PPC Agency

Mastering PPC Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Boosting Your Online Advertising ROI with a PPC Agency

Digital marketing has evolved to include a variety of strategies and practices but one thing has stood the test of time – paid search using PPC Ads. Pay-per-click is a strategy that can be used as leverage by small businesses to get a boost in online advertising ROI.

Whether you are a newbie in PPC or have some experience with PPC management, then you know that PPC could turn around the fortunes of your small business. You have come to the right place and we have affordable and revolutionary PPC advertising services for any company that requires to gain mileage in paid search.

This definitive guide on PPC management will help you master PPC advertising and boost your online advertising ROI.

Understanding PPC and Its Functions

PPC advertising holds valuable insights for small businesses and it is a skill that you must have in your digital marketing tool belt. However, your PPC ad campaigns will not be effective if you do not have the proper PPC management and strategies.

Pay-per-click is a digital advertising model where you pay a fee for every time your ad is clicked. With the proper PPC management, the fee per click will be negligible to the return on investment. For example, if you pay $5 for a click and the result is a $600 sale, then you have made a huge profit.

Today, PPC management is not confined to search engines like Google or Bing, but it can be applied to social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook through social media advertising. It is also common practice to engage in search engine marketing.

The bottom line is that the success of your PPC ad campaign is dependent on the target audience and the business goals. When PPC management is done right, your small business can achieve the desired results quickly without waiting for weeks if not longer for organic traffic to bring your target audience to the website/platform.

How does PPC work?

Essentially, advertisers pay for the clicks received on ads placed on different places such as search engines, social media, and other websites. You can then secure your ad placement in a PPC auction via a bidding system. If you have the winning bid, you will pay a fee for each click.

Undertaking a PPC audit with a focus on PPC metrics to track and the type of PPC ads is the difference between effective PPC management and a waste of time and money.

PPC Ads Campaign Success: 5 Essential Metrics to Consider

For success with your PPC ad campaigns, you must understand and measure the resulting PPC metrics by determining the following:

• What is the visibility of your ads?
• How many users are clicking on your ads?
• How many users are completing the desired action (subscribing or making a purchase)?
• Are your ads profitable?

A PPC marketing agency can help you turn around a non-performing ad campaign. We have tailor made PPC services packages to turn around the fortunes of your business through paid search.

Here are some of the most important and frequently used PPC metrics to help you analyze and track your PPC ad campaigns effectively:

Types of PPC Ads to Consider

A PPC advertising agency will help you identify the best and most relevant type and suitable PPC ads to for your business. However, choosing between the different types of PPC ads comes down to the basics of digital marketing and advertising:

• Who is your target audience
• How much is your projected ad spend on PPC campaigns?

Below are some of the most common and effective types of PPC ads businesses use to get visibility from potential customers:

What to Look For In a Paid Search Agency

Hiring a paid search agency is a significant decision that can greatly impact the visibility and success of your brand online. A professional and experienced pay per click agency will not only enhance your online visibility but also craft strategies that align with your unique business goals using tools to drive traffic to your site.

In addition to PPC ad campaigns, a PPC management agency should incorporate a mixture of digital marketing and advertising tactics that can be tailored to your business’s unique needs. These could include:

While these activities can be performed by an in-house team, it is more cost-efficient to use a paid advertising agency. Moreover, they have the expertise of having worked with other businesses to yours and they can tailor their service offerings to suit proven strategies, advanced tools, and best practices to your business goals.

Now, let us shift focus and look at the qualities you should look for in PPC agencies:

The Best PPC Platform for Your Small Business

These are some of the most common and preferred PPC advertising platforms that can help you boost your online advertising ROI:

• Google Ads (formerly known as Google Adwords)
• Meta Ads, which includes Facebook and Instagram Ads
• Bing Ads
• X Ads (formerly Twitter Ads)
• Pinterest Ads
• TikTok Business Account
• YouTube Ads
• Snapchat for Business
• LinkedIn Ads

However, each platform is different and your target audience is a crucial factor in choosing the best PPC ad campaign platform. They not only attract different users, but they also have proprietary algorithms that will boost the reach of your PPC ad campaigns.

You should also consider the following when selecting a PPC platform?

