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Digital marketing is highly competitive. Not only are you battling for attention against existing competitors, but new competing entities enter the market every day. For many, reaching the top of the search engine results page (SERP) seems like a pipedream. Thanks to pay per click ads and PPC Optimization Tools, however, it’s not so farfetched of an idea.
That said, investing in paid search ads is a risk, as is the case with any marketing investment you make. Your objective is to maximize your returns and turn the cost of PPC marketing into positive revenue for your business.
There are many PPC management tools available to optimize your PPC campaigns, but the important thing to remember is that it is an ongoing process! You’re never finished adjusting campaigns and making improvements to achieve even greater results.
Thus, optimization takes a lot of time and crucial resources to manage. You’re constantly conducting keyword research, testing new ad copy, designing fresh landing page experiences and more. It’s a lot to take on alone!
Luckily, there are PPC optimization tools available that can help your company optimize its PPC efforts with fewer resources. This discussion will look at why optimization tools are important, why traditional options don’t always work, what questions to ask when selecting a PPC optimization tool and how PPC Signal may be the answer to your optimization woes.
PPC Optimization Tools are software solutions designed to make managing your campaigns easier and less time-consuming. There are many optimization tools available to PPC marketers and each one has slightly different functions and features.
For every problem facing a PPC marketer, there is a tool that will help solve it, from identifying duplicate keywords or tracking changes in your Google Quality Score. As you’ll learn in this guide, it is important to select PPC optimization tools that resolve your biggest paid search obstacles.
Time is money— a business lesson older than time and a concept that is not lost on anyone. It’s also the core reason why marketers invest in PPC optimization tools. What can you do with more time for your marketing? Plenty!
There are unlimited possibilities for what you can do with your newfound free time.
PPC platforms have plenty of built-in tools and features that are designed to help marketers. While these are great for novice PPC users that are still learning the foundations of paid search ads, they aren’t so useful for experienced marketers with large campaigns targeting thousands of unique keywords.
The following tools are readily available in Google Ads.
By incorporating scripts into your Google Ads account, you can make automated changes through JavaScript code. This eliminates the need to have to manually enter edits each time and they are effective in making broad changes across all of your campaigns.
The Problem: While scripts can help you manage campaigns, even large ones, they require that you or a member of your team has JavaScript coding skills. If scripts are flawed or written incorrectly, it can cause problems.
A useful PPC optimization strategy is to create automated rules that dictate when your ads appear and how to increase or decrease bids based on the time of day. When you can target the moments and events that offer the best opportunities, you can maximize your returns.
The Problem: Automated rules certainly optimize your PPC campaign performance and can even save you time. So, what’s the problem? Creating the right rules requires lots of data and insight. You may have to set several automated rules just to create one simple effect. And, you still need to regularly check these rules to ensure they are still providing the desired results.
This is a relatively new feature in Google Ads that is still undergoing changes. Explanations are designed to alert you of large changes in the performance of your Google Ads efforts. When a significant change occurs, not only is it easier to identify the shift, but it also allows you to find out why the change has happened.
The Problem: Explanations are still evolving. It’s valuable to know why a shift has occurred, but, at the moment, Google doesn’t offer any advice as to what a marketer should do to handle the change.
When it comes to keyword research, an abundance of PPC marketers use the Google Keyword Planner. It’s a free tool (although there are also some for-pay features for premium users) that offers basic keyword data that can be used to evaluate different search terms.
The Problem: Basic keyword research is a great start. However, as your campaigns grow and need more detailed keyword planning, the Google Keyword Planner stops being as useful. You need a sophisticated keyword researching solution that shows relevant PPC data for each keyword term.
Are you looking for the best keyword planner tool? Give it a try to PPCexpo Keyword Planner. It’s smart and less time-consuming. You can just install your chrome extension and you are good to go with all the keyword research.
Spreadsheets are not directly designed for PPC optimization, but many marketers rely on them to keep their campaign data structured and organized. You can run simple data analysis on the information gathered in your spreadsheets. These analyses can help you understand your PPC data and even discover ways to improve performance.
The Problem: As your campaigns grow, so do your spreadsheets. These are helpful tools for small campaigns, but processing lots of data at once can take hours and even cause these programs to crash. And, the more rows and columns you add, the more muddled your spreadsheets become and the harder it is to find the insights you need.
Spreadsheets also don’t have change-tracking functions that let you know who made what changes and when.
