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No matter what level of experience you have in dealing with Google Ads and PPC marketing, management never seems to stop being a thorn in your side. There is a long list of adjectives that could be used to describe the PPC management process: painstaking, tiresome, tedious, difficult, cumbersome, complicated, time-consuming, resource-intensive… the list goes.
It’s such an arduous (there’s another one) process that many PPC managers decide to take a ‘set it and forget it’ approach to their campaigns. At best, they track just enough information to ensure that their ads are yielding more revenue than they are costing.
However, this laissez faire approach to management is far from ideal. While their campaigns may be surviving and producing some amount of gains, they are far from prosperous. When you set and forget your campaigns, you leave countless opportunities on the table and risk wasting significant amounts of your budget.
Just because your campaigns produce positive returns does not mean that you have a good ROI.
You need to take an active approach in your campaign management if you want to grow your company with PPC marketing. Again, this is not easy given the many aforementioned pain points associated with the process. Google Ads management software is the solution.
This guide will cover how PPC management software reduces the burden and allows you to better run your campaigns to produce more ROI. When it comes to managing a large PPC account, Google Ads management software is an absolute necessity!
PPC management is about making your campaigns more efficient and prosperous. The objective is to limit how much time, money, manpower and effort is wasted by your PPC strategy. When a campaign is run with great efficiency, you maximize your returns and grow your business.
Management is a very broad term that encompasses several key tasks in the PPC process. Setting an advertising budget, assigning bids, choosing keywords, changing targeting settings, optimizing landing pages, directing team efforts, defining objectives and so many other tasks fall on the shoulders of a PPC manager.
The three biggest responsibilities of a PPC manager are:
Even if you have a team of marketers dedicated to these responsibilities and the many tasks within each one, it may still not be enough. Large PPC accounts can include hundreds of campaigns, which can mean thousands of ad groups and tens-of-thousands of keywords.
That’s a lot of moving parts!
It’s too many moving parts to comfortably manage with only human capabilities. Whether you’re a single PPC manager or a team, new to the world of PPC or a veteran, Google Ads management software is a useful and often necessary addition.
How do you know what areas need attention and what management activities to deploy? Data.
PPC is a metric-rich strategy that is constantly producing heaps of data. Understanding this data is critical to understand what’s going on within your campaigns and what needs to be done to boost performance. In short, data is the driving force behind successful PPC management.
You need this data to be quality. Quality data is accurate, filtered and accessible, which is not always easy. When you’re operating a large-scale PPC account, the volume of data created makes it incredibly challenging to remove all of the unimportant information and get to the quality data that leads to valuable insights.
It is these insights that will help you make critical decisions about your campaigns, like defining and executing the right bidding strategy or selecting profitable keyword targets. Quality data is a strict requirement in discovering ways to optimize your campaigns and achieve greater success. It fuels your ability to accurately forecast coming trends, locate new opportunities and avoid potential risks.
When properly managed and optimized, a PPC account can be a boon for your business. It can be an exceptionally strong source of revenue. The downside is that it is a time-intensive strategy that also costs money.
If you find yourself struggling to keep up with PPC management best practices. Or, worse yet, you find yourself losing money with Google Ads, then it is time to get some from PPC management software.
Again, PPC management software is useful to any PPC marketer, even if you’re a beginner with a fairly small account. While you may not need this software as much as a manager handling a large account, the insights provided by the tool will help you better understand what makes your advertising strategy tick.
That said, you still need to weigh the cost of such an investment against the benefits it will provide to your account. To figure out whether your PPC account is a good fit for Google Ads management software, here are a few questions to ask yourself before you sign up for one of these tools:
Every PPC management solution uses an algorithm to determine how best to optimize your account. While these are sophisticated algorithms that perform very complex calculations, they still follow the basic principles that you learned in your pre-algebra class many moons ago.
Essentially, these algorithms are trying to solve for X. This variable can be anything: costs, clicks, conversions, impressions, ROI, etc. If your PPC goal is to improve your returns, then you want to be sure that your chosen PPC management software has an algorithm that aligns with that goal.
The algorithms and AI behind Google Ads management solutions require a lot of data to function. Remember, machines can’t make decisions on things like intuition, feelings, know-how or creativity. They rely strictly on numbers, patterns and data.
For smaller accounts, this creates a problem because your campaigns don’t produce as much data. With fewer data points, it’s hard for these systems to draw accurate, “big picture” conclusions. They may be able to identify trends that seem significant, but without a large reserve of data to work with, these insights can be volatile in nature.
There are some cases where AI misjudges what’s occurring, even with a good amount of data. This can mean that automation hurts your strategies in the long run.
For instance, let’s say that your business relies heavily on seasonal sales and keywords in the month of August. An AI system may not automatically understand this behavior. It may decide it’s a fluke because one month of spiking activity may not outweigh the 11 months of no activity.
You need to think about inconsistencies that may occur in your business and whether or not your PPC management tool will be able to understand these behaviors.