Optimizing PPC Ads Best Practices

Optimizing PPC ads allows you to analyze PPC ad campaigns and tweak them to improve your turnover. This involves making the required changes to your landing pages and tweaking the campaign’s keywords among other elements such as selecting the best PPC advertising services to increase your PPC ads reach.

Pay-per-click optimization allows businesses to operate optimally with a reasonable advertising budget while targeting the best keywords for bids, maximizing clicks, improving CTR, and increasing online advertising ROI.

These are the best practices you can use to optimize your PPC ads campaigns that will boost your online advertising ROI:

Building a PPC Ad Campaign

Building a PPC ad campaign is essential to boosting your online advertising ROI but it is not as easy as many influencers would make you believe. A search engine marketing PPC agency is best placed to help your small business get the most out of your online advertising.

However, be sure to assess whether the pay-per-click agency is implementing the following crucial steps when building your PPC ad campaign:

• Define your business objectives and goals and this will help you set the parameters for your PPC Ad campaign
• Carefully choose the most appropriate ad type and ad platform
• Carry out in-depth keyword research to identify relevant keywords for your ad campaign
• Track the campaign’s performance regularly by looking into the metrics that matter to your business

A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing

A/B testing – also known as split testing is the number one method for assessing conversions by comparing the performance of two variables. For example, you can evaluate which one of two ads has a better CTR and conversion in a PPC ad group.

Multivariate testing, on the other hand, allows you to simultaneously compare multiple elements of a single page. It compares more variables and reveals more information about their interactions and how they impact your PPC ad campaigns despite using a similar approach as A/B testing.

Difference between PPC and SEO

Over the last decade, SEO has become the main focus of digital marketers due to the growing number of proponents for organic traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy that incorporates a set of practices to improve the appearance, usefulness, and positioning of different types of content in organic search results on SERPs. Pay-per-click is a digital advertising model where you pay a fee for every time your ad is clicked. It is also the philosophy behind paid search.

Different scenarios and objectives will dictate which one of the two digital marketing/advertising tactics suits your small business. However, it is best to ensure that you combine PPC and SEO to get the best out of your online marketing and advertising budget.

The Search Landscape

The key to making an educated decision between SEO and PPC is to understand how SERPs work and the defining elements that boost visibility for the keywords that matter to your business.

The latest versions of search engines provide a variety of page features designed to provide optimal user experience and comprehensive answers to search queries. Search results are diverse and complex and the various elements of a SERP provide an opportunity for online marketers and advertisers.

While SEO has many benefits, it still has challenges that make it difficult for most businesses to go through:

• It is highly competitive
• Ads dominate the top of the SERPs
• Algorithm changes can render a carefully thought and executed SEO strategy ineffective
• Many of the search results are dominated by corporations that can simultaneously execute a variety of techniques and strategies
• Local results can be hyper-localized resulting in poor organic radius

Moreover, SEO tools that are meant to help small businesses improve their SEO operations do not help either. They generate endless lists of SEO tasks such as blog posts that will never rank, technical SEO and more that amounts to busy work with little to show for it.

Since SEO provides free and organic traffic, why then should you spend on paid search? PPC gives you better control of your digital advertising. This is accomplished through:

1. Targeting – you can laser-target your ads to be seen by the intended audience. This can be achieved by targeting using time of day/week, keywords, language, geography, devices, and more.
2. Speed – PPC ad campaigns are the best avenues for getting in front of your potential customers. Speed gives PPC ad campaigns the agility to give rapid feedback on the launch of a new product/service.
3. Page position – ads dominate the above-the-fold content. The modern SERP shows four ads on desktop and three on mobile. This will ensure that users will see the ads.
4. Budget – while PPC ads can be expensive, they allow you to control the budget with a definite projection of the ROI.
5. Market intelligence – by integrating your ad campaigns with analytics software, you can determine which keywords have the best conversion rate and at what percentage and cost.

PPC is very powerful but you need to optimize every aspect of the campaign with the right pay-per-click advertising agency to maximize results and keep costs low.

