Categories
Pay-per-click is the nuclear physics of digital marketing.
Essentially, it’s a complex venture that can spiral into losses due to negligence and other factors. As a PPC manager, you have to always ‘stay on top of things’.
PPC advertising generates an incredible amount of data because all the activities of the users are tracked by the ad platform. For instance, Google tracks every download, click, and impression of the users in its entire platform.
Imagine the amount of data generated by users across the world every second. The data is unimaginable. The amount of data produced by your client’s ad campaigns is humongous and can easily overwhelm you.
Remember, today’s world is driven by Big Data. Businesses are increasingly leveraging their data to make insight-driven decisions.
Data is the ‘new oil’ in the PPC landscape. However, it’s worth noting that a lot of data produced by your clients’ ad campaigns is ‘noise’. Imagine sifting through your massive data only to discover you are dealing with outliers or one-off occurrences.
Remember earlier on we compared pay-per-click marketing to nuclear physics.
Well, here’s another reason.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is highly influenced by various factors that are out of your control, such as changes in users’ tastes and preferences.
Unless you have a brain with quantum computing power, keeping up with changes that influence your clients’ ad campaigns is almost next to impossible.
Why?
You are likely to make errors while trying to keep up with the speed of the changes. Essentially, keeping up with each and every change that can potentially break or make your clients’ campaign is next to impossible.
You need to automate some aspects of your PPC management to keep your clients’ ROI positive and steady and most importantly, save time. Time is a very scarce resource. In fact, it’s a luxury that PPC managers cannot afford to waste. It’s undeniable that you have innumerable tasks to accomplish by the end of each working day.
Pay-per-click marketing is a game of numbers. Is it a bold claim?
Let’s find out.
To attract and maintain paid search clients your wins need to outweigh your losses. In other words, you need to demonstrate to your clients that your edge over the house is beyond doubt profitable.
A profitable PPC advertising entails keeping tabs on shifts and trends to take effective measures to adapt (be proactive). Watching for shifts and trends in your ad campaigns manually is not an option. Not in today’s pay-per-click (PPC) marketing
To keep up with your competition, you need to create some spare time to create strategic goals, such as attracting and retaining new clients.
Most PPC managers find the number of tasks to be executed at their disposal outweighs the time available. They have to optimize accounts, perform keyword analysis, and visualize data on top of other back-office activities.
Pay-per-click managers need a smart companion that conducts intensive and objective data analysis for actionable insights. As you’ve seen, going manual is not an option especially in today’s competitive landscape.
Time is surprisingly the main differentiation between successful and failing PPC agencies in today’s digital marketing world. You need sufficient amounts of time to experiment (A/B test), learn, optimize, rinse, and repeat. Undertaking tasks that can easily be automated is not the strategy you want to pursue to outdo the competition.
This blog will walk you through 5 Facts about time management you need to keep in mind in pay-per-click (PPC) management.
Why Save Time?
Like we said earlier, time is a luxury every PPC manager cannot afford to squander. There are many tasks to undertake in paid search marketing that can be directly attributed to clients’ return on investment (ROI).
It’s no wonder to meet a pay-per-click (PPC) manager whining how time moves at an unimaginable speed.
Why would you want some spare time?
Trust me, you really need some spare time.
Every business has a set of strategic goals that can be classified as either short, mid, or long term. Scaling is one of the common strategic goals for a business looking forward to claiming its share in its respective industry.
PPC ad agencies are no different from other businesses.
As a PPC manager, you need some time to craft sustainable goals for attracting and retaining more clients for more revenues.
How can you achieve your strategic goals if you’re ever preoccupied with tasks that can be automated easily?
The practice of conserving time in small proportions can have a diminishing effect on your costs.
The more you save your time, the more you cut costs in the long run.
The extra time you manage to carve out of your busy schedule can help you come with innovative and creative ways to trim your overheads. Automating recurring PPC tasks can not only help you cut human resources costs but also save tremendous amounts of time.
