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Any digital marketer will tell you that they are consumed with tasks, projects and responsibilities. However, no marketing professional is quite as busy as a Google Ads manager. These individuals are constantly juggling multiple tasks that are as time-consuming as they are important.
Letting just one of these tasks fall can mean significant setbacks.
For this reason, Google Ads users have to be incredibly focused. They need to be experts at managing their time. In fact, when hiring a Google Ads professional, many hiring managers put time management skills at the top of the list of must-have qualities.
The reason that time management is so crucial for PPC marketers is because it is such a dynamic and competitive environment. If you aren’t constantly identifying changes and persistently counter-strategizing against the competition, your campaigns on Google Ads won’t produce the optimal results you want.
In short, time is a very, very valuable resource in PPC marketing.
Time management is not just about getting a lot of things done. It’s about getting the right tasks done in the right ways. You don’t want to just be busy, you want to be productive with how you spend your time.
Luckily, there are tools that can help PPC managers become more productive and better optimize how their time is spent. These tools handle many of the cumbersome obstacles that eat up lots of time, thereby allowing a manager to focus their attention on the right tasks that produce the best results.
In this discussion, we’ll look at what it takes to become a great Google Ads manager and how a tool like PPC Signal can help you go from frantic and busy to efficient and productive.
What actually needs to be managed in your campaigns and why does the culmination of these tasks require so much time and attention? These are some of the first things we need to cover in our journey to becoming a more productive Google Ads manager.
As a PPC manager, you may be responsible for some or all of the following:
And that’s just the big stuff. There are plenty of smaller responsibilities within each of these categories.
Collectively, these responsibilities will require you to use multiple programs and platforms. You may find yourself preparing a spreadsheet one minute, editing an ad headline in a text document the next, before digging into more advanced activities, like creating and analyzing charts to extract insights.
Looking at all of the items on the to-do list of a Google Ads manager, it’s easy to see why time management becomes problematic.
If you want to be a productive manager, then you need to find ways to carve this list down to a short lineup of priority tasks.
This does not mean neglecting certain management responsibilities; every task on your list is necessary. Rather, it’s about delegating and automating certain tasks that, while necessary, do not require the direct attention of the manager and can be easily handled by another person or tool.
This is where a lot of managers go wrong. They handle all of these duties solo, which makes them very busy. It may make you feel like a valued and essential asset to the company, but it’s not a good management style.
Not only is it a sure path to burning out and cracking under the pressure of too much responsibility and too little time, but it also causes you to produce weak results for your campaigns.
The challenge is actually identifying the tasks that you can delegate or automate, versus the ones that require hands-on management. There are some tasks that can be partially automated, while other parts need your direct attention.
It’s also worth mentioning that while delegating tasks does work, it has its limitations. First, your company only has limited human resources and adding more (in other words, hiring new staff) is incredibly costly.
Even if you do have available team members that you can delegate tasks to, their time is finite.
With PPC marketing, there are certain tasks that are overly complex when handled manually by anyone. This is just yet another reason why traditional delegation doesn’t always work.
Handling all of your Google Ads management tasks on your own isn’t feasible. Delegation works, but only to a point. Eventually, you’ll run into the same issues as a solo Google Ads manager.
So, what’s left? Automation!
Supporting your Google Ads management with intelligent tools capable of automation can take tremendous pressure off you and your team’s shoulders. These tools also produce excellent results for your campaigns, especially in the area of data analysis.
Data analysis is easily the biggest burden of a Google Ads manager in terms of the time, attention and effort required. It is an ongoing task that is very complex and time-consuming when managed by hand. Thus, it is a task that cannot be solved easily with delegation.
Data analysis is incredibly challenging for several reasons:
Essentially, manual analysis is only really feasible to a point. Eventually, your data grows so much in both size and complexity that it’s no longer efficient to manage it without the help of a tool.Remember, efficiency is a critical key to being a great Google Ads manager, and not just a busy one because it leads to productivity.Data analytics tools and AI solutions are capable of analyzing even large and incredibly complex spreadsheets. Not to mention, this analysis happens instantly. They are thousands of times more efficient than even the most skilled data scientist. This means that this otherwise laborious task is automatically and instantly managed.
