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The current global pandemic is increasingly forcing most businesses to market their brands and offerings using Google Ads.
As people continue getting confined in their homes, there’s an emerging ‘work from home’ movement that’s pushing e-commerce to unprecedented highs.
Equally, businesses are outsourcing PPC Marketing Campaign Management Process to agencies like yours to shore up their revenues during the current recession.
Why?
They recognize that the management of paid search campaigns requires a special set of skills, experience, and most importantly, what to look for in case of disasters.
Managing Google Ads accounts on behalf of your clients is not an easy undertaking. Your customer expects you to drive the desired results within a short period.
If you fail to deliver, they’ll simply switch to another PPC ad agency that actually delivers.
The truth of the matter is there are enormous complexities involved in paid search marketing campaign management. Firstly, the amount of data produced by Google Ads accounts is incredibly gigantic.
Remember, Google tracks all activities of users using its search engine.
Secondly, there is an unimaginable number of combinations at play in your clients’ PPC ad campaigns, as you shall learn later. To make matters worse, complexity grows right alongside the number of Google Ads accounts under your management.
In other words, the bigger your PPC campaign portfolio, the harder it is to manage.
Where do you even begin to optimize when you have 20 campaigns with 20 ad groups apiece and 10 keywords to every ad group?
Do you agree that’s a lot of stuff to track and analyze?
When this complexity goes unchecked, it becomes a detriment to your entire pay-per-click (PPC) management strategy.
Suddenly, the routine act of checking your clients’ PPC ad campaigns’ status becomes a dread.
This blog post will walk you through the complex scenarios in the search engine marketing (SEM) management processes and timely and money-saving mitigation strategies.
Before we delve right into the complexities associated with the management of pay-per-click ad campaigns, it’s more than fair that you should be acquainted with the major actors involved, namely:
Let’s examine them in detail to enhance your understanding.
Remember, the objective here is to combat complexity with all guns blazing. You don’t want to drown in a sea of numbers and countless metrics and dimension combinations.
A dimension is a type of structure that helps categorize attributes in an order that lends itself to answering critical business queries.
In pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign management, dimensions are more specific characteristics associated with ads and activities influencing them.
There are plenty of dimensions in Google Ads that can help you to analyze the data in paid advertising campaigns.
Below are some of the examples that are highly applicable in Google Ads management.
Metrics are used to measure your campaigns quantitatively.
You can assess and compare your results in PPC as easily as ordering Uber.
These metrics are divided into these categories according to the stages in users’ guided journey in a funnel.
Metrics to look for
The ideal metrics to track in your clients’ Google Ads are highlighted below:
The metrics mentioned below are very significant, especially to your PPC clients.
Dimensions and metrics are the core building blocks of PPC ad management data.
When a particular metric is combined with dimension, it generates a new analyzable variable. Essentially, you can combine dimensions in a certain scope and measure the metric value on that combination.
For instance, Google Ads dimensions like campaign, ad group, geography, day of the week (DoW), and the device can be used to produce possible combinations.
Let’s examine a few combination examples using the clicks metric and dimensions mentioned above to simplify and enhance your understanding.
You can check the complex combinations in your Google Ads account from here.
Complexities are the intricate processes that occur within pay-per-click ad campaigns.
One of the common complexities in paid search marketing is the number of possible combinations of different dimensions and metrics for optimum desired results, as you shall discover later.
The other source of the common ‘unending web’ in PPC management is the massive data generated by your clients’ Google Ads accounts.
Please be patient, and read on.
It’s very understandable that this isn’t a 30-second video or a 140 character tweet…but it might be the turning point in your PPC ad agency.
The reasons highlighted below are really unavoidable and can easily overwhelm you.
As you read through, you’ll begin to understand why these reasons cannot be understated.
The structure of your clients’ Google Ad accounts is the first factor that leads to complexity.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to structuring a PPC account. Every PPC manager has their idea about how to organize it.
You need to find what works best for your clients’ ad accounts because what works for a competing PPC ad agency is not guaranteed to work for your agency.
Think about it!
The account structure for a client whose preferred reach is the local market is different from a client trying to reach a national or international audience.
The same comparison can be drawn between a business-to-consumer (B2C) client advertising to a particular audience and a business-to-business (B2B) one striving for lead generation.
Essentially, your account structure strategy needs to work for your clients and their unique marketing needs!