Work-life balance is an important aspect of a healthy work environment. Maintaining a work-life balance helps reduce stress and burnout at the workplace.
Chronic stress is one of the most common health issues in the workplace. If you are from digital marketing background,
it can lead to physical consequences such as hypertension, digestive troubles, chronic aches and pains, and heart problems. Chronic stress can also negatively impact mental health because it’s linked to a higher risk of depression, anxiety, and insomnia.
Are you wondering how work-life balance comes in pay-per-click marketing?
Well, search engine marketing (SEM) is daunting and can easily occupy a huge chunk of your time in a day. Remember, you have to undertake all the tasks that directly contribute to elevating your clients’ return on ad spend (ROAS).
You need to automate some of the recurring tasks, such as data analysis and visualization. Remember, your mental health plays a significant role during the decision-making process.
You need to be sharp at all times.
Factors that influence your clients’ ad campaigns, such as new tastes and preferences can easily catch you off-guard.
To maintain a healthy mental state, you need to have an optimal work-life balance. The only way to squeeze extra time from your busy schedule is by letting technology take over time-intensive tasks.
The current recession due to the Coronavirus pandemic is really taking a toll on small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) all over the world.
Pay-per-click advertising agencies have not been spared either.
Hard times, such as the prevailing recession forces businesses to think creatively to shore up their revenues.
Where can you get time to think creatively if you’re ever occupied by tasks that can easily be accomplished via automation?
Without enough time at your disposal, you’re less likely to think strategically to grow your client list in the long term. Growing PPC agencies can easily catch up with enterprise-level agencies if they have extra time to experiment creatively.
Innovations and smart strategies are born out of experimenting and making mistakes.
How many elements did Thomas Edison experiment with before coming up with what shifted the current civilization from the dark ages, i.e., a working bulb?
You guessed it right. It was over 10,000 different materials.
Optimizing your clients’ ad campaigns by 1% on a daily basis can drive a whopping 3,778% improvement after 12 months.
What’s the 1% improvement?
The 1% improvement rule is essentially the understanding that small gains (as little as a 1% change) will ultimately add up to massive improvement over time.
These slight improvements add up quickly. In fact, they add up exponentially. If you strive to improve 1% every day for a whole year, your accumulative advantage would equal a 3,778% increase.
Incredible, right?
Naturally, it’s hard to keep a constant upwards trend and there may be days when that 1% change is in the opposite direction.
The good news is that positive changes have a much more significant impact than negative ones. An off day won’t ruin all your hard work!
How can you achieve 1% continuous growth?
You need solid strategies to save time, such as automating tasks that are relatively less significant and are incredibly time-consuming. For instance, sifting through your massive campaign data for actionable insights.
The phrase basically means it’s better to solve a problem right away, to stop it from becoming a much bigger one.
People use “a stitch in time saves nine” to express that it’s better to spend a little time and effort to deal with a problem right now than to wait until later, when it may get worse and take longer to deal with.
How is this saying relevant to pay-per-click (PPC) marketing?
Like we said earlier, paid search marketing is marred with a massive amount of data. Essentially, all the activities of your target users are aggregated by Google and provided to you in granular and tabular form.
The data is only worth gold to you if you’re able to extract meaningful insights to optimize your clients’ ad campaigns continuously.
Remember, only mountains are static.
Everything else is dynamic and changing. Changes are everywhere. These changes can either make or break your PPC ad campaigns.
You need to make continuous improvements to keep up with changes proactively.
Kaizen is a Japanese term for continuous improvement. It was crafted soon after the Second World War to help Japan’s industrial base improve its production efficiency.
Kaizen is based on a premise that if you continuously improve a process the end result will compound in an exponential manner. Essentially, continuous improvement helps you kill two birds with one stone.
Firstly, if you continuously improve your clients’ ad campaigns by 1% daily, the returns will grow exponentially by 3,778% by the end of the year.
Secondly, if you continuously patch up small risks on a daily basis, by the end of the year, you’ll have averted a major tragedy on your clients’ ad campaigns.