Both SEO and PPC ads can be run simultaneously for a holistic digital advertising campaign. The benefits of running them together include:

• You can feed conversion and keyword data from PPC into SEO
• You can leverage geo-targeting and local marketing with PPC and boost your SEO coverage
• Increase traffic volume through organic search for high-performing keywords and through targeting clicks in paid search
• You can move low-converting keywords in PPC ad campaigns to SEO
• Feed the A/B testing results of an ad copy into your organic listing and landing pages
• You can test a keyword strategy in PPC before committing to long-term SEO strategies

Implementing PPC and SEO is the optimal approach. However, it is recommended that you start with intensive PPC ad campaigns while you build up your organic search. This should be dependent on your business goals and the objectives of your online advertising.

PPC Vs. CPC

It is common to see advertisers using PPC and CPC interchangeably. However, they are not the same, and understanding the difference is crucial to excelling at paid search and online advertising. PPC is a marketing model that includes paying for advertisements. Cost per click (CPC) on the other hand, is the ad spend for a single click on your ad.

PPC Ad Best Practices and Trends for 2024

We have seen that each PPC platform is different and this is where a small business could use the services of a paid advertising agency. When done right, PPC management can be an asset offering the ability to track and accurately reach out to potential customers.

Statistics show that online advertising revenue is expected to surpass a trillion dollars by 2027. This means that small businesses should incorporate PPC ads as part of your business’s marketing strategy. However, to get the best out of your PPC ad campaigns, ensure that your paid search agency is incorporating these best practices in 2024.

1. Automation for PPC Ad Campaigns

Automation has played a pivotal role in the digital marketing spaces and PPC has not been spared. Small businesses should start automating various aspects of their PPC campaigns including:

• PPC ads optimizing
• Bidding
• Reporting
• A/B testing

Google and Bing are continually pushing ad automation to make advertising easier on their platforms. There is an array of automation features on these platforms that you can use to maximize the results from your PPC campaigns in 2024 and beyond.

2. Smart Bidding

AI has changed the landscape of how content masters are generating SEO content for their platforms but it remains a violation of Google’s spam policies. However, this is not the case with paid search. Google has introduced Smart Bidding that utilizes Google AI to optimize conversions for PPC auctions.

Smart Bidding allows you to optimize bids and get a boost in your online advertising ROI. Here are some strategies you could incorporate with Smart Bidding:

• Target cost per action (CTA) – this is an automated bid strategy where you set your desired average cost per action. Google will then use the target amount to set your bids automatically based on the likelihood of someone converting through your ad.
• Target return on ad spend (tROAS) – Google AI will analyze and predict the value of a potential conversion and will automatically adjust your bid to maximize your ROI.
• Maximize conversions – this strategy uses Google AI to set bid amounts that allow you to get the most conversions for the set budget.
• Maximize conversion value – if you execute this strategy, Google AI will optimize and set bids to help you get the most value from your conversions.

3. Loosening Keyword Match Types

Google Ads offers different keyword match types and loosening of the keyword match types is one of the trends taking root in 2024. However, Google has expanded what qualifies under exact and phrase match keywords to include broader search terms that are relevant to your ads campaign.

This means that the exact and phrase match types will still be precise in targeting but will now include broader but still highly relevant search terms. Essentially, your PPC ad campaigns will have more opportunities for relevant keywords without compromising on the accuracy of the match.

4. Optimize Landing Pages to Match User Intent

Relevant landing pages have been crucial for ensuring conversion once a user clicks on an ad. With more businesses using online advertising, optimizing your landing page should be paramount to ensure that the user takes the desired action.

Here are some tips on how to optimize your landing pages:

• Make the landing page informative and concise – avoid overwhelming your audience with too much information by focusing on the vital information needed to convert potential and repeat customers.
• Keep the landing page focused on your business goal– the information on the landing page needs to match that used in the ad copy. For example, it is pointless to have an ad about dietary supplements that leads to a landing page with information about weight loss exercises.
• Use visuals – videos and images can enhance your ads by showing your product or service in action. This will make the ad more engaging, especially for your social media ads.

5. Use of AI in an Evolving Search Landscape

Google has started experimenting with its newest feature – Search Generative Experience (SGE). The search experience uses AI to generate answers for search engine users by reducing the time it takes to access information. Bing on the other hand uses Copilot to achieve a similar user experience.

