Digital marketing is a broad industry consisting of several different channels and platforms. There are few channels in this digital marketing mix that play as substantial a role as search engines. Businesses in all sectors and verticals find value in reaching prospective customers that are using search engines to find products, services, and information.
With all of these businesses vying for attention on search engines, the need for pay-per-click (PPC) search ads has increased dramatically in recent years. These ads produce faster results than organic methods and result in prosperous revenue.
However, as businesses grow their PPC campaigns to larger scales, the need for PPC Campaign Management Software becomes increasingly apparent. Manually monitoring and optimizing campaigns just doesn’t work when you have multiple campaigns with hundreds of keyword targets. Even the biggest enterprises don’t have the time or human capital necessary to handle the task on a continuous basis!
Paid search management tools allow advertisers to monitor and optimize their campaigns with far less effort. By automating the more tedious tasks, like monitoring campaign data for irregularities, advertisers have more time to commit to actually implementing changes and achieving better results.
Unfortunately, many advertisers neglect PPC management tools because they think that these solutions are only for large agencies with complicated ad accounts. When they finally decide to invest in a PPC management tool, their campaigns have already grown beyond the control of manual optimization techniques.
This discussion will look at PPC Signal, a PPC management tool designed to help small businesses and large agencies alike in the quest for handling their Google Ads accounts and optimizing results for the future. PPC Signal is a tool that any Google Ads user can use with great success.
Small and midsize businesses include any company with between 0 and 999 employees. Since these businesses have fewer employees and resources, they have their own marketing strategies and objectives that need to be realized. The smaller the budget, the more careful and strategic a marketing team needs to be. They don’t have the large cash reserves or the reputation of a corporation.
The first part of this discussion aims to define how PPC advertising works for SMBs and what sort of strategies pay off the most.
Small and medium businesses have tighter audiences. This isn’t always by choice. For instance, if you’re operating locally, you’re limited by your physical, geographical location.
Nonlocal businesses are also limited, but by the reputation that comes with being smaller. You’re the new kid on the block, which means the majority of prospects have no clue who you are. You have a smaller pool of prospects that you’re trying to reach, while also building awareness to generate more leads.
There are many substantial differences between a local PPC campaign and one with a national or even global target audience. Local campaigns involve location-specific keywords and targeting options.
Similarly, nonlocal audiences are typically working off retargeting data and lists of leads. They need to go out and bring these specific targets to their website.
This is a lot different from a large, global campaign that casts a wide net and hopes to capture the attention of massive audiences.
SMBs typically sell or provide a straightforward lineup of products and services. While there may be a lot of projects or ideas on the back burners, you first need to allow your flagship offerings to grow your business to the point that developing these ulterior products and services is possible.
This is not the same case with larger organizations.
For instance, imagine comparing a small legal practice to a much larger law firm. The small legal practice may have one or two lawyers with only a handful of specialties. On the other hand, the large legal firm has grown over the decades and brought in lawyers specializing in all types of law.
When it comes to advertising, large legal firms have their work cut out for them because they may decide to run ads for every service offered. As a smaller business, the two-person legal practice has fewer ad targets, which makes management easier.
It comes with a trade-off, however. With fewer ad targets, there is much less room for error. You have a very specialized list of keyword targets. You have to be sure that your campaigns are hitting those marks and providing valuable and relevant traffic to your website.
If the large law firm’s campaign targeting keywords associated with family law happens to stumble, it’s okay. There are several other campaigns for contract law, worker’s compensation law, tax law, etc. that will pick up the slack.
As a small or midsize company, marketing budgets are smaller, which means less money to dedicate to advertising. As mentioned earlier, a smaller budget means a business needs to be extremely strategic and precise with its campaigns.
Again, it comes down to having far less room for error. If you have a limited budget, then every single dollar counts. It’s much harder to test new keywords or experiment with different audiences, especially if you’re uncertain about whether these methods are profitable or not.
This presents quite a dilemma because new PPC accounts need to test and experiment. That’s how you grow your understanding of which keywords and options work and which do not. Ultimately, these are the insights that will help you strategize and increase account performance.
For large companies, this isn’t an issue. It is common for these businesses to dedicate a portion of their marketing budget specifically for testing new opportunities. This is money that the organization has decided is acceptable to burn in the pursuit of learning.
So, what is an SMB to do? Do they just need to accept that burning through their budget is a necessary evil? Or, is there an alternative? Is there a way to test strategies efficiently and with less risk? PPC Signal may be the solution.
With tight audiences, less budget and straightforward products and/or services, small and medium-sized companies have simpler ad accounts. There are fewer campaigns each with fewer keywords and ad groups.