You need an intelligent tool that conducts data analysis and provides you with a consistent stream of actionable insights.
Why?
To improve your ad campaigns on a continuous pattern for exponential growth in ROIs.
Remember, procrastination is a thief of time. You’re unlikely to catch up with your competitions and achieve your target objectives if you have a habit of postponing Kaizen activities on your ad campaigns.
Sooner or later, you’ll be confronted by a disaster, which may be in losses or missed ROIs if you let small problems mount continuously. It’s very possible to stay ahead of your rivals if you have a tool that provides you with timely risks and opportunities signals. You’ll be able to avert a disaster if you act promptly on the timely risk signals.
Take action now and save that ‘9’ later by letting a smart and intelligent complement your skills and experience in PPC management.
The proverb above means that the person who takes the earliest opportunity to do something will gain an advantage over others.
In other words, the one who arrives first has the best chance for success.
Today’s world is marred with intense competition in every respect of human life. Pay-per-click marketing is not an exception. Sometimes the thin line between winners and losers is differentiated by timely access to opportunities.
Like we said earlier, changes in factors that significantly influence the performance of your client’s ad campaigns are inevitable. These changes may present an opportunity for you to exploit or risk to avert.
Remember, opportunities are always short-lived. You need an automated PPC tool to provide you with opportunity signals to stay ahead of your competition.
Timely access to opportunity signals can result in soaring returns (ROIs) or a significant reduction in cost per action (CPA). Imagine you’re running over 10 ad campaigns on behalf of your clients. You happen to be using an intelligent tool that conducts an intensive and fast analysis on your data.
Assume you’ve received a signal that certain keyword groups are driving mouthwatering traffic to your clients’ ads.
What’s Your Next Move?
This is an opportunity for you to reallocate your ad spend to high-performing keyword groups for maximum ROI. Assume you’ve gone past the procrastination syndrome and now you add 1% improvement on your clients’ ad campaigns on a daily basis.
Can you imagine your ROI at the end of the year?
Remember, 1% continuous improvement daily can balloon your ROI by over 3,778% by the end of the year.
Higher ROI can result in your PPC agency attracting more clients even from your competition. Essentially, a tool that provides timely signals keeps you a few steps ahead of the competition, which is embodied by the age-old proverb – “the early bird catches the worm”.
It’s worth noting the difference between insights and actionable insights with respect to this discussion. Actionable insights are deep meanings of data that drive a future action while insights are just in-depth meanings.
For you to implement the 1% continuous improvement or Kaizen, you need actionable insights.
For an insight to be classified as ‘actionable’ it has to be relevant and most importantly, timely. A smart signal tool can strategically position you to access opportunities that will set you apart from the competition.
It’s a no-brainer that to be warned is to be armed in advance. Essentially, if you have timely access to warnings about forthcoming risks, you easily devise mitigation strategies.
For instance, if you receive an early warning about an upcoming tornado or hurricane, you can evacuate your family and valuables ahead of the disaster.
Like we said earlier, PPC marketing is marred with changes beyond our control. Changes in pay-per-click (PPC) can be classified into three, namely:
Imagine your average cost per click in your client’s niche is usually $4. Assume on Monday it rises to $6 before falling to $3.50. The fluctuation from the average is a shift.
For instance, you can conclude that a CPC is on a downfall trend if the metric has been going down in a gradual fashion.
Outliers are misleading and should not be relied upon to make critical optimization decisions. However, it does not mean you should disregard them entirely.
Some of the factors that can influence positive and negative changes in your clients’ ad campaigns are:
Changes, such as seasonality can result in your cost per click (CPC) and cost per acquisition (CPA) spiraling out of control.
Surprise birthday parties are fun, surprise in a PPC campaign is not.
Remember nobody likes surprises. Surprises are incredibly costly because they can easily result in negative returns, losses, and loss of customers in the long term.
