Categories
You just made a decision. You clicked a link that brought you to this page because you wanted to learn more about PPC campaign management and be a more productive PPC marketer.
And, you continue to make the decision to stay on the page and continue reading.
These little micro-decisions happen constantly. Sometimes, it’s an almost-automatic decision that occurs subconsciously. In other words, you may not even be aware of all of the decisions that your brain makes in a single day.
It’s a lot. You make thousands of decisions before you even open your computer and begin managing your PPC campaigns.
Then, the decision flood gates really open.
PPC campaign management requires constant tinkering and adjusting to the latest changes to your performance metrics. This results in countless decisions that must be made regularly.
All of these decisions become draining on many levels. This is known as decision overload.
Decision overload occurs because you’re making too many consecutive decisions, or you have too many options at one time.
As you’ll learn in this discussion, there is a fatiguing effect caused by decision-making. With the abundance of decisions that a PPC manager must make on a routine basis, decision overload and choice fatigue are real dangers that can get in the way of your productivity and performance.
This discussion will look at the causes and effects of decision overload and choice fatigue, with particular attention paid to how they affect PPC marketers, and how to prevent them.
If you dream of being a more productive PPC manager, you’re in the right place.
To understand how to become a more productive and successful PPC manager, we first need to address the challenges facing marketing professionals in this role.
This will give a fuller understanding and appreciation for how PPC campaign management is overwhelming, and why so many managers find themselves overloaded and fatigued by decision-making.
When you tell someone that you’re involved in online advertising and PPC marketing, they assume that most of your time is spent creating clever, compelling headlines and developing ad creative, like a modern episode of Mad Men.
In reality, the majority of your time as a Google Ads manager is spent managing existing campaigns, not creating new ones.
Occasionally, the need for a new campaign or ad component (headline, description, image, product video and so on) arises. However, most of your job responsibilities as a manager involve tightening each existing campaign’s nuts and bolts.
There is far more to a successful campaign than a catchy headline or flashy product image. The best ad elements are worthless if you’re not targeting the right keywords or audiences.
Not to mention, you need to manage your costs. With an unlimited budget, anyone can produce results.
Since you don’t have unlimited resources, you need to be very strategic in how you spend your ad budget.
It’s about maximizing your ROI. You need your campaigns to generate more money than they cost you. When campaigns are well optimized, every $1 you spend on Google Ads can return as much as $2, $3 or even $4.
This high level of returns is only possible when you complete all of the many tasks and duties on a PPC manager’s list of responsibilities.
PPC management is a very broad term that encompasses an expansive range of responsibilities.
To understand how a PPC manager finds themselves battling decision overload, all you need to do is begin listing the duties and tasks that fall under this job title.
This is only a partial list and, to make matters worse, every item consists of several, smaller tasks that are equally time-consuming.
For example, keyword management can be split into all of the following, smaller tasks:
With all of this regularly occurring, Google Ads managers feel constant pressure of responsibility.
PPC management would be a lot more feasible without the element of constant change.
By nature, PPC marketing is a dynamic strategy. Your campaigns are always shifting, moving and fluctuating.
Not only does Google Ads routinely change its features and policies, but you have to also account for patterns and shifts in how Internet users search and interact with ad messages.
Plus, how your competitors are conducting their PPC strategies will also impact your results.
These are just some of the factors that can cause your campaigns to fluctuate on a routine basis. Seasonality, your own strategies and global pandemics are also elements that can impact campaign performance, whether negatively or positively.
It’s this constant element of change that makes PPC management so overwhelming. Every responsibility on that lengthy list needs to be completed regularly.
No element of PPC marketing can be set and then forgotten, at least not for long.
Thus, for many professionals, PPC management feels like a juggling act. You’re always battling to stay on top of all of these responsibilities.
You have to continually be making fast decisions and moving your attention from one task to the next.
Time is a major component!
If you aren’t acting fast enough and making the right decisions in the correct amount of time, performance will suffer.
To reiterate: time is a critical component to successful PPC marketing.
Changes happen so quickly and so frequently that managers need to respond even faster.
This means responding before a shift or change actually occurs.
“But, how can a PPC manager respond to something that hasn’t happened yet? Are they fortune tellers?”
PPC managers can’t actually see into the future (sorry to be the bearer of bad news, folks). However, you could argue that they do have a crystal ball – data.
Every time your PPC performance metrics fluctuate, which is all of the time, it produces data.
Data is vital to making better campaigns because it leads to insights. Actionable insights are essentially data-backed clues on how to improve your campaigns.
You can categorize most insights as either an opportunity or a risk. Capitalizing on opportunities allows you to create a positive change in your campaign performance. Meanwhile, avoiding and mitigating risks can prevent negative changes from occurring.