There are a few rules that every PPC manager should consider when organizing their clients’ Google Ads accounts:
Firstly, understand the metrics that contribute to your performance. Secondly, segment campaigns into relevant ad groups. Lastly, tightly align keywords to ads to avoid an increase of more complexities.
The more time you can commit towards your clients’ PPC campaigns, the better you’ll be prepared to handle emerging complexities.
Your PPC account structure strategy has a very definite impact on mitigating complexities.
Did you know that a single Google Ads accounts produce humongous amounts of data?
Remember, Google tracks users’ interaction and engagement with your clients’ PPC ads and provides data for analysis and forecasting.
Data is not static.
As long as you’ve got some activities in your clients’ Google Ads accounts, it will continue growing, growing… and growing. The good news is, the actionable insights buried in this mass of information are gold.
It’s not a secret.
Every PPC manager committed to driving positive desired results on behalf of their clients understands the importance of analyzing and dissecting data for in-depth answers.
It’s relatively easy to dig into the data and extract insights when you’re only managing one or two campaigns. You can track changes and optimize performance using a simple spreadsheet.
Things start to get tricky when you have 5+ campaigns generating scores of data.
Remember, manual analysis is no longer an option when you start working with massive amounts of data.
A simple spreadsheet, such as Google Sheets and Excel, can easily crash due to thousands of rows of numbers. Without a sophisticated PPC management tool, such a large amount of data can be time-consuming and mentally draining.
Time is increasingly turning into a scarce resource that PPC managers can’t afford to waste.
Your PPC ad campaign data is gold when it comes to predicting upcoming changes and optimizing timely for desired goals. However, to leverage your data profitably, you need to overcome the catastrophic complexity factor.
This is an incredibly crucial source of complexity in PPC Marketing campaign management.
Why is data such a problem?
Well, data breeds complexity because of the number of combinations of dimensions and metrics that it produces.
The growing number of combinations makes it exceedingly difficult to find the right path towards optimizing your clients’ ad accounts for positive desired objectives and goals.
You should keep in mind that changes are always occurring.
Your task as a glorified PPC manager is to prioritize the changes that require your immediate attention.
Think of urgent vs. important strategy
Remember, it’s all about finding the metrics that matter and the dimensions that lead to relevant, valuable insights to optimize performance and grow your clients’ PPC campaigns.
When you manage multiple ad campaigns at once, it is normal to find yourself tracking changes across thousands of keywords.
Imagine you have 10 campaigns, each with 12 ad groups, and every ad group has 5-10 keywords. Let’s add in dimensions and metrics.
Let’s add 24 hours of the day, 7 days of the week, across 4 device types and geographical locations.
Not to mention, there’re other metric types I’ve chosen to overlook to simplify everything. Suddenly, your data has grown to hundreds of thousands of rows.
How would you know the profitable metric + dimension combinations to optimize campaigns timely and quickly?
Essentially, if you want to know which ad group generates the most number of clicks, at a certain time of day, on which device type, and in what areas, you need tons of different combinations to find your answer.
This is where an intelligent and AI-driven PPC management application is needed.
When complexity occurs in a PPC account, it can quickly result in frustrations.
You can easily lose focus because the complexity is really overwhelming, even to a seasoned PPC manager. At this stage, PPC management can easily transform into a daunting and dreadful task.
Imagine the amount of time wasted on trying to untangle the unending complexity webs. Optimization activities are likely to stall because, ideally, you would be trying to dig yourself out of the overwhelming complexity rabbit hole.
This is the best-case scenario;
Imagine you’re managing multiple accounts with limited resources, such as manpower. The impending complexity is an utter terror.
Why does it matter to know how complex your campaigns are?
Complexities obscure potential opportunities in your PPC ad campaigns.
You cannot achieve success if you’re still confronted with the following money-draining obstacles caused by overly complex PPC campaigns:
Besides, the more data you have, the harder it is to sift through the noise to find timely, actionable insights.
Having too much data slows your productivity down!
This implies that it’s extremely difficult to identify the movers and shakers in your ad campaigns or know what’s working and what isn’t.
To achieve the best ROI, you need to overcome the complexity of your clients’ PPC campaigns.
One of the significant factors contributing to the complexity of your campaign is the number of combinations created by the dimensions and metrics, as mentioned earlier.
Remember, when the number of combinations increases, the complexity of your campaign increases proportionally.