There is no shortage of PPC optimization tools available on the market. It can be a challenge to find the perfect tools to fit your needs. If you don’t carefully choose the right tools for the job, you can easily waste a valuable marketing budget on tools that you don’t actually need.
By answering the following checklist of questions, you’ll better ensure that you select the tools that offer the most value and the highest potential returns.
There is a shortcut to choosing the right PPC optimization tool: put the decision in the hands of a marketing agency. A marketing agency will handle your paid search ad campaigns for you, which will save you all the time that you would normally commit to this area of your business.
Moreover, an agency is full of proven professionals that know the deepest intricacies of running a successful PPC campaign. The tradeoff? Agencies are expensive — more expensive than even the most sophisticated PPC optimization tools (which, by the way, agencies are also using!).
By investing in the right PPC optimization tools, you can cut out the middle-man of a marketing agency and still maintain complete control over your campaigns and marketing strategies.
You have a limited marketing budget. You need to spend the majority of that money on the ads themselves, which doesn’t leave much to invest in tools. Thus, the first thing you need to consider is the price and what percentage of your marketing budget you can sacrifice on PPC optimization tools.
Also, think about the cost in terms of what you’re getting in return. For instance, if you decide that a tool can save you six hours a week on PPC management, what can you do with those six hours? What are they worth to you?
Alternatively, if a PPC tool promises to improve your campaigns, try and estimate how much your campaigns will be improved. What is the value of those improvements? Does it justify the cost of the tool?
The above questions regarding cost are not always possible to answer without taking the tool for a test drive. You shouldn’t invest in any PPC optimization tool that doesn’t offer the opportunity to demo the software first.
A free trial period of 7 or 14 days is normal and will give you the first hand experience you need to measure whether or not the tool matches your needs. It will also allow you to have quantifiable evidence regarding the potential returns of the software.
Take advantage of any trial offer and spend extra time during the free period to test every feature and setting within the software. Push every button, turn every knob and see what sort of future is possible if you decide to invest in the tool. Don’t be afraid to utilize multiple free trials and compare the differences.
PPC marketing is like a game of chess: easy to learn, but almost impossible to master. Optimization tools are designed to make PPC easier and improve your chances of winning the game. That said, these tools can have their own learning curves ripe with potential obstacles and roadblocks.
You want any tool that you invest your time and money into to alleviate headaches, not add to them. Sometimes, you need direct help to resolve these issues. Thus, you want to check that the developers have plenty of support options available.
Support comes in many different shapes and sizes. Do you require 24/7, on-call customer service? Or, do you prefer a chat messaging tool to ask and receive support? Some companies don’t offer direct support but have helpful articles that handle any problem you may have. Are you okay using these resources to solve your own problems?
Finally, you need to consider what specific features the tool brings to your organization. Every feature is incorporated into the price you pay. Even if you don’t need every bell and whistle, you’re paying for them.
In a perfect world, you’d choose a solution that only had the features relevant to the needs of your company. That isn’t always possible, but it is a good strategy to clearly outline the features you want and choose a tool that is as closely aligned to that list as possible.
Also, consider the scalability of any solution you choose. While you may not be interested in certain features now, they may be valuable in the future when your needs change. A great PPC optimization tool has the ability to grow alongside your needs!
As a rule of thumb: if you don’t need it, don’t invest in it!
In the early sections of this guide, you learned why you need PPC optimization tools. One of the key benefits is automating high-effort, low-priority tasks that, while not that crucial, are necessary.
Marketers sacrifice a lot of time and energy on these types of processes, when they could be dedicating their attention and resources towards more important tasks that need human-driven experience and know-how to manage.
There are a number of processes you can optimize with automation software.
When it comes to PPC marketing, there are few tasks as tedious or time-consuming as managing your click bids. It’s a science and an art, but mostly a science, which means it is a perfect candidate for automation.
Google Ads has plenty of smart bidding options available to marketers, but these should not be used without understanding the specifics. You can also invest in third-party bid automation solutions. These tools automatically handle bids with greater precision and accuracy than even the most proficient marketers.
Ultimately, it is the job of your ad creatives to entice prospective customers to click on your paid search messages and visit your website. Ad copy takes a lot of time to create and even longer to perfect.
Ideally, your goal is to make your ad copy as relevant as possible to the audience. Personalization is a winning strategy in today’s market! With automation, you can customize ad text based on data feeds.. These tools help craft more relevant messages to each unique viewer.
