketing, including local search and internet yellow pages. Betty has maintained large ppc accounts for major interactive ad agencies and direct ecommerce sites.
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