This means that you should be ready to adapt your PPC ads strategy for the AI evolution in search.

6. Power Campaigns with First-Party Data

Data privacy and protection concerns are increasing exponentially and businesses have come under scrutiny for using third-party data. To avoid getting caught in the crosshairs, ensure that you use first-party data – this is data that you have collected that comes from your campaigns and audience.

The advantage of this best practice is that you are getting data from people who are interested in what you have to offer. This also means that you understand what makes your target audience tick. Consequently, you can adjust your PPC ad campaigns to drive more leads and sales.

7. Shift to an Omni-channel Advertising Approach

The average internet user can access the internet on various devices and be on several platforms at the same time. Many businesses have made the mistake of focusing on one advertising channel and this has limited the reach and visibility. The solution to this is implementing omni-channel advertising approach.

In 2024, you must look beyond Google as your only advertising channel. You could explore strategies such as social media advertising and display advertising. Whichever channel you settle on, be sure to see if it has the resources and tactics that will positively influence your PPC ads campaigns.

8. Social Media Advertising

It is projected that people spend on average 143 minutes on social media and this means that you need to take advantage of the advertising opportunities. However, each social media platform has a particular demographic of people and this boils down to understanding your audience and which social media platform they use.

For example, if you want to reach out to young people, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are the best while LinkedIn is where you can reach out to working professionals.

9. Remarketing Strategy

Chances are that when you put up a PPC ad, your target audience may not convert the first time they see it. However, this does not mean that they are not interested but you should develop a remarketing strategy to pick their interest in your product/service.

The remarketing strategy should include the scope of showing your PPC ad to people who have shown interest in your product/service. This is one of the best ways to increase the conversion rate of your PPC ad campaigns.

Developing a successful remarketing strategy will include the following steps:

• Segment your target audience – group your audiences based on interests and deploy the relevant ads to each group.
• Timing of your ads – when retargeting, time is of the essence. Make sure to schedule your ads to appear when your audience is likely to see them.
• Cap the frequency of the ads – seeing ads too often can be annoying. For this reason, you should put a frequency cap on the remarketing ads and rework the ad copy and content to rekindle interest.

10. Use PPC Ads and SEO Together

Users see organic search results and paid search results together and this makes sense to integrate these strategies to maximize your visibility on SERPs. Here are some tips for integrating PPC ads and SEO:

• Optimize both for the same keywords – this is a great way to ensure that your PPC ads and organic results appear on the same results page.
• Combine data from both strategies – PPC ads and SEO have similar data sets that you can track including the conversion rate, bounce rate, and click-through rate (CTR). This way, you will be able to understand your target audience better.

Paid search agencies on the internet today are using this strategy to maximize the results for their clients.

11. Audience Targeting

Audience targeting helps you to put your ads in front of people who fit your ideal customer profile. You can reach your audience based on gender, age, occupation, location, income, and more. This best practice allows you to optimize your ad spend and get maximum results.

12. Click Fraud

Click Fraud is when bots disguised as legitimate users click on ads multiple times artificially inflating traffic statistics for online ads. Click fraud not only skews the analytical data that you rely on to make data-driven marketing decisions, but it also drives up advertising costs.

You can tell if your business is a victim of click fraud if you have a very high click-through rate but a low conversion rate. Since you are being charged for every click, the ad spend will eventually outweigh the profit. Click fraud mainly originates from:

• The most common culprits for click fraud are businesses that are in direct competition with you
• Fraud rings – The rise of click farms also known as fraud rings generate millions of clicks and views per day by targeting certain ad networks to extract the most amount of money in the shortest time possible.
• Webmasters – this type of click fraud applies to users of Google’s network display. With an AdSense account, a webmaster can display Google ads on their website at any time. The webmaster gets 68% of the revenues paid to Google for every click of an ad on their website.
• Disgruntled customers – this is one of the least common types of click fraud and is done by returning customers who click the same ad repeatedly. While it is not entirely malicious it still costs businesses money.

Why Use Zen Republic for PPC Management

When it comes to choosing a PPC agency, look no further than Zen Republic. We are a holistic digital marketing agency that helps small businesses gain an edge in the digital ecosystem. Here are reasons why you should consider Zen Republic as the PPC management agency for your business: