When asked, 87% of people claim that there are more ads now than there were two years ago, but that doesn’t make online advertising any less valuable to your business. In fact, good PPC management can dramatically increase your business’s revenue. It’s also very easy for a small or medium-sized business to get started because unlike traditional advertising, you only need a small budget to begin.

But what is PPC management, really? And how exactly is it different from traditional advertising? We’ll answer these questions and more in this article.

What Is PPC Management?

Pay per click advertising is an online advertising model. A business pays an ad service a certain amount of money for each individual click through to their website. If you were advertising the old-fashioned way, such as with a billboard, you’d have to pay thousands of dollars just to get your ad on the billboard, regardless of how profitable your ad campaign actually turned out to be. With PPC advertising, you get to set your own budget, and you have the option to spend more once you know for sure you have a campaign that’s working.

As you can guess, PPC management is when a marketing team oversees a company’s PPC budget and strategy. A PPC expert or agency will take care of tasks like keyword research, competition analysis, split testing, and campaign monitoring. PPC experts will also choose which advertising channels to target, such as Google and Facebook.

Elements of a Successful PPC Campaign

There are several steps that go into launching an effective PPC strategy. The first step is to create a clear roadmap to follow that’s been predicted to work. This requires significant internet marketing knowledge and familiarity with the online competition.

A successful PPC campaign also depends on having a clear idea of your key business metrics. Important metrics to know include:

• Average customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
• Return on investment, including ad spend (ROI)
• Average sale or deal size
• Product margins

Once you’ve established what these key metrics are for your business, you can use them as a benchmark to compare against your advertising results. This is integral to knowing whether you’ve had a profitable campaign or not. If you aren’t sure what metrics to compare to, you’ll have a hard time gauging the success of an ad campaign.

Next after having your business metrics established, you need a goal for your ad campaign. You can’t simply buy a bunch of ads and hope for the best, after all — you need to decide what it is you hope to get out of your advertising campaign.

The most obvious goal of PPC advertising is to increase the number of purchases your business is getting. Just because it’s the most obvious goal doesn’t mean it ought to be your priority right now, though. Depending on your business strategy and stage of development, generating leads or brand awareness might be a better long-term strategy.

If you’re running an e-commerce store or you sell digital products, your goal will probably be to simply increase sales every day that your ads are running. If this is your goal, then you’ve got to make enough sales from your advertising to offset ad costs. This usually works best when you sell attention-grabbing, low-cost products with a high markup, which people are eager to buy on impulse.

Lead generation and increasing brand awareness is usually a better idea for larger businesses with more expensive products or services to sell.

The Role of a PPC Management Agency

Although PPC advertising seems incredibly simple on its surface, the devil is in the details. Copywriting, keyword research, and landing page design are all art forms in their own right, and each one has to be mastered for a truly successful campaign to be run.

For this reason, most businesses would do well to hire an internet marketing agency to manage their PPC advertising for them. This ensures that the people running your ad campaign know what they’re doing, and that you’ve got the tools and resources necessary for the job.

There’s much to learn about pay per click advertising — this just scratches the surface. To learn more about what professional PPC management can do for your business, get in touch with Fasturtle Digital today.