Paid search marketing is often likened to rocket science because of the lack of a one-size-fits-all approach. Imagine adding surprises into what seems to be an already complicated equation.
You need a smart warning system that provides you with a reliable stream of risk signals to optimize your clients’ ad campaign in a timely manner.
Averting risks in the early stages is one of the smart strategies of saving time.
In other words, you won’t have to commit your time in the future to deal with massive problems that have been piling up due to procrastination.
Remember, procrastination is a thief of time.
There’s an interesting tool that sifts your Google Ads campaign data and packages actionable insights as either opportunity or risk. This tool is noteworthy because it saves the time you take trying to classify an actionable insight as to either an opportunity or risk.
Conduct ‘health check-up’ on your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns FREE of charge.
What would you prefer?
Fight fire or prevent it?
Well, as a rational human your first instinct is to avert risks. Multiple surveys show that a majority of people prioritize protecting what they have more than gaining something new.
Essentially, as a PPC manager, your first instinct is to protect your client’s ad budget. It makes sense to have a smoke detector in your PPC ad agency rather than wait for the full-scale fire to call the fire brigade.
A smoke detector is an analogy for an intelligent PPC management tool that provides you with timely and relevant risk alerts. Taking additional measures to prevent a problem from occurring is called being proactive. Conversely, waiting for a money-draining problem to take place to address it, is referred to as being reactive.
Think of the time, money, and other resources you can potentially save by being proactive.
Like we said earlier, being proactive in PPC advertising is a must-have rather than a nice-to-have due to sudden changes in factors that directly influence your Google Ad campaigns.
Adopting proactive measures, such as using a PPC signal tool to keep you updated with risks and opportunities insights, can indeed be a smart way to outperform the competition.
Some of the direct benefits of being proactive include the following:
Remember, accessing opportunities ahead of others can be the differentiator between a winner and a loser in today’s competitive landscape.
Be proactive rather than reactive
A recap of what you’ve learned so far.
Firstly, time is a very scarce resource that PPC managers cannot afford to misuse.
Secondly, saving time has incredible and money-saving benefits, such as widening your strategic goals and experimenting with various innovations to further save more time and other resources.
Thirdly, automating recurring PPC tasks is the answer to saving time.
Essentially, PPC automation tools can help you greatly cut the time taken to optimize your clients’ ad campaign.
There’re third-party PPC management tools designed to undertake data analysis objectively and provide you with real-time actionable insights that can help you drive higher ROIs.
PPC Signal is one of the PPC management tools currently trending in 2021 due to its unique and ground-breaking features.
PPC Signal is a SaaS tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically monitor your Google Ads data for changes that are substantial enough to warrant your attention.
These changes can be categorized as shifts, trends, or outliers. The intelligent tool monitors your Google Ads accounts for statistically significant patterns.
When something important comes up, it suggests an improvement backed up by real data. Essentially, PPC Signal analyses your campaign data and categorizes the insights into opportunity and risk signals to save your time.
Its highly intelligent algorithm searches your accounts for potentially money-draining inefficiencies and opportunities to generate ready-to-push improvements in seconds.
How cool is this?
You just need to log into Google Ads account, select a campaign, and launch PPC Signal. In a short timeframe, you’ll get campaign-related insights that empower you to take immediate money-making decisions.
Easy Peasy!
When you start working with PPC Signal, you’ll feel like you have a partner (co-worker) sharing your goals, which is to maximize your clients’ returns on investment (ROI) and minimize costs per action (CPA).
Conduct ‘health check-up’ on your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns FREE of charge.
One of the reasons why it’s highly recommended for you to start using PPC Signal today is that: it increases your reaction time in averting risks and maximizing available opportunities.
In other words, it positions you to be ‘an early bird that catches the worm’ ahead of the competition.
PPC Signal solves many of the problems that get in the way of building a house advantage on Google Ads and make more money for your clients.
Some of the alerts generated by PPC Signal may be opportunities to trim your ad spend while maintaining the clicks.
