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Why Your PPC Campaigns Need Continued Support
Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns are often more complicated, and more delicate, than you might assume. With thousands of pounds at risk, a simple mistake like incorrectly setting a budget or directing an ad to the wrong landing page can have catastrophic damage to your cashflow and lead flow.
Unlike TV or radio ads, the work is far from over once you’ve launched the campaign. Constant optimisation and monitoring is required to maintain optimal account performance. We’ve listed a few reasons why it’s best to have someone manage your account past the initial set-up phase below.
Competition Could Affect Your Account
Since Google Ads advertisers pay via a live-auction model, the more competitors who want to bid on a keyword, the more advertisers pay per click. If an industry giant were to suddenly start bidding aggressively on the same keywords as you, the average cost-per-click for your campaign could quickly reach un-profitable levels.
Likewise, a gap in the market where there is little to no competition could be your opportunity to acquire leads at an extremely cheap price.
Having a specialist monitor these changes and look out for opportunities for you can be extremely beneficial, especially if you’re in a sector where there are big names who dominate keywords in your area.
Consumer Search Trends Will Change
The number of people searching for a keyword each month (which we call search volume) is always changing.
Just because there’s a large search volume for one of your products one month, doesn’t mean there will be the next month. Seasons such as Summer or Winter can affect which products consumers are likely to buy, and the same goes for public holidays like Christmas, which can affect how likely a user is to purchase anything at all.
For example, there will be more searches for “warm conservatory roof replacements” in the autumn than there would be in the summer, because consumers often want to prepare their conservatories with warm roofs for use in the winter. Whichever industry you’re in, you’ll probably be familiar with seasonal changes like this.
At Purplex, our PPC Specialists are attuned to these changes every year and they regularly adjust campaign bids & budgets to account for this.
Creatives Need Regular Updates
Testing is a big part of our ethos; this means our team spend a LOT of time designing and creating advertisements for our clients, creating visually appealing ads that stand out from the crowd, utilise rich media, are mobile friendly and have strong messaging and calls to action. We aim to constantly improve conversions with the objective of creating a winning ad, one that performs better than all others we’ve created and far exceeds its competition.
It’s easy to assume that once you’ve got a winning ad and it’s bringing in cheap leads, all of the hard work has been done. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth.
Over time, the ad will become ineffective as consumers become accustomed to seeing it. Those that saw it and weren’t interested, still won’t be the 3rd 4th or 5th time they see it; those that saw it and were initially interested, will have probably either chosen to get in touch or decided against contacting you for whatever reason.
To ensure your campaigns don’t go stale and ad spend isn’t wasted, ad creatives must be regularly updated once the ad has been shown a certain number of times to your audience (this number is called frequency rate). We monitor multiple metrics within the account, and update ads regularly as soon as we notice the frequency rate starts to negatively affect performance.
Performance Can Be Optimised
Just because you’re satisfied with the cost-per-lead your agency or PPC expert is achieving doesn’t mean the job is done. We believe that by split testing regularly we can continually make tiny improvements that achieve sustained growth in our clients’ accounts.
We split test (A/B test) a variety of factors within your account. For example, we could test an ad where the main call-to-action is ‘Get A Free Quote’ against an ad with ‘Get In Touch Today’ and see which one gets the best results.
We test a large variety of campaign elements, but most often it’s the:
- Ad copy (including headlines, descriptions, call-to-actions etc.)
- Landing pages (including headlines, copy & call-to-actions)
- Ad extensions
- Account structure
- Images
- Creatives (for example for Google Display Ads or Facebook Ads)
- Bidding strategies
- Targeting audiences
- Devices, Locations, Demographics etc.
Rapidly Changing Technology & AI Improvements
The world of PPC advertising is constantly evolving with major changes being rolled out every few months, our team have their fingers firmly on the pulse to keep up. Technology is improving at such a fast rate that Google are able to constantly improve their platform with new features.
To give an example, Google recently announced that Expanded Text Ads (ETA’s), the most widely used ad type within Google Ads, will be removed from the Google Ads platform. Dynamic Search Ads (DSA’s), which uses AI to dynamically choose combinations of text to get the best chance of acquiring a lead or sale, will become the premier ad type.
Every account, no matter how big or small, will require a significant amount of time spent to change, improve and add DSA’s and other ad types to their campaigns to compensate for the loss of ETA’s.
Having a dedicated PPC team can ensure that you’re not only aware of these changes, but proactively utilising new features and settings to maximise the benefit you receive from your ad spend, pioneering the way forward long before most advertisers follow.
Unsurprisingly, when performing audits for potential and new clients we still come across accounts using old and ineffective ad types and settings, losing out on revenue and inadvertently increasing the cost-per-lead past it’s potential.
How We Can Help
The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and new challenges are being faced by businesses far and wide. Those that embraced the digital age are thriving, and those that haven’t now risk being left behind, if they haven’t already. Many businesses now face fierce competition from big brands who can easily access large portions of the market via digital channels.
If you’re looking for an agency who can guide you through digitalisation and help you win against your biggest competitors, book a free audit today. From PPC and Search Engine Optimisation services (SEO), to web development and branding, Purplex are the industry-leading full-service agency for all of your marketing needs.
This entry was posted in Digital Marketing