It’s important to detect and act on insights as early as possible. Again, the PPC environment is always changing, so the longer you wait, the less relevant and valuable the information becomes.
If you detect an opportunity too late, chances are your competitors have already moved in and taken advantage. Thus, there’s less room for you to capitalize.
Similarly, when you let a potential risk proceed undetected, it’s going to cause more damage than if you were to detect the problem in its very early stages.
A light leak under your kitchen sink isn’t a problem. However, the longer you fail to notice and fix the problem, the more damage the leaking water will cause.
Productive, successful PPC managers strive to be proactive in their changes, instead of reacting to things that have already happened.
Data is not easy to analyze. The more data you have, the harder it is to comprehend. Add in the fact mentioned earlier that PPC data is short-lived and you have a very cumbersome problem on your hands.
Insights can range from simple changes to more complex trends, shifts and patterns. Typically, complex insights lead to more significant and valuable opportunities or risks.
Of course, there is a trade-off. Complex insights require deep analysis, often involving multiple dimensions and metrics. This level of analysis isn’t easy and requires a substantial amount of time to complete manually.
This creates yet another layer of fatigue and overload that PPC managers have to overcome.
With campaigns producing data at a constant and rapid rate, your spreadsheets can grow exponentially.
You can go from a handful of rows and columns, to thousands of them in the blink of an eye. When spreadsheets grow to this size, the wall of numbers becomes overwhelming. Your eyes and your brain do not know where to focus.
Data analysis has a lot of decisions and choices that need to be made. What data do you analyze? How do you analyze it? What chart do you use to present your findings?
PPC campaign management involves a lot of moving parts, which is overwhelming in its own right.
That said, if you understand how and why decision overload and choice fatigue happen, then you can overcome them.
At some point or another, everyone has agonized over a decision to the point that it becomes overwhelming and almost anxiety-inducing, like picking out the perfect outfit for a date or shopping for a new insurance plan.
Even a seemingly simple decision like what topping to put on a pizza or which Netflix series to binge-watch next can be challenging.
Yet, as mentioned, there are also decisions that we make almost automatically. So, where’s the divide? What separates a bang-your-head-on-the-desk decision versus an “Oh, that’s an easy one”, decision.
There are several factors that make decisions more complicated.
Arguably the most considerable detractor of effective decision-making is what’s known as decision fatigue, or ego depletion.
The problem is that your brain only has a finite amount of decision-making capacity for a given day. When this willpower is depleted and you have no more energy, you start to become fatigued.
Once fatigued, the decisions that you make begin to decline in quality. Eventually, you begin making poor decisions.
It’s easy to make the right decision to avoid junk foods around lunchtime because you still have plenty of decision-making brain juices left. After your brain has made thousands of decisions throughout the day, it’s much harder to avoid that temptation at midnight.
When was the last time you decided to have a salad as a late-night snack, instead of indulging in something sweet, salty or otherwise unhealthy?
You no longer have enough willpower to think about decisions and weigh the different options. Thus, you succumb to the most comfortable option, even though it isn’t the correct one. Or, you make no decision at all because it is easier to maintain the status quo.
While no one feels great about cheating on their diet, decision fatigue can really be damaging when it comes to PPC management.
If you start making snap-decisions about your campaigns, you may be steering your strategies in the wrong direction!
The key is removing choices and limiting your less important decisions throughout the day, thereby preserving your ability to make accurate and high-quality changes to your campaigns at all times.
Decisions often require a lot of analysis. This is particularly true in PPC marketing because data is such a crucial element.
Unfortunately, this can lead to analysis paralysis. This phenomenon occurs when you have too much information to analyze. Any action you take starts feeling like the wrong one. Buyer’s remorse, anyone?
The result? You don’t do anything at all.
PPC management is a very active job. Becoming so overloaded that you don’t make any changes at all is not the path towards success and productivity.
The real root-cause of analysis paralysis boils down to this idea of having too many options. The size of your data alone can make it difficult to know where to start. There are near-infinite possibilities!
This is counter to what many marketers believe to be true. In many cases, marketers bombard consumers with tons of options and features because there is a belief that more choice leads to more freedom.
In reality, this can have a negative end result. When faced with lots of choices, you typically lose freedom because of how long it takes you to make a decision.
Thus, fewer options can actually increase performance. This is best showcased by what is known as the “Jam Study.”
In the study, customers inside a gourmet market were offered a selection of jam samples. Every few hours, the selection of james changed from 24 options to just 6. This allowed researchers to test the impact of a wider selection versus a narrow one. Each customer that participated in the tasting was given a $1 coupon to incentivize them to buy one of the jams.