As the number of dimensional and metrics attributes grow in a campaign, the number of combinations will grow proportionally. This growth creates complexity and makes it difficult for you to detect a change.
The complexity of combinations can negatively impact your ROI.
Why?
When facing a large number of combinations, it becomes difficult to detect where and when important changes are occurring.
Complexity in PPC ad campaign management can consume your time immensely.
‘Time-scarcity’ is one of the recurring problems for PPC managers because there is so much to do and not enough time in the day to do it all.
You don’t even have enough time to get to half of the PPC-related activities you hope to resolve.
Essentially, there’s always a lot to do in a typical working day of a PPC manager.
Not to mention, manually analyzing your data leaves room for human error.
You may discover a correlation between two dimensions of data that’s not as solid and concrete as you think. Besides, there may be discrepancies in the data that produce inaccurate results.
You need to automate some of the most time-consuming activities related to managing accounts and understanding data, such as identifying the most profitable metric + dimension combination.
Without a smart and intelligent management tool, you’ll have to spend an exhausting amount of time analyzing your clients’ data to find the opportunities hidden within that ever-changing stream of numbers.
You really need some space and time to think and plan strategically to outdo your competition.
There are two types of complexity in paid search marketing management.
Let’s quickly delve in.
There are a handful of affordable and AI-driven tools on the market to help you simplify the complexity of PPC and optimize your clients’ PPC ads by pointing out certain opportunities.
Essentially, these tools should provide you with a high-level overview of your clients’ PPC ad campaigns’ performance, which is vital.
However, further analysis is required to get the most out of your campaigns.
This is where a tool (I’ll talk about later) comes in to help you with an in-depth level of campaign optimization by diving in deep the sea of data.
With this tool, you can construct a strategy from the top-down without missing essential patterns in the data.
There are 2 tiers of complexity, namely:
In this tier, you might have just a few insights to make.
For instance, you’re managing a PPC account, and you want to see how a specific device or ad group performs (one dimension at a time).
This is fairly simple.
You may not even need tools to help you with this. This is also likely to be the type of campaign where your client deals with one service or product serving a very narrow market.
Alternatively, you may have only been running PPC ads on behalf of your clients for a very short time. In such a scenario, manual approaches seem to be the best.
Some PPC campaigns have in-depth levels of complexity.
Essentially, there are massive amounts of data to go over if multiple Google Ads accounts are involved.
When dealing with more campaigns, you need to bring all of your data to the forefront and apply analysis for actionable insights.
Imagine you have a campaign with 20 ad groups, each group consisting of 20 keywords. This campaign targets 4 device types over 50 geographic locations with ads running 24 /7.
It’s not hard to imagine how quickly such a campaign could become complicated.
There’s a FREE and popular tool that seasoned PPC managers use to measure the complexity of their clients’ PPC campaigns. This tool is called PPCexpo Combinations Calculator.
This free tool allows you to determine the exact number of combinations in your campaigns.
The Combinations Calculator looks at campaigns, ad groups, keywords per ad group, device types, hours of the day, etc., and determines how many unique possible combinations can be made from all of this.
There are two ways to use a PPCExpo Combination Calculator.
You can manually enter your PPC data in the calculator.
This means informing the calculator of the number of your campaigns and their respective ad groups, the average number of keywords per ad group, total devices being targeted, locations, hours of the day, days of the week, and relevant metrics.
As you key in the data, you’ll see the number of combinations on the right-hand side change to reflect your inputs.
Scroll down the list of combinations to see how the figures fluctuate based on dimensions. For example, how many possible combinations exist when looking at the campaign, ad group, and device type.
It’s needless to reiterate that manual strategy is time-consuming and mentally draining, especially if you’re managing PPC ad accounts on behalf of paying clients.
Below is an example of the manual calculator.
Let’s measure the number of possible combinations in a single campaign featuring the following:
Image credits: ChartExpo
Check out the results. There’s a whopping 474,000 possible metrics + dimension combinations.
How feasible is it to go through each combination manually?
Unless you’ve got the speed and efficiency of a quantum supercomputer, it’s virtually impossible to crunch all those combinations.
Keying in your data manually is time-intensive and money-draining in the long run.
Automatic Combinations Calculator works like pure magic. All you need to do is sign in to your clients’ Google Ads accounts. Then, leave the AI-driven and highly intuitive combination calculator to do the rest.
The amazing tool will gather your accounts’ information automatically to evaluate the level of complexity quantitatively.