Now, it’s up to you to look at what insights the tool has found and apply those towards improving your campaigns and strategies.
The number-crunching and faster data analysis capabilities offered by intelligent, AI-powered tools have far-reaching benefits that make your entire Google Ads management more efficient. In this section, we’ll look at the various ways that these tools help you become a great Google Ads manager.
Keywords are a core building block of PPC marketing. Not to mention, they also play a significant role in many other areas of your digital marketing strategy. Everything from a PPC ad, to a blog post on your website, requires a deep understanding of what topics people are currently interested in and searching for.
In other words, keywords are the guiding light that dictates what and how you market.
In PPC marketing, keywords are even more important because they are how you target prospective customers. Keywords will also control your costs, as some keywords are more expensive than others.
One of the more important tasks on a PPC manager’s to-do list is managing keywords and trying to find the right ones that will produce the maximum results with minimal costs. Keyword management also involves finding negative keywords that detract from your results and get in the way of your goals.
Planning, researching and managing keywords in the PPC environment are very data-heavy tasks that need to be performed on a regular basis.
If you don’t have the right tools to help you navigate the data, you’ll exhaust most of your time and energy on analyzing possible keyword opportunities, which leaves little in the tank for actually executing your keyword choices and measuring their results. PPCexpo Keyword Planner is an excellent tool for having keyword research.
You can access keyword planner from here
When you have these preliminary steps automated with a PPC management tool, you can dedicate all of your effort towards actually enacting keyword changes and studying the latest search trends.
Next to keyword management, tracking key metrics is the next biggest task that also involves a substantial amount of data and analysis. This task is all about keeping tabs on your most important metrics — the metrics that help you measure progress towards your marketing goals.
In a way, metrics allow you to test the health and status of a campaign. Is progress moving at an efficient pace? If you aren’t paying constant and close attention to your key metrics, you may miss out on valuable opportunities or fail to identify disastrous downturns in performance.
It’s this idea of “constant” attention that makes tracking a big challenge for PPC marketers. Remember, your data can change overnight. Ideally, you’d check your campaign progress at all times to catch opportunities and risks as early as possible.
Of course, that isn’t possible because there’s so much other stuff that you need to get done in a day. After all, you’re human — you require sleep, food, social interactions, etc.
Software tools, on the other hand, do not need any rest. They are perfectly capable of constantly monitoring your campaigns and notifying you of noteworthy changes.
In this respect, supporting this task with an AI solution is like having an early warning alarm system for your campaigns.
When your key metrics deviate from what’s expected, whether that deviation is positive or negative, the tool alerts you. This means you can still have constant monitoring of your campaigns, but you don’t need to monitor the metrics firsthand.
Thus, you can dedicate more time to making the necessary course corrections based on the latest metric data. You’ll always be ahead of any significant changes to your Google Ads account.
This is very similar to monitoring and analyzing your metric data. The key difference is that a change in a key metric can be a one-off occurrence, while a trend is something that is building over a stretch of time.
For example, if a particular keyword suddenly experiences double the number of normal clicks, that’s a noteworthy change that needs to be tracked. Trends, on the other hand, build over time. A keyword may have 60 clicks one day, then 90 the next, followed by 130, 270, 390, etc.
Every trend can be considered a change in a metric, but not every change to a metric can be classified as a trend.
Trends are much more valuable because they suggest that the change is long-term and typically more significant. Thus, being able to readily identify and respond to trends is a big advantage in Google Ads management.
The problem is that, just as a single change to a key metric is difficult to identify, a trend is even harder because you have to notice a change occurring across multiple days.
When that trend includes multiple dimensions and metrics, you could be looking at thousands of combinations to fully test and understand the extent of a single trend. You need to extract the data, filter it, analyze it and more. It’s a painstaking process to do manually.
This makes it extremely challenging to differentiate a one-time fluctuation that can be largely ignored, from a more significant trend that requires immediate attention. Again, the more productive and efficient strategy is to rely on the support of tools.
When you can automate the detection and analysis of trends, your team can focus its resources on actually putting those discoveries to use and improving performance.