They could also communicate a golden chance for you to maximize your clients’ returns by diverting your resources (effort, skills, and ad budget) to the 20% best performing metrics and dimensions that are driving 80% of your results (Pareto principle).
A risk signal is a warning about various campaign attributes draining your clients’ hard-earned money.
The intelligent PPC solution is meticulously designed to ensure you receive the risk alerts way ahead of time for quick optimization.
Do you feel relieved?
You should be relieved because managing pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns for others is not an easy undertaking.
Procrastinating on taking immediate action risk alerts can lead to losses, which we believe is not on your strategic plans at the moment, right?
Remember, procrastinating on acting on risks and opportunity insights can throw you into a deep rabbit hole at a later time.
Think of the time and resources you’ll waste crawling out of the rabbit hole.
With the PPC Signal solution, small and medium-sized PPC businesses (SMBs) can compete on level ground with enterprise-level brands.
How?
They’ll have enough time to test, choose what’s working effectively, and implement a ‘rinse-repeat-and-scale’ strategy.
PPC signals perform intense data analytics on your clients’ Google Ads accounts and provide you with in-depth, actionable insights.
It combines a programmer’s, data analysts’, and PPC marketer’s skills to quickly extract data from the Google Ads platform at a supersonic speed.
Essentially, it compresses the time needed to optimize your ad campaigns into minutes, depending on the insight generated. Complex risks and opportunities are automatically discovered and presented to you at a very affordable cost and promptly.
If you’re still reading this, you know time is incredibly scarce in today’s PPC marketing.
There’re innumerable tasks you have to undertake as a PPC manager. Leaving some of these recurring tasks to automation can save a massive amount of time. Time is a luxury PPC managers cannot afford to misuse.
Essentially, the number of tasks to be executed outweighs the working hours.
Automatic PPC management tools allow you to squeeze extra hours out of your busy schedule to focus on equally important issues, such as the implementation of the 1% continuous improvement and widening your strategic goals.
There’re various time-oriented phrases and sayings still relevant in today’s paid search marketing.
For instance, in the case of reactive vs. proactive, it’s highly recommended that a PPC manager maintains a proactive attitude.
Changes are inevitable. They can make or break your clients’ ad campaigns. Being proactive is the answer to the unpredictable factors that influence your paid search advertisements.
How do you become proactive?
With regard to ‘to be warned is to be forearmed’, a PPC manager needs an early warning system to manage risks in a cost-effective fashion.
‘A stitch in time saves 9’ saying implies that PPC managers should use intelligent tools to ‘stitch a hole’ timely before it costs them ‘9’ on later dates. Essentially, to stay winning in pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, you need a steady flow of insights to continuously improve your clients’ ad campaign.
Continuous improvement can also mean patching up sources of risks progressively.
PPC Signal is an affordable and easy-to-use tool for managers who want to save time, cut costs, and scale. It comes with a 30-day free trial
Why?
To enable you to perform intense data analytics on your clients’ Google Ads accounts for actionable insights condensed into risk and opportunity signals FREE of charge for the next one month.
Why does it matter to you?
PPC Signal provides you with in-depth insights to help correct risks and maximize opportunities.
Save your time by 50% in the next 30 days free of charge with PPC Signal.
How much did you enjoy this article?
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
Actionable insights discovered for you. Now you can do more in less time.
PPCexpo Keyword Planner will help you align your keywords with the customers’ intent.
Frequent audits will help you optimize your PPC campaign for success.
Visualizations give you the ability to instantly grasp the insights hidden in your numbers.
Experience the new revolution in reporting … click your way to insights, don’t scroll.
Calculate the number of combinations in your PPC campaign. It may surprise you.
Related articles
A landing page is a web page designed to drive specific actions. Learn the essentials of creating high-converting landing pages in our guide.
ROAS calculation can help you evaluate every PPC campaign's performance so that you know which of your campaigns are converting the best.
Discover the marketing lifecycle stages and how they shape customer relationships. You’ll understand their role in driving customer engagement and retention.