This mind-blowing approach is not only faster but also undoubtedly accurate.
Remember, no matter the approach you use, manual or automatic; you’ll save incredible amounts of time than calculating combinations using a pen and paper.
Understanding the level of complexity in your account (i.e., the number of combinations) is a great start.
However, there is still a looming problem of managing and optimizing multiple Google Ads accounts profitably. For that challenge, you need an intelligent tool like PPC Signal.
PPC Signal is the leading and arguably the only application built from the ground up to mitigate complexities in your clients’ ad campaigns.
The sensational PPC management app uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to detect opportunities and risks in your campaigns automatically.
No matter how complex or paralyzing your data is, PPC Signal provides timely, actionable observations about positive and negative changes occurring in your campaigns.
With these observations and signals, you can overcome complex problems with ease and escape the dread of managing multiple Google Ads accounts.
The once tedious task of dissecting complex data to discover valuable and actionable insights is now AI-driven.
Essentially, this allows you to zero in on the combinations and changes that have colossal importance.
Time dedicated to PPC management can be entirely spent on making continuous improvements rather than dealing with complexities.
The smart PPC Signal not only detects changes but also recommends action to be taken to achieve desirable results.
When you can make these improvements part of your daily routine, your clients’ ROI will instantly surge to exceptional new heights.
Intelligent and incredibly affordable solutions, such as PPC Signal, are extremely valuable in search engine marketing (SEM) management.
Through complex algorithms, predictive analytics, and other machine learning applications, PPC Signal can increase the liquidity of your Google Ads account.
Liquidity in PPC management is the efficient allocation of ad budget to guarantee every dollar is flowing towards the most valuable leads.
PPC Signal management tool can help you in the optimal audience for each ad and ensure that ads are targeted at the right time, location, price, etc.
This, in turn, makes optimization more efficient.
Increasing liquidity and efficiency helps alleviate complexity because it allows you to understand and focus on what truly matters.
When you know where to allocate money, you can ignore the other combinations that don’t provide results.
Filter out the noise and focus on the actionable signals!
PPC Signal processes all the complex data in real-time.
This dramatically simplifies your optimization process and streamlines campaign management. AI-driven tools reduce the amount of manual effort required to set up and optimize PPC campaigns for success.
Insights rise right to the surface, which allows you to focus on improving your clients’ ad campaigns’ effectiveness instead of drowning in complexity.
Remember, you’re not handing over complete control of your campaigns to the automation tool.
PPC Signal simply does the heavy lifting when it comes to the more tedious aspects of campaign management. This allows you to focus on strategic tasks, such as implementing innovations.
The PPC Signal tool was largely built with the 1% improvement principle in mind.
The aforementioned approach to optimization does not entail overnight success but rather marginal gains continuously.
It’s not possible to capitalize on every opportunity and mitigate every risk all at once. You’ll burn out trying to accomplish this, especially when dealing with a complex account.
Aim to grow just 1% each day.
This is a daily goal that is extremely manageable when working with a revolutionary automation tool like PPC Signal. Over time, those 1% improvements will begin to build off of one another.
Your growth will multiply exponentially before you know it!
The value of the time-saving aspect of AI-driven PPC management tools cannot be understated.
You can always make more money, hire more staff, etc. However, you cannot create more time!
PPC managers agree that time is a limited and valuable commodity.
When you have more time in your schedule, the opportunities are endless.
This makes the life of a PPC manager more enjoyable because you can use your skills and experience more appropriately.
This is what paid search marketing should be about, i.e., using your creativity and expertise to develop engaging, successful strategies.
Complex pay-per-click campaigns often limit the amount of time available for creative strategizing.
Not anymore!
PPC Signal handles the ever-changing data on its own efficiently and swiftly to provide you with time, actionable insights. This leaves you with more time to focus on being strategic and creative.
This implies handling tasks, such as:
Other money-saving reasons why you must sign up for PPC Signal today are highlighted below.
Managing PPC ad campaigns is not an easy undertaking.
It’s marred with unpredictable changes and complexities resulting from massive data and possible metric + dimension combinations.
The complexity grows with the data and number of Google Ads accounts under your management. Remember, dimensions and metrics are the core building blocks of your paid search marketing ad data.
When a particular metric is combined with dimension, it generates a new analyzable variable. PPC Signal is a best tool to analyze different complex combinations in your PPC account and highlight untouched areas for you to take actions and increase the ROI.
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