Data-born insights are extremely valuable to marketers. Unfortunately, discovering insights means conducting lengthy and tedious analyses of your PPC data. If you don’t have a very analytical mindset, uncovering actionable insights can be more trouble than they are worth.
Your data should work for you, not the other way around. With analytics solutions, you can stop the tiring, manual processing of data and turn your raw metrics into actionable insights that inform and accelerate your decision-making without the tedium of crunching numbers on your own.
As mentioned, PPC optimization is an ongoing process. Your campaigns require continuous attention, monitoring and effective audit, which is an important part of your role as a PPC marketer. Your objective is to find opportunities to improve your campaign, as well as detect and avoid any potential risks on the horizon.
Campaign management has many different parts. It is part optimization, part data analysis, testing, reporting, etc. Choosing a PPC optimization tool that automates many of these tasks at once is a real win.
Yes its PPC Signal. when it comes to automated campaign management and optimization, there are not many tools that offer what PPC Signal brings to the conversation. With powerful machine learning capabilities, PPC Signal uses sophisticated AI technology to simplify your campaign data and offer an easier way to manage and optimize your PPC campaigns.
Optimizing your PPC campaigns can feel like an incredibly daunting task. There is so much happening with your ad groups and keywords that it is hard just to know where to start! To make matters worse, the PPC marketplace is in a constant state of change.
As soon as you make one positive adjustment to your campaign, it can cause other areas of your campaigns to move and shift. You’re always turning over rocks for new opportunities and putting out potential fires before they hurt your account performance.
The problem is that marketers often feel like they need to optimize everything at once. What you should be doing is trying to make small, but continuous improvements every day. These seemingly insignificant changes will grow exponentially into big growth for your PPC account!
PPC Signal works by automatically monitoring your Google Ads data to find noteworthy shifts in your data that “signal” an important change. Then, the optimization tool alerts the user of the change and offers actionable advice on how to adjust campaigns to create positive ROI based on current and historical data. The more alerts you’re able to resolve, the greater your ROI.
One of the biggest problems that marketers have with automation solutions is the fear that they will have to relinquish control over their campaigns and important processes in their marketing. PPC Signal doesn’t make any decisions for you.
Instead, it analyzes your PPC data for attention-worthy opportunities and risks and notifies you of these events. This keeps the control in the marketer’s hands. You decide which opportunities to capitalize on and which risks to avoid and in what order.
Not only do you pick which alerts to follow, but you can also use options to filter which trends you’re alerted to. For example, you can select to be notified of trends specific to keywords, which allows you to bid more competitively based on up-to-date insights.
Alternatively, you can use PPC Signal to be alerted when your site is seeing unusually high or low ad traffic. This is a great way to get real-time alerts when something in your campaign isn’t performing correctly. Think of it as an early warning system!
PPC Signal also offers in-depth analysis in the form for charts and tabular data that look at key aspects of your campaigns, such as Hour of Week performance, wasted spend and more. These analysis can provide valuable insight into your campaigns without having to manually dig through your data.
Remember, you don’t want to just understand what is happening with your campaigns, but also why. When you know the ‘why’ behind certain changes, you can better prepare your PPC strategies for the future.
For marketing agencies, the PPC Signal analysis are useful when justifying progress to clients. You can quickly send them real-time analysis that showcase what’s going on in their paid marketing, what was happening in the past and what steps your agency is making.
PPC Signal is cheaper than the top-tier solutions, which makes it a viable option for beginner and intermediate PPC marketers. That said, the power of this software also makes it a useful tool for marketing agencies. When you need to manage multiple accounts quickly, automating the discovery of opportunities and risks is a huge bonus!
If you still aren’t sure if the PPC Signal optimization tool meets your team’s needs, there is a PPC Signal demo & trial version available to use. See what automation can do for your PPC optimization!
Eventually, every PPC marketer hits a point where they need to find more advanced solutions to solve their latest challenges. As your campaigns grow, the free features included with your Google Ads account cease being useful anymore.
Don’t worry! This is a good sign. It means that you’ve outgrown the basic tools. Now, it is time to find a solution that fits your scaled-up needs! Solutions like PPC Signal are designed to eliminate the tedium that often comes with PPC management, while also providing the opportunity to optimize your efforts to produce the best possible results.
Optimization is always achievable with the right tools at your side!
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