Are Your PPC Management Services Wasting Money?

Most businesses using PPC management services are not running fully optimized campaigns. This is because there are numerous details that can make or break campaigns that most people simply don’t know about. Thousands of businesses use services like Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram Ads, etc. But, most of these businesses don’t know the best practices they should use to set themselves up for success. Some go as far as hiring experts or agencies to manage their campaigns, provide consulting, etc. But, not all “experts” do high-quality work. Everyone has heard horror stories of business owners paying for months of services and thousands of dollars in ads with no profit after everything was said and done. Conversely, we’ve all heard that Google and Facebook Ads are some of the most powerful advertising tools ever created and we should all be using them to grow our businesses. There’s truth in both of these common ideas. And, we want to set ourselves up to leverage the power of these tools without getting taken advantage of.

With all of this being said, how can you be sure your PPC management services are yielding the maximum possible return on investment?

Well, there are really two major factors:

(1) Increasing your proficiency with Paid Media & (2) Working with a skilled partner you trust.  

If you want to increase your proficiency with Paid Media, you can do a little self-education on core KPIs like amount spent, impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, CPA, CVR, and conversion value. If you’re going to manage your campaigns yourself, these are absolutely critical metrics to understand. And, even if you’re going to work with another partner who manages these services, you’ll want to have a good grasp on how these metrics work so you can see first-hand if your campaigns are going in the right direction or not. This will improve your ability to communicate with this PPC management service provider, learn more, and get a sense of the optimizations they recommend. These metrics will also help you to understand how your campaigns are performing over time. You can see if they’re improving, how they’re affected by the season, etc.

For instance, if your campaigns spent $1,000 last month, had a $40 CPA, and generated conversion value of $3,000, BUT, this month they spent $1,250, had an $80 CPA, and generated conversion value of $1,500, you’re going to want to know what the heck changed and what you can do about it! This would basically mean your campaigns did way better last month and they’re performing way worse this month. This is not the direction you want to go. You want to have the lowest possible CPA and generate the largest possible conversion value. How do you do this when your campaigns seem to be tanking? Well, that’s a bit more complicated.

If you’re looking to improve your campaigns, then you’re getting into the realm of campaign optimization (AKA fixing campaigns and maximizing performance). When considering how to optimize campaigns, there are a number of factors to consider.

With Google Ads, some of the questions you want to ask are:

• Is the campaign structure set up in a granular and easily optimizable fashion?
• Is conversion tracking set up properly?
• Is the location targeting selected correctly?
• Does traffic perform better from computers or mobile devices?
• How does traffic from Search partners compare to traffic from Google Search?
• What ad groups are spending the most money?
• Are these ad groups generating quality traffic?
• Which ad groups are generating the most conversions/conversion value?
• Which ad groups have the highest CPA?
• Which keywords have the highest CPA?
• Are any ad groups generating a lot of junk traffic?
• Should any ad groups be created that don’t currently exist?    
• Is the account using Negative keyword lists?
• Is an ad copy split test taking place?
• What ad copy performs best?

Since these types of questions are not necessarily intuitive to someone with no, little, or even basic Paid Media proficiency, it definitely can be advantageous to work with a skilled partner who has years of experience in this field. Not only will they ask questions like those above, but they’ll also make the time to actually implement optimizations based on the answers they get. As a business owner, you almost definitely have a variety of other critical tasks to tend to. Delegating Paid Media tasks to an expert can work beautifully if they’re qualified and can put in the time to tend to your account.

So, are your Paid Media management services wasting money?

You’ll either want to audit your account yourself or find a number of experts to audit your account to find out. This way you’ll either have a first-hand understanding of how your accounts are doing, or you’ll have a number of audits you can use to corroborate your answer.