This seems like an advantage from a management perspective because you have fewer items to monitor and manage. This is precisely why so many SMB PPC account owners shy away from management tools like PPC Signal. Why bother when you only have a handful of items to manage?
It comes down to this idea of having less room for error. Is it possible to manage a small account manually? Yes. Is it the most efficient way to do so? Absolutely not. True optimization is difficult to do manually because it requires an accurate, detailed and ongoing analysis of campaign data.
Without this analysis, your uncertainty will stop you from bidding aggressively when the time calls. Conversely, you may try and capitalize on an opportunity that turns out to be less prosperous than first thought. In both cases, you’re minimizing the possible progress.
SMBs are just as loyal to their clients as the large corporations and they share many of the same goals and objectives when it comes to marketing. One of the ways to serve clients and complete these goals is through ad campaigns.
Remember, customers want to find your products and services. That’s why they are searching for them! Positioning yourself as solutions to these searches is not just about producing revenue. It’s also a means of growing your customer experience.
Naturally, it is challenging to juggle customer needs and client handling, no matter what size company you have. That difficulty really spikes when your accounts and campaigns start to grow. It can create a scramble to scale management practices to accommodate rising needs.
The wiser approach is to start using a PPC management tool like PPC Signal early as an SMB. The AI-enabled solution will help you realize those hidden opportunities, avoid money-wasting risks and make changes with greater certainty.
PPC Signal helps you prioritize your spending to grow your campaign efficiently. This produces better results and less stress. There is no uncertainty when you have the power of AI and data on your side!
The tool is straightforward to use and has an intuitive interface. With just a little effort each day, an SMB can grow its PPC strategy exponentially.
Now that we’ve looked at the challenges of handling an SMB PPC account, it is time to look at how the other side lives. What are the issues when managing a large PPC account with 50+ campaigns?
SMB owners may dream of having a huge budget and more ad opportunities, but it comes with many problems. Here are just some of the significant obstacles facing large PPC account owners.
This is by far the biggest hurdle. A big account has a greater number of campaigns, which means more ad groups and keywords to manage. When you think about all of these items in combination with the various metrics and targeting options available on Google Ads, you start to see the complexity. It’s this complexity that makes it nearly impossible to manage a large account manually.
For instance, imagine if this is the breakdown of your PPC account:
That’s 15,000 individual keywords that need to be carefully monitored. Not to mention, you need to think about ad copy and landing page variations for each keyword.
Then, you need to consider targeting options. There are…
That’s a lot of possible combinations between all of these parts, metrics and dimensions. We’re talking about millions of rows of data. That’s too much to handle manually!
The almost limitless combinations that a large account can produce are overwhelming from a management and resource perspective. It takes a mountain of time, attention and, of course, money to not only put these campaigns into action, but also to monitor and optimize the results of these efforts.
As a large PPC account, you still need to have a clear idea of what’s going on and where the opportunities are to improve performance. Just because your budget is larger doesn’t mean you want to waste your ad spend freely. You’re trying to make money!
The challenge is figuring out where in this massive account those revenue-generating opportunities are and where the risks reside. Your campaigns will produce a far greater number of insights, but that means you need to spend more time exploring these different observations.
Once you find some noteworthy changes, you then need to determine what change requires your attention first. You want to make the biggest improvements and capitalize on the most prosperous opportunities right away!
How do you do it? You need help. Again, it is impossible to manage a large PPC account without a PPC management solution like PPC Signal.
How does PPC Signal minimize complexity and reduce the number of resources required to manage PPC campaigns?
To reiterate, the challenge is that you have a massive pile of stuff that you need to monitor and analyze, including thousands of keywords, multiple targeting options, metrics and more. It is impossible to handle all this data manually, even with a team of dedicated PPC marketers.
What PPC Signal does for a large PPC account is remove the tedium of analyzing these thousands, or even millions, of combinations by hand. This is really the high effort, low reward type of task that marketers want to automate.
PPC Signal lets the risks and opportunities rise to the surface of that sea of data. By automating this significant obstacle in the process, all of those important resources can be used to evaluate changes and choose which further actions to take.
In this respect, PPC Signal is a more efficient way to uncover PPC management steps. It can often feel overwhelming to have so many possible avenues to take, metrics to explore and combinations to look at. With this tool, you have a complete list of ways to improve campaigns.
We’ve touched on how PPC Signal assists SMBs and large corporations in handling their unique PPC challenges. To build off of this, here is a more complete list of the advantages that PPC Signal brings to the table, no matter what size organization or team you’re working with.
Change is a constant in PPC marketing. There is never a moment when your campaigns are not fluctuating for one reason or another. Your ability to identify changes in a campaign as they happen, or especially before they do, is the Holy Grail.
It’s all about consistency and proactively detecting the rising and falling stars in your campaigns and then making course corrections accordingly. Through manual efforts, this just isn’t possible with the same level of efficiency.
