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Pay Per Click Strategy vs Management

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In the last week we’ve had two separate clients remark to us about their displeasure with the way they pay for Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising and the lack of PPC Strategy. Side note, we do not handle their PPC (yet). Below is an outline of what came from our discussions.

PPC Management

When these clients described the way they were sold the management of their PPC campaigns it was all the same. “We’ll ‘manage’ your PPC account for X% of your spend” was the common synopsis. The problem here is that it really only includes the “management” part and little to no “strategy”. Both clients were frustrated because all they received was a report showing the numbers. Impressions, Clicks, Quality Scores and Conversions are all well and good, but how are you optimizing the account?

PPC Strategy

A number of our clients have moved to a more strategic model and away from simply “Management”. Management is the easy part, which is why most agencies have a junior-level resource watching over your account. It’s a margin game! So break free of the game and start making strategic optimizations to your PPC account on your own. It all begins by developing your initial PPC Strategy, by evaluating opportunity keywords, developing relevant ad copy, and selecting the most relevant and conversion-focused landing page. This is where a company like Bluefin Strategy comes in. We have provided strategies for many of our clients who then can easily manage their own accounts day-to-day or we work with them to get a management platform in place. Again, the management part is easy, it’s more about what strategic changes have to take place in order to take the account to the next level!

Don’t settle for simple “PPC Management”. If you’re still paying a percentage of your PPC spend and getting nothing out of it then it’s time to shift your campaigns into full gear with a sound PPC Strategy & Optimization plan. Start targeting your search audience at the right time with the right message today and see more conversions tomorrow!

Hidden Pay Per Click Engagement

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Conversions are king, that’s for sure, but what about when a pay per click (PPC) keyword isn’t getting conversions? Do you pause it? Some PPC management tools out there will focus on “Costly Keywords” but don’t take into consideration other site engagement metrics. But there’s more to PPC optimization than simply pausing or adding keywords!

PPC Conversion Optimization

Again, if we have a website and we are running PPC it is all about getting visitors to convert. There are a myriad of things involved in PPC optimization, but we’ll assume for this article that your keywords and ad copy are perfect (ha!). First off, make sure you have AdWords conversion tracking in place on your conversion page (eg: Thank You, Order Confirmation, Articles…). This conversion pixel should be on the same page that triggers your Google Analytics goal (because you have goal tracking set up… right??). Once tracking, you can easily see, in both Google AdWords and Google Analytics, which keywords are driving conversions. But now lets take a look at those keywords that aren’t.

PPC Site Engagement Metrics

If some keywords are not converting it is time to determine whether or not the pause them. But don’t just pause them if they aren’t converting, make sure you are pausing them because visitors are not engaging. Now, a full ‘engagement’ is a conversion, but visitors can engage with your site in other ways. We have mentioned in this column previously the importance of what we call site engagement metrics. Our focus here is simple, did a visitor try to engage with the site at all? These metrics are simply Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site and Pages per Session. These engagement metrics help you evaluate whether a keyword is good at driving an engaged audience, but maybe there is a slight alteration to a landing page or steps that would help that audience cross the finish line.
There is so much more that goes into this analysis, but just be sure you aren’t pausing keywords simply because they haven’t generated a conversion. If they are driving an audience who is looking at pages and staying a while, then perhaps there are slight changes that can be done to that funnel as opposed to selecting all new keywords. So while conversion is king, site engagement rules the castle!