PPC management software can offer a lot of value to managers, but it is important to understand the circumstances when a tool may have a harder time delivering the results you expect and need.
In many ways, choosing the right automated system is like interviewing a new employee. You need to consider which tool has the unique capabilities that your business needs. If you can think like a computer and appreciate the strengths and shortcomings of such a system, then you can make informed decisions about what Google Ads management software offers the best fit for your company.
To further explain how management software helps you become a more efficient PPC marketer, here are 5 key benefits that only a great PPC management solution can offer:
At the very top of the list is the cost-related advantages. When you have an automated system that is monitoring and detecting areas of wasted spend, you’ll lose far less money. You’ll quickly identify areas that are hurting your ROI and have the opportunity to move that budget to keywords, ad groups and campaigns that are profitable. You’ll always know the best ways to optimize your spending and make more money.
With Google Ads software automatically handling certain management tasks, a lot of the typical tedium of manually handling your account is lifted. This frees up a lot of time that you can commit to high-priority tasks and areas of your marketing strategy that you’ve long been neglecting.
Time is an incredibly valuable resource! Not only does a PPC management tool allow you to optimize your budget, but also your time.
There’s more than one way to classify performance. ROI is a great choice and you definitely should be concerned about wasted spending. However, you may also have marketing and advertising goals that are not cost-related. This means that you also find value in tracking how certain metrics that relate to these objectives are performing.
Understanding which campaigns and opportunities are producing the most progress towards your goals will help you make intelligent decisions about your campaigns.
Automation can be unnerving because it feels like you’re giving up control of certain processes that you’re used to doing on your own. For this reason, it is important that you choose a Google Ads management software that you trust and feel comfortable with. This will give you peace of mind that your campaigns are well looked after and that the AI-based tool is making intelligent decisions quickly and efficiently that will lead to a more prosperous account.
Some PPC management tools will even send you a report showcasing how your campaign performance has improved thanks to the software’s choices.
PPC advertising has always had the advantage of being far more targeted than traditional forms of advertising (billboards, print ads, TV/radio spots, etc.). You can directly reach even the most specific and targeted audience segments.
That said, targeting is still a difficult task. There are a lot of options that need to be explored and utilized if you want to properly reach your desired audiences. Not only do you have to consider the right keyword targets, but also the times of day, locations, devices, etc. that produce the best results. For display campaigns, audience demographics, interests and other targeting factors also enter the mix.
Google Ads management software can make sense of all of these targeting options and the piles of data associated with them. Pairing this with what you already know about your ideal customer profile will greatly improve the efficiency of your ads and their ability to reach your customers. The more relevant your ad targeting is, the stronger your ROI becomes.
This is an important distinction that a lot of marketers don’t consider, particularly when shopping for PPC management solutions. For years, it was about being data-driven – listening to the numbers and making changes accordingly. Now, thanks to today’s AI capabilities, management software is capable of making insight-driven decisions.
What’s the difference? A data-driven decision is reactionary and basic. For instance, Keyword A is seeing rises in key performance metrics, therefore we should increase bids for this keyword. Becoming insight-driven means going further:
You want to be insight-driven because these decisions have long-term value. Data-driven choices are less accurate and can be short-lived. You may discover what’s going on right now, but you fail to see the bigger picture.
If you have very deep knowledge of PPC marketing and you’ve managed your account for a significant period, manual management is much better, at least in theory. You retain complete control over your strategies and campaign adjustments. Plus, you understand your business and marketing objectives to the fullest, which eliminates the risk of a software misjudging seasonal behaviors and other things.
Unfortunately, manual management is still problematic if you are controlling a large account. Even if you are exceptionally skilled and knowledgeable of PPC, the size of the account will require an enormous amount of time and effort. This will leave little of either left over for other tasks and projects.
For this reason, using PPC management software is often the best approach. While you may have the expertise to manually handle your accounts, software tools allow you to be more efficient with your time.
When it comes to choosing the best Google Ads management software, PPC Signal is becoming a leader in the market. PPC Signal leverages powerful and intelligent machine learning algorithms to make Google Ads management more efficient. You can have complete visibility of how your campaigns, ad groups and keywords are performing, as well as identity areas where improvements can be made.
There are several core features and benefits that PPC Signal offers. Many of these are unique to this PPC management tool and can’t be found in other software solutions.
PPC is a very dynamic strategy, more so than other areas of digital marketing. Your campaigns are in a constant state of change. This is the primary reason why PPC management is so difficult to begin with. What’s worked for your campaigns yesterday is never guaranteed to be the answer tomorrow.
For this reason, it is important to always be monitoring your campaigns and detecting changes. With manual management, this just isn’t possible. There’s just not enough time in the day. What PPC Signal does is automatically bring these noteworthy changes to the surface. Then, you can use your knowledge and expertise to choose which signals to act upon first.
Essentially, you can minimize how much time and effort is required to know what’s changing in your accounts with PPC Signal. Instead of reacting to changes, PPC Signal allows you to become proactive in your PPC management.