With automation, you can free up more time — time that is being poorly spent on necessary, but low-impact tasks. There are a number of ways that you can spend this time. One of these ways is expanding your knowledge of the platform, its tools and features, your audience, competitors and more.
Granted, you already know a lot about all of these topics. However, one thing that is always certain with Google Ads and PPC marketing is that things change.
If you want to be at the top of the market as the best Google Ads manager you can be, then it is important to have a deep and current understanding and knowledge of the ad platform you are using, the latest competitor strategies and the newest audience search trends.
These are tasks that can’t really be automated. For example, if a major change happens to Google Ads, it’s on you and your team to research the new update and analyze how it will impact your account. When new features are added to Google Ads, it’s also up to you and your team to experiment and see what role they may have in your PPC strategies.
You may lean on a tool to identify a change in a competitor or audience segment, but you’ll often have to do some digging yourself to understand why such a change has occurred.
Perhaps, your PPC tool notices that a cluster of branded keywords suddenly experiences a rapid decline in clicks and conversions. As a manager, your responsibility is not only to act on this change, but understand why it’s occurring.
Your education as a Google Ads manager is never over.
It’s easy to fall behind other managers when you aren’t dedicating some portion of your time to learning. This means studying new and upcoming changes, applying the latest tools, seeing what other industry professionals are discussing and more.
Now that we’ve talked at length about Google Ads management and the various tasks that go into this process, it’s time to evaluate your management style.
Are you just busy?
Or, are you conducting your management responsibilities in the right way that leads to positive results?
Let’s find out.
There is a huge difference between being busy and being productive.
When you’re busy, you are putting in the maximum effort, but it doesn’t guarantee that you see the maximum results because you aren’t thinking about what you’re doing or the ways that things are getting done.
You’re working hard, but not smart.
Productivity, on the other hand, comes from thinking, planning and executing tasks in a logical and smart way, thereby maximizing the results. With the same amount of time, a productive manager will produce greater output than a busy manager.
A great example of busy versus productive is to think in terms of completing a jigsaw puzzle. A busy puzzler would work hurriedly to put all the pieces together as quickly as possible. There will be little-to-no strategy involved, just frantic matching of puzzle pieces to see if they fit.
Meanwhile, the productive puzzler makes a plan. They start by separating the border pieces and completing that part of the puzzle. Next, they separate pieces by color and distinguishing elements. Thanks to this planning and strategizing, the productive side will be able to finish their puzzle in far less time.
Busy is okay in the short-term, but it doesn’t produce the long-term results that you need from your Google Ads account.
To get long-term, productive results, you need to stop trying to handle every task on your own. Instead, plan and prioritize which tasks you need to manage, and which can be automated.
A productive Google Ads manager can also be a busy one. With all of the management tasks and responsibilities, how could they not be? So, you may find yourself thinking I am busy, but I am also productive. That’s possible.
The real test to knowing whether you are productive-busy or just busy has to do with your mindset and your output. Typically, when a Google Ads manager feels that they are stretched too thin or frequently falls behind schedule for accomplishing certain tasks, it’s because they are busy but unproductive.
A productive manager, on the other hand, despite working hard and having lots to do, stays on target and completes their daily objectives.
It really comes down to the saying, “Own the day, don’t let the day own you.”
Concentration and focus are just as big keys to productivity as planning. A productive Google Ads manager doesn’t succumb to distractions or lose sight of what needs to get done in the moment. Distractions can be work-related and non-work related.
For instance, binge-watching your favorite TV show while you work or occasionally browsing social media are two non-work related distractions.
However, you can also be distracted by trying to tackle too many tasks simultaneously. These are work-related distractions because you’re not giving 100% of your focus to the task at hand.
Being efficient and being productive are both better than only being busy. However, there is a distinction between efficiency and productivity.
Efficiency means that you’re getting tasks done; you may even be completing tasks at a fairly quick pace. So, why isn’t this productive?
Getting tasks done efficiently is on the right path. In most cases, you’re achieving more than you are inputting. To this point, efficiency is really a matter of getting more things done each day.
This is different from being productive. True productivity is about getting more important things done each day.
In other words, your focus should not be on getting the most amount done in a day, but rather prioritizing your tasks and working on the core, required duties that produce the best results.