PPC Signal automatically detects insights and presents them to you in an easy format. All of your time and attention can be put towards taking necessary actions to improve campaigns.
It is very easy for a PPC marketer using PPC Signal to stack an unbeatable competitive advantage through these recommendations. Without having to identify or detect insights on your own, you can commit all of that time towards enacting positive changes. You can make growth a daily occurrence.
Imagine making just a 1% improvement every day. With PPC Signal, it is very easy because the insights are already there for you to utilize. That 1% change grows each day; it doesn’t just add. By the end of the year, you would have an improvement of 3,778%!
No matter the size of your accounts, there is always a lot of “noise.” In PPC management, noise is anything that gets in the way of making the right, smart decisions. Not every metric or insight is going to be valuable for you and your unique marketing objectives. You need to remove this noise to get to the insights that really matter.
PPC Signal has several filtering options that allow you to get rid of the noise and ignore what you already know. This leaves only the insights that you have yet to discover. Again, it is about making the right decisions continuously.
Outliers are another thing that all PPC managers deal with. These appear as large spikes in your data, whether positive or negative. As quickly as they appear, they are over. Because of the abnormality and suddenness of these outliers, it is common for advertisers to write them off and lump them into the “unusual” category.
There are some cases where outliers should not be ignored. They can be warnings of more severe issues still to come or a fundamental problem with your campaign. PPC Signal makes it effortless to detect and analyze outliers. You won’t have to dig deep to get to the root cause of the spike!
Why choose PPC Signal over other PPC campaign management software options? There are several inherent problems that many traditional management tools have with regards to handling PPC campaign data, especially for novice marketers.
The use of JavaScript codes in a Google Ads account can allow a marketer to make automated changes to campaigns. The codes eliminate the need of having to manually enter edits each time you want to make a broad change across your account. This is a very common tool, but it has its shortcomings.
First, using this technique means that you need someone on your team that is adept at JavaScript coding. When scripts are entered incorrectly or are flawed in some way, it can cause big problems. Finding the exact code snippet that is malfunctioning can be a nightmare.
The other drawback is that this only helps you make broad, account-wide changes. If you want to make a change to one specific campaign, you still need to lift the hood and make the adjustment by hand.
Within the Google Ads interface, you can create automated rules. These rules dictate when your ads appear and how to optimize bids according to time of day.
For example, if you’ve determined that you experience the best results between 6:00PM and 8:00PM, you can create an automated rule that says to increase bids during this time period. This helps maximize the results during this golden time. You can use the same strategy to decrease bids during less desirable periods.
There are several inherent problems with automated rules.
This is a newer feature in Google Ads and it is still evolving and undergoing changes. The Explanations feature shares a similar function to PPC Signal. It alerts you when a significant change has occurred in your Google Ads account. And, it supplies some basic insight into why the shift has occurred.
Explanations have a number of shortcomings, especially compared to a more superior PPC management software solution. For one, they only supply alerts for major changes. However, it is the subtle shifts that often go undetected to marketers.
Moreover, Explanations do not provide any recommendations to resolve a change or how best to proceed.
While not directly a PPC optimization tool, many marketers live, breathe and eat spreadsheets when it comes to campaign management. It’s a very common and convenient way to keep campaign data structured and organized.
Plus, you can run simple data analyses on your spreadsheets, which will yield some basic ways to improve PPC performance. That said, you need to be pretty familiar with excel and data analysis techniques to use this tool, even with a small Google Ads account.
And, there comes a time when spreadsheets are no longer a valid tool. As your account and campaigns grow, your spreadsheets also grow. Suddenly, your spreadsheets are massive walls of numbers that are nauseating just to look at.
As you add more rows and columns, it becomes harder to extract insights because everything becomes muddled. It’s just not a convenient environment to work with!
PPC campaign management is a critical and ongoing task that every Google Ads user must endure, no matter the size of the account. Thus, investing in PPC campaign management software is something that any Google Ads user should consider.
While there is no way to automate campaign management completely —no matter how sophisticated AI technology becomes— PPC Signal automates your detection of data-born observations and insights.
This approach doesn’t replace or discount your own experiences and common sense. Rather, it allows you to spend all of your time putting this expertise to good use by prioritizing and unpacking the insights provided by PPC Signal. Then, making smart, data-informed decisions regarding how to make improvements.
PPC Signal has a unique approach compared to other PPC campaign management software and tools. We’re not promising optimization overnight or complete automation. Our promise is founded in simple mathematics.
All we promise is that if you can commit to making just a 1% improvement to your campaign each day using PPC Signal’s observations, then you’ll have built an unbeatable competitive advantage by the end of the year. Just 1% a day —that’s it.
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