No matter the size of the assortment of jams, customers tasted 2 flavors on average. Here’s where things get interesting: more customers were drawn to the larger selection of products (60% compared to only 40% that approached the smaller offering). However, customers that sampled the smaller assortment were 10X more likely to buy the jam afterwards.
This is the paradox of choices: having lots of options is attractive, but it actually makes it harder to decide.
You could argue that making so many decisions, each consisting of several complex choices, is what makes PPC management so challenging. Thus, if you remove some of the decisions you need to make as a PPC manager, it allows for more freedom, more productivity and better overall performance.
By removing unnecessary decisions, you can turn an otherwise complex process into a simple one.
“Simple” is often confused for basic. We assume that only complex processes are capable of producing high-quality results.
However, when you apply a simple fix to a complex problem, the difference is much more monumental. Simplicity is what allows you to work smarter, instead of harder.
It’s about focusing on the choices you want and need to make as a PPC manager, instead of exerting time, willpower and other resources on less-important decisions.
William James, an American philosopher and psychologist, said, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
When you unclog your decision-making process by removing unnecessary choices, you eliminate scenarios that cause overload or fatigue.
This is why having only one CTA in your PPC ads is a widely-accepted “best practice.” When there are two or more call-to-actions, it decreases performance because viewers get overwhelmed or distracted by the multiple options.
It also causes you more work on the management side because you have to measure the data of each additional CTA.
You want people to convert one way or another. Don’t give yourself more work, or ad viewers more frustration, by including excess options.
If curating your choices and managing your decisions leads to better performance, how do you get started? These are some simple steps that you can follow to improve the decision-making model of your PPC campaign management:
1. Review Your Goals: Since your goal is to focus on the decisions that matter most, it’s a good idea to take a moment to review your goals. What metrics matter the most? How do you define the success of your PPC campaigns? Answering these goal-oriented questions will help you better understand what decisions are important to make. Then, you can focus on these types of choices. Not only will you feel less overwhelmed, but you’ll also better optimize your time.
2. Accept That Bad Decisions Happen: Nobody’s perfect and, even with actionable insights, PPC campaign managers can make mistakes. Unfortunately, many people let the fear of such errors stop them from making any choices at all. This, as mentioned earlier, is known as buyer’s remorse. You become consumed not by what happens because of the choice you make, but by what could have been if you selected one of the other options. Accepting that not every decision you make will be the best makes it easier to avoid the negative impacts of buyer’s remorse. Better yet, think of bad decisions as valuable learning experiences. It’s great to know what strategies are the best, but eliminating not-so-great options is also a worthwhile activity.
3. Focus On The Task At Hand: This is not an easy task because your brain is naturally jam-packed with stuff. It is almost always thinking about several things at the same time. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, it allows human beings to get a lot done and operate efficiently. The drawback? The brain tires out quicker, which leads to decision fatigue and overload. However, if you can manage to get your brain to focus only on the task at hand, you’ll limit the other stuff that distracts from that objective and simultaneously depletes your brain’s resources. Often, this requires you to streamline work in such a way that you’re staying hyper-focused for short intervals.
4. Automate As Much As Possible: Arguably, the easiest way to limit decision overload is to rely on automation. By automating certain tasks, you remove a lot of the unnecessary decision-making that you don’t want to do, thereby saving more energy for the choices that actually matter. With PPC campaign management, there are plenty of decisions, tasks and other things that managers must do. Yet, many of these items are incredibly resource-intensive. By automating the cumbersome jobs and allowing an AI-powered data tool to make the decisions for you, you can dramatically improve your chances of avoiding data fatigue.
With automation being a critical factor in solving the decision overload problem, PPC Signal is a standout for AI machine learning tools.
In this section, you’ll learn about the PPC Signal tool and its ability to deliver vetted signals to managers. These signals are the solution to both your data and decision paralysis problems.
You can access PPC Signal from here.
PPC Signal is an AI-driven tool with deep machine learning capabilities developed specifically to help PPC campaign managers with their heavy workload.
The core function of PPC Signal is to constantly monitor your PPC account for trends, shifts, outliers and other patterns that the AI brain deems is interesting or noteworthy.
Then, using the historical data from your campaigns, the system analyzes each change to determine how significant it is and whether it poses a risk or an opportunity to your account.
A risk would be a change in the data that requires some sort of action. If no action is taken, then performance will decrease.
For instance, PPC Signal may detect that the CPC value of a specific PPC keyword has been steadily increasing over the last few days. Suddenly, costs for the keyword jump from a few cents to a few dollars!
If you don’t act on this risk, you could be overspending on the affected keyword.