Part of this equation, again, is about freeing up time from low-priority tasks and allocating it towards the tasks that matter.
AI-enabled chatbots are a great, modern example of using technology to be both efficient and productive. On the efficiency side, these chatbots never sleep or take a break, which means they can serve more requests in a shorter span of time.
When a chatbot runs into a high-priority or complex service request, it passes it on to a human agent. This is productivity. The finite time of these human agents is only spent on the most important queries.
Productivity hinges on your ability to manage your time effectively.
In theory, time management is easy. First, you take your job responsibilities and break them down into small, specific and more manageable tasks. Then, prioritize, plan and schedule when you will complete each task and how frequently.
The reality is that time management is much harder in practice. There are two key challenges:
Over time, you’ll learn how to make the most of your time and achieve the best possible results.
It’s common for a team to need to experiment with different ideas for being more productive. Once you develop an excellent time management plan, you can start making time an advantage instead of an obstacle!
How does this happen? When you are hyper-productive as a Google Ads manager, you achieve more with your time. This means that you’re creating more results with the same amount of time input as other Google Ads managers.
So, as more time goes on, your higher results continuously contribute to creating a stronger edge over the competition.
To explain further, let’s presume that you improve your campaign by 1% every day in an eight hour period. Meanwhile, a competitor, with their less-productive approach, is only able to muster a 0.4% increase each day with the same time.
Your faster rate of improvement means that the longer you both work on your campaigns, the more significant your edge becomes.
You can access PPC Signal from here.
Throughout this guide, we’ve mentioned tools that can support your Google Ads management tasks. When you have the right tool automating those time-intensive tasks, the goal of being a productive Google Ads manager is much easier to obtain.
So, what is the “right” tool?
PPC Signal is a Google Ads management solution that uses a unique system of alerts that allow a manager to focus on the right areas of their account.
With sophisticated AI, the tool simplifies even the most complex account. It effortlessly analyzes thousands of combinations in your Google Ads data and presents the insights in an easy and productive way.
When managing a large Google Ads account, the size and complexity of the data become a serious burden. The time it takes to effectively monitor, analyze and extract insights from this data is more than even a team of marketing professionals can commit and still consider themselves productive.
Remember, productivity is about doing the right tasks, the right way.
PPC Signal reduces the complexity and presents insights in a simple, easy-to-understand format. With its machine learning engine, it is able to automate all steps in the data analysis process, from collecting, filtering and cleaning the data, to the actual analysis of the information to detect insights.
Since PPC Signal handles all of these labor-intensive tasks behind-the-scenes, managers suddenly have tons of free time available to commit to higher priority tasks. This allows you to spend more time on the tasks that really matter, which is essential in being a productive Google Ads manager.
In other words, PPC Signal gives PPC marketers greater choice and freedom in what they want to work on and which tasks to complete, instead of being handcuffed by tedious data analysis processes.
PPC Signal also maintains a watchful and constant eye on your Google Ads data to catch any abnormalities, trends, noteworthy shifts or other patterns that it feels need to be investigated.
Thus, no matter what changes your Google Ads account undergoes, you have an automated, early detection system that doesn’t require any extra time to operate.
There are plenty of data management tools on the market, even in the niche of PPC marketing. So, what makes PPC Signal the best choice when it comes to Google Ads management?
While other tools are capable of extracting and presenting you with insights, there’s very little thought given as to their value or significance.
This means that, as a Google Ads manager, you’re still left with the responsibility of analyzing each insight and deciding whether or not it’s worth pursuing.
This duty means asking several questions about each insight, such as:
Working through this list is far from a productive strategy. Essentially, these tools provide you with rough, uncut insights that you still need to uncover, clean and polish before they are actually actionable to you and your team.
PPC Signal, on the other hand, delivers finished gems, so you don’t need to search for answers to any of the above questions.
It’s very much the approach of quality over quantity. Receiving an abundance of insights is not actually valuable. It’s more work for you and your team to decipher each one and decide which path to explore first.
That’s why PPC Signal takes each insight several extra steps, thereby ensuring that every signal it presents is a complete, finished insight that is ready for you — no extra effort needed. PPC Signal will:
PPC Signal even recommends a follow-up action for each signal.
