Pay per Click Campaign Setup and Management is one of the standard services that most Search Marketing consultants offer. Although Ireckon Web Marketing tend to focus mainly on Search Engine Optimisation and Conversion Optimisation, we also do quite a bit of PPC.
We occasionally get asked by clients to just create a campaign for them, and leave them to it. Sometimes they think that once it is setup it can be just left alone, sometimes they believe that they can manage it themselves. In very rare cases, they actually can do a reasonable job at self management, but the majority of times, the campaign grinds to a halt within a matter of weeks or months, because it is “too expensive” or “is not generating the sales I expected” or just “isn’t working”.
PPC is NOT a set and forget exercise
Creating the initial PPC campaign is really just the starting point, and in 10 years of PPC management, I’ve never seen a campaign that couldn’t be improved or optimised to achieve better results.
Once a campaign is in place, the most important thing is to ensure that conversion tracking is also setup. Even if you are monitoring the costs, clicks, and sales/inquiries you get, unless you can determine which keywords/Ads account for which sales/inquiries, then you are still “flying” with one (or both) eyes still closed.
What the Client did
The catalyst for this blog post was a client who had decided to self manage their own Google PPC campaign. To their credit, they at least recognised that the campaign needed to be monitored and adjusted, but unfortunately they had very little idea about what things to change. Here is what they did:
The client noticed that many of the keywords that were active (and generated lots of clicks) when they first launched the campaign had “dropped off” the first page, because their bid rate was not high enough. This is a very common scenario for new campaigns, as it often takes a while for Google to work out the Quality Score for individual keyword/Ad/Landing page combinations, but usually within the first few days there is a reshuffle.
The client had been monitoring their sales and had noticed an increase when they kicked off the campaign, so they decided to increase the bid rate on individual keywords to get them back up on page 1. They continued to do this over a few weeks, with the net result of dramatically increasing their click costs, reducing the number of clicks they received (because the daily budget was being reached sooner), and their sales dropped off. Some time (and lots of dollars) later, they asked us to investigate why their campaign wasn’t working, and we quickly established that the majority of sales were actually coming from long tail keyword phrases. By increasing the bid on keywords that they “thought” were good, they were simply increasing their costs, decreasing their clicks and not leaving enough budget for the keywords that actually were generating sales.
To provide a simple analogy of this “management strategy”, it is a bit like the business owner giving one of his staff a promotion (and paying them more), without knowing anything about what they actually did, or how well they did it – just because they “looked” as if they knew what they were doing. Clearly this would be a ridiculous approach to managing a business, but why does it seem appropriate for PPC management? I see it again and again.
So What’s the Answer?
So to the question “Can I manage my own PPC Campaign? – the answer is “possibly”. For the question “Can I manage my own PPC Campaign properly?” the answer is “probably not”, but the real question that needs asking is “Should I manage my own PPC Campaign?” and to this question, unless you are already quite experienced in PPC, the answer is a resounding NO!
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