Through automatic change detection, PPC Signal makes it easy to recognize all of the patterns and data-based events happening in your campaigns. By highlighting the anomalies, outliers, trends and shifts in your account, PPC Signal makes it easy to optimize your accounts accordingly.
Many of these data patterns are hard to spot manually and even harder to measure the significance of. Is this change a one-off occurrence that isn’t going to happen again? Or, is it a repeating pattern that will show up again in the future? PPC Signal finds out for you.
When PPC Signal discovers a change, it analyzes what this change means and classifies it in a number of ways. First, it labels each change as a risk or an opportunity.
PPC Signal also analyzes the quality of the change-driven insights it returns. You can focus on the highest quality signals to ensure every change you’re making is based on the most accurate conclusions. Alternatively, you can view changes based on simple and complex combinations. We’ll discuss this in a later section of this guide.
There are other PPC management tools on the market that will showcase how your campaigns are ebbing and flowing. PPC Signal goes the extra mile by also highlighting specific actions that you can take to capitalize on opportunities and mitigate risks. You don’t have to spend any time analyzing the trend yourself and deciding what to do next.
This makes improving your accounts very fast and simple. As a manager, all you need to do is choose which PPC Signal alerts you want to resolve and follow the recommended action. You can even make some changes to your campaigns right from the PPC Signal interface.
Committing to making just a few positive changes each day by following these recommended actions will produce monumental growth for your accounts and your business. Each change may seem like a small drop in the bucket, but they will grow exponentially over time.
One of the ways that PPC Signal determines changes is by comparing historic performance to the current and projected metrics. This gives you a sense of variation in the data, as well as confidence as to the accuracy and significance of the changes. In other words, you need to know how your campaigns have performed in the past to know what current changes will be important in the future.
Each signal includes a small trend line that shows the change over a period of time. You can quickly track and see how this change has acted in the time frame. You can click further to expand the chart.
A lot of changes happen across your Google Ads account, even in just a single day. However, not all of these changes are significant. Some changes may not align with your goals, while others may be too small to matter yet. All of this insignificant data creates noise.
Noise is a significant contributing factor as to why manual PPC management is so difficult and even impossible when it comes to larger accounts. Larger accounts produce more data and more data equals more noise.
PPC Signal helps cut through all of the noise and only presents the noteworthy changes that the AI system determines will lead to improvement. You can even filter the signals further to ensure that you’re only seeing the changes that are relevant to your campaign goals.
All of the alerts that PPC Signal provides are useful to some degree and should create some amount of improvement. That said, some changes are more impactful than others. When it comes to PPC management and campaign optimization, you want to prioritize tasks based on value. You want to take care of the biggest opportunities or most significant risks first.
PPC Signal presents alerts in a prioritized list, which makes it easy for you to plan which alerts to pursue first and what actions to take. Again, it’s about being more efficient. By prioritizing the list of alerts, PPC Signal eliminates the burden of having to analyze each change yourself to determine its potency or potential impact.
Most PPC accounts include multiple campaigns. Separating your account into different campaigns not only improves organization, it also allows you to pursue multiple objectives and advertising goals simultaneously.
From a management perspective, however, having multiple campaigns can be a challenge because each one will be distinctly different from the next. PPC Signal allows you to select alerts at the campaign level, which is a handy strategy that makes it easy to work on each campaign at a time. You can even receive alerts by ad group or individual keyword.
This tool takes a unique approach to management by acting like an alarm system that signals of noteworthy changes and combinations in your account. These combinations range from being simple to very complex.
Simple combinations involve just one dimension and metric. For instance, how many clicks the mobile device type is receiving. While useful information, it doesn’t tell the full story. What really drives powerful and actionable insights are complex combinations involving multiple dimensions that show you the bigger picture of where performance is actually happening.
A great way to think of complex versus simple combinations is to think of white light through a prism. Without the prism, the light is just, well, light. You can’t see the hidden rainbow that occurs when you look at the same light through a prism.
The same is true of PPC. When you look at the data through different dimensions and combinations, you see a bigger picture and start to put the hidden pieces of the puzzle together. The problem that stops many managers is they don’t have the right medium to pass data through and discover how it is behaving with these different combinations. They don’t have a prism!
Unfortunately, complex patterns and combinations are very hard to detect, analyze and understand manually. PPC Signal’s powerful AI is adept at looking at data from all angles and dimensions and uncovering hidden risks and opportunities that you would likely miss through manual PPC management.
Even with a tool as robust and powerful as PPC Signal, you still cannot set and forget your campaigns. That said, this Google Ads management software automates much of the management process, especially the steps that are difficult, time-consuming and tedious.
This means that only the most important parts of the management process are in your hands. Chasing down alerts and enacting changes that improve performance will quickly become part of your daily routine. You may even find it fun to resolve each alert that PPC Signal provides!
Better yet, as your campaigns begin to flourish and thrive as a result of all of these optimization efforts, you’ll see an increase in returns and steady growth for your company and clients. You can’t guarantee that with other PPC management tools or a manual approach!
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