This action is what PPC Signal has decided is the best response to the given change in data. Not only does this save you additional time in your management process, but it also allows you to act swiftly on every noteworthy change occurring to your account.
This is what insight-driven management should be.
When you have cut, polished, high-quality insights delivered right to you in an easy-to-use interface, Google Ads management stops feeling like a tiresome burden.
To build off of the powerful benefits already described, here are 4 more advantages of using PPC Signal.
Change is a constant in PPC marketing. Not a moment goes by where there is not something (or everything) fluctuating in your campaigns for one reason or another. Being able to identify changes as they happen, or — better yet — before they happen, is the quest of every Google Ads manager.
It is the Holy Grail.
This is exactly what PPC Signal offers by automatically detecting insights and presenting them in a timely fashion.
As mentioned earlier, it creates an opportunity where you’re not only able to save mountains of time, but you also can act on the latest changes ahead of the competition. You can obtain the maximum value from emerging opportunities and stop any potential risk from causing damage to your performance.
PPC Signal allows you to become proactive as a manager, instead of simply responding to changes after they’ve already occurred.
With PPC Signal delivering actionable insights and even recommending the next-step to take, you have the perfect framework to make constant improvements to your campaigns.
Since you no longer have to spend any time identifying and extracting insights yourself, you can commit all of your attention on enacting positive changes.
You can make growth a daily event!
This is how you turn time into an advantage. If you commit to even making just a 1% improvement each day, you’ll still be growing your efforts faster than the competition. The longer you keep at this routine of consistent action and constant improvement, the larger your competitive advantage will become.
While a 1% daily change may seem small and insignificant, it’s anything but, especially when it is repeated on a regular basis.
Positive improvements grow your account at an exponential rate. This means that these seemingly unsubstantial changes don’t just add to one another —they multiply. In just a short year of making 1% daily changes, your progress would be a tremendous 3,3778% growth!
Focus and concentration are two of the principle elements of productivity.
In PPC marketing, these can be very difficult to achieve because there is always a lot of “noise” to contend with. Noise is anything that gets in the way of being productive and making the right decisions at the correct time.
Noise is a severe problem, especially when it comes to data analysis.
You have lots of different metrics populating your Google Ads dashboard. Not all of these figures are going to be useful or lead you to valuable insights. Meanwhile, there are other metrics that are extremely important and need to be analyzed and monitored closely.
While every signal is valuable to some degree, PPC Signal’s filtering options and prioritization allows you to filter out the low-impact signals and focus on the ones that are directly related to your marketing objectives. This allows you to make the right improvements and in the correct order.
Outliers are another obstacle that PPC managers must regularly overcome.
An outlier is a large spike in your PPC data that is either positive or negative. Outliers are short-lived; as quickly as they arrive, they disappear. The fleeting nature of outliers causes many Google Ads managers to write them off as just an unusual anomaly.
In some cases, these managers are correct. Some outliers are just one-off occurrences with no real value. However, there are other cases where an outlier should not be ignored because it is a sign of a much bigger event.
It could be an early warning sign of a fundamental problem with your campaign!
With PPC Signal not only identifying outliers for you, but also analyzing each one to determine the significance, you can quickly make sense of these data occurrences.
You’ll no longer run the risk of writing off an outlier as unimportant, only to have it come back with a vengeance later on.
Doing lots of things at once means you are a busy Google Ads manager.
Getting lots of those things done means you are an efficient Google Ads manager.
Staying focused and completing the right tasks, in the right way and in the right order means you are a productive Google Ads manager.
Without a tool like PPC Signal, productive Google Ads management is incredibly difficult. If you’re managing a very large account, it borders on the impossible.
There’s just too much data and too many tasks to handle all by hand, even if you have a team working alongside you.
Being busy is part of the job description as a Google Ads manager. However, you shouldn’t feel frantic or stressed by juggling the many responsibilities associated with a PPC marketing professional.
You should be running your Google Ads account, not letting it run you!
PPC Signal is more than just a Google Ads management tool. It’s about doing more with the resources that you have, whether few or many, and making time your greatest ally.
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