Why should you get help with PPC advertising?

Google were very clever to make the activation process for their PPC management software just easy enough for anyone to activate and start running a few ads. The problem is that the software is so powerful and poorly documented, it is very difficult for the average business owner to setup and maintain an account that performs well; and by “performs well” we mean several things:

  1. Poorly written text adverts will result in a low CTR (Click thru rate) which pushes down the quality score of your advert, and means you have to pay more for every click on your adverts.
  2. You may presume some keywords would be good to use to trigger your adverts, but people have different intentions when searching for things online so it can be difficult to always target customers with adverts based on their “intent to buy”. Lots of adverts targeting users who are not intending to buy, means lots of wasted money on clicks on your adverts from people who will never buy. For example they may be in another region of the country. With lots of experience using the PPC software, you learn to compensate for these factors and increase the targeting relevance. 
  3. When the user clicks on one of your adverts they follow a link to your website, that you specify when setting up each advert. The PPC software sends a robot that follows the link to your website and runs an algorithm to test the relevancy of your page to the keyword you want to bid for. For example if you are bidding for the keyword “insurance” and your advert when clicked takes the use to a page about bank loans, this would be seen as a very low relevance landing page, and the cost for each click on your advert will continue to climb, whilst the costs your competitors are paying stays the same.
  4. If you take the example of a campaign with every click on your adverts costing £1, and your website converts 10% or 1 in every 10 visitors, this means your cost of acquisition is £10. Now imagine a poorly set up campaign that is performing at half of it’s full potential, so every click on your adverts might cost £.150 which means your cost of acquisition becomes £15, and if you have a product or service with a tight margin this can be the difference between making a profit or a loss on the sale.

If you are wondering if you think you can manage your campaign, consider if you feel confident with the following aspects of PPC which we think are essential:

  • Will you be using exact, phrase, broad or modified broad matching for keywords? This is the foundation of PPC and getting this wrong is equivalent to just throwing a handful of cash out of your window every day, your adverts will churn through your credit and you will get hits on your website, but there will be a 90%+ bounce rate and likely no conversions.
  • What’s your strategy for advert rotation and conversion optimisation? Google recently changed to a 90day rotation period, have you set these dates in your diary to make the necessary changes and additions of new adverts to go into a new improved 90day conversion rotation.
  • How will you be targeting customers in a specific location? What is your strategy for users who can be detected by IP and those that can’t? We recommend completely separate campaigns so you can monitor them independently.
  • Which ad extensions will you be using? Page extensions can work well in some situations, the same is true for map extensions for locally targeted adverts.
  • As in point 3 above, do you have fully optimised PPC landing pages setup on your website for every adgroup to get the highest quality scores and keep your cost per click cheaper.

Why choose Alloy and what level of service do you need?

  1. We will setup and provide management of the account if requested, based on years of experience working with PPC advertising. Based on your Account ID, we will submit a request to gain “Agency Control” of your Adwords account, you simply login and accept this and we can update everything apart from billing details. At any point you can login and revoke our access.
  2. PPC and SEO work great together, they are the 2 sides of the coin in terms of getting maximum coverage on the Search results pages. As only 30% of people ever click on the PPC Adverts,  PPC adverts can help you to get more clicks when your “Organic” result in the search results is too low down the page.

Levels of service:

  1. Starter Service: (for accounts spending under £200 per month) Initial setup, then ad-hoc maintenance. For a standard small business Adwords account, this setup service is £50 and includes the keyword research, setup of 10 adgroups, each with 2 unique ads setup for maximum conversions. This professional setup service means you get the peace of mind you are getting the best return on investment from your PPC spend. Every month or 2 months after that we can login as requested and spend half an hour or so optimising the account, adding new keywords we discovered, dropping keywords and adverts that aren’t performing, to keep your account in shape and performing to it’s best.
  2. Standard Service: (for accounts spending under more than £200 per month) Initial setup (quote on request based on the quantity of adverts you will be needing), then ongoing maintenance, charged at 10% of your total ad budget each month. So a £200 advertising budget, would cost £20 in management fees.
  3. Premium Service: (for accounts spending under more than £500 per month)  Initial setup (quote on request based on the quantity of adverts you will be needing), then ongoing maintenance, charged at 7% of your total ad budget each month, monthly telephone updates.
  4. These same packages also apply to Bing Adcenter PPC advertising for adverts on Bing search results. When purchasing together with the Google Adwords services above, the setup service for Bing is half-price.

Order your Adwords management service today here