Opportunities, on the other hand, are changes in data that reflect a possibility to increase performance, if you take action.
For example, PPC Signal notices that CTR for a particular group of keywords is suddenly much higher than usual. If your PPC goals are related to increasing site traffic, this is a great opportunity.
By increasing your bids for these keywords, you could capitalize on the increased CTR.
When PPC Signal alerts you to an opportunity or any other insight, it packages the data, a visualization of the change and other essential information into a digestible “signal.”
Here’s an example of how PPC Signal presents noteworthy changes to PPC campaign managers:
This is essentially the main PPC Signal dashboard. At the top, you can see that there are 33 “active” signals. These are signals that have not been resolved by the manager.
You can scroll through all of the active signals or choose the tabs to filter by campaign, ad group, keyword, device, geo-location and hour of the day.
As you can see, each signal has many different pieces of info. If we take the first signal, for example:
First, PPC Signal underlines the metric affected by the change. It also includes information like the direction of the trend, when it started and how significant the change is.
The key text is highlighted red in this example to reflect that it is a risk signal. If it were an opportunity, these words would be highlighted green.
PPC Signal also shows you what dimensions are affected. In the example’s case, this signal involves the “Forerunner Sales” campaign on mobile devices.
When you click the “Explore” button on a signal, it expands to show you even more information.
This view displays all of the information at the top and shows an interactive, detailed chart of the change. You can even add additional metric data to the chart to see how other areas of the affected campaign are impacted.
You can also select to view this data as a table, which can then be exported to Excel or Google Sheets.
The difference between PPC Signal and other PPC campaign management tools is simple: complete, vetted signals.
Other PPC campaign management tools often only offer half-baked, incomplete insights. This means that managers need to spend their own time and resources to fully understand the information and use it.
This is not what you want. After all, you’re trying to save time and resolve your decision-making overload.
A vetted, complete signal is one that requires almost no effort on the manager’s side to understand and implement.
Typically, where other tools go wrong is the classic quantity-over-quality ratio. As you’ve learned, having too many choices is not always a good thing.
When a tool bombards you with every fluctuation or semi-significant data change, it’s not any less confusing than the raw data itself.
The truth is that not all insights hold the same value. You don’t want to know everything that happens, only the important things.
Since your PPC management tool is constantly monitoring your accounts, you can think of it like a 24/7 babysitter. You don’t want the babysitter to call every time your account drools, giggles or drops a Cheerio under the couch.
You only want to be notified when something important happens.
PPC Signal pays very close attention to the quality of each signal that it presents. It prioritizes alerts based on the significance of each risk or opportunity.
Moreover, the PPC Signal interface has multiple filtering options, which allows you to remove further insights and signals that don’t pertain to your PPC marketing goals.
It’s about filtering out the noise that will fatigue and overload your brain, leaving only the signals that matter to you and your business.
Another shortcoming of other PPC management tools is that they don’t provide you with any clues about what to do next.
Whenever you uncover an insight or clue on how to improve your PPC campaigns, there is an all-important, next step – taking action!
In other words, what are you going to do with the information?
Again, when your PPC management tool doesn’t provide this extra information, it means you need to analyze the insight for yourself and decide (yes, yet another decision) what to do next.
If the insight is extremely complex and involves multiple dimensions and metrics, it may be difficult to know what actions to take next.
The time you take to weigh the possible options and decide what to do next is value lost.
PPC Signal, on the other hand, does go the next step.
When you click to “Explore” an insight from the PPC Signal homepage, you’ll see a “Take Action” button on the next screen.
By pressing this button, PPC Signal will recommend a next-step action that you can take to resolve the signal.
You can even make some changes to your campaigns right from the PPC Signal interface.
This means that you don’t need to make any decisions on how to resolve a signal. You just need to accept PPC Signal’s recommendation!
By removing yet another decision from your list, you can continue focusing on the ones that matter most and avoiding the harmful effects of choice fatigue and decision overload.
Decision overload, analysis paralysis and choice fatigue are all real effects that stand in the way of your success as a PPC manager.
Success for PPC managers is not about getting the most amount of stuff done within the given time.
It’s about making the right decisions and completing the correct tasks.
To achieve this, you need to manage your decisions and focus on making the ones that offer the most substantial impact.
It’s important to remember that your ability to make good decisions is finite. There’s only so much gas in your brain’s tank!
When you can automate less-important decisions with PPC Signal, you can preserve your energy and time for the crucial decisions.
You’ll consistently make smarter decisions that will lead to higher performance, more tremendous success and easier PPC campaign management.
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
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.
Discover sales skills examples and why they are crucial for success in sales. Elevate your sales game with these actionable strategies.
