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“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
-Thomas Edison
Advertising has always been a mountainous challenge. Successful advertising requires science, psychology, creativity and experience.
Yet, there is no perfect recipe that makes advertising effective 100% of the time.
In fact, with the average clickthrough rate (CTR) being around 2%, even amazing ads only “work” a small fraction of the time. This means that advertisers, even great ones, fail a lot more than they succeed.
Despite all this failure, PPC managers need to maintain a positive outlook. When you let negativity and doubt creep into your thought process and decision-making, the results are rarely positive.
Staying positive in the hyper-competitive space of PPC marketing is not easy. Most people are conditioned to concentrate on their failures over their successes.
To be a successful PPC manager, you have to focus on the positives and, at times, ignore the competitive slugfest.
This discussion will look at how negative and positive thinking impacts your PPC efforts. We’ll explore strategies that marketers can deploy to preserve a positive mindset.
“Why aren’t my campaigns working?”
This is a common question asked by all PPC managers, from beginners to veterans. It’s quickly followed by a slew of other, more specific queries, such as:
All of these insecurities contribute to a negative mindset as a PPC manager.
You’re not asking constructive questions. Instead, you’re allowing your negative attitude to dictate your perception of your account performance.
This is known as the “negativity bias.” It is a psychological phenomenon that triggers the brain to recall unfavorable events more vividly than positive ones.
In turn, this makes our failures hit harder than successes, which can have a devastating effect as a PPC manager.
When you first create a new campaign, there is a slight learning curve. You have to learn which strategies pay off and produce the best ROI. During this period, you’re going to experience a lot more downs than ups.
All of these early “failures” can create long-term, negative attitudes. In reality, these so-called failures are valuable and necessary learning experiences that will generate positive ROI in the future.
Unfortunately, it can take months or even longer before you fully grasp what makes your PPC campaigns tick. This extensive learning period is like a breeding ground for negative thinking.
PPC requires extensive testing, keyword research, budget planning and so much more. All of these tasks take time. You need months’ worth of data before you can begin optimizing your campaigns accurately.
Without positive thinking, it’s easy to lose confidence in your advertising. This defeatist attitude creates multiple problems for your campaigns and you as a marketer.
A self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when you predict something will happen and change your behaviors according to that prediction. In doing so, you cause the forecast to become true.
If you allow negative performance to bog you down as a PPC manager, you start assuming that each strategy you deploy will fail.
Without realizing it, this negative attitude changes your mindset and management practices. You stop thinking strategically or actively trying to improve your strategies because you already anticipate their failures.
It can be a vicious cycle that is difficult to break out of.
When you only focus on your campaigns’ shortcomings, you build an expectation that your strategies will fail. Downturns in performance are treated as regular and unavoidable occurrences.
This prevents you from looking at these losses as valuable learning opportunities. To repeat Edison’s wisdom: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Believe it or not, your PPC campaigns also have tens of thousands of combinations that need to be tested and measured.
Every time you experience poor performance in your campaigns, it’s not a failure. Rather, it’s a combination that didn’t pan out.
You can use this information to inform other parts of your PPC strategy. In some cases, you can learn more from a failure than a success.
It’s just a matter of seeing the value in even your most imperfect ads.
Confidence in PPC starts to decline at the management level as more failures stack up. Stakeholders will recognize your inability to resolve issues and lose faith in PPC and you as a manager.
Not only will it become impossible to convince the company or client to invest more into PPC ads, but they may even cut back spending.
With less budget, you’ll have an even harder time building successes.
You need to have confidence in your strategies and instill this same confidence in these stakeholders. That just isn’t possible when you can’t shed your negative mindset.
The other side of the negativity bias is overvaluing your successes. Any part of your PPC account that is performing well is left alone. Don’t fix what isn’t broken, right?
This isn’t inherently bad, but it can stunt the growth of your campaigns. If you don’t understand why these areas of your account are doing so well, you can’t apply the same techniques to your weaker campaigns.
Plus, PPC performance changes often. The best parts of your account now aren’t guaranteed to be so rewarding in the future.
If you always assume that these campaigns, ad groups and keywords are the best, you won’t catch these changes until it’s too late.
This could cost you money and hurt your returns.
With a positive approach, PPC can be fun, not just hard work. It may sound silly, but seeing small improvements in your metrics and watching your campaigns trend higher and higher can be a thrill.
You have to accept your failures and learn from them, but you also have to understand what went well in your campaigns and use that information to your advantage.
Positive thinking transforms those negative questions into constructive opportunities.
(Negative) Why am I not attracting the right customers?
(Positive) Are there different or even better audiences that are engaging with my ads?
(Negative) Why is my budget not enough for the results I want?
(Positive) How can I better optimize my ad spend to stretch my budget further?
(Negative) What are my competitors doing that I’m not?
(Positive) How can I use competitor data to learn from their successes?
Having a positive attitude means leaving yourself open to PPC success, even if it doesn’t come today. It’s the idea that when your mind is in the right place, good things will come.
What are some of these “good things” that can come from positive thinking? Here are just a few examples of how this type of attitude contributes to making an advertiser effective and successful.
Your PPC campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum. PPC is part of a broader digital marketing strategy.
Thus, excellent communication and interpersonal skills are vital for PPC marketing. You often have to collaborate with the other marketing departments to ensure cohesion and on-brand messaging.
If you’re managing a client’s Google Ads account, you also need to maintain a healthy relationship with that person. The same goes for managers and stakeholders at a company.
A positive mindset is infectious and makes you more approachable. People want to collaborate and work with individuals that have a good attitude. A bad attitude, on the other hand, deters people from even wanting to contact you.
Creativity and enthusiasm are must-have attributes for a PPC manager to be successful.
If you don’t approach every aspect of your strategy with a creative, enthusiastic and positive attitude, it’s like trying to sail with no wind. The competition is sure to pass right by you!
Creative strategies and ads can be risky. You may be trying something that’s never been done before, even by the competition. Yet, it’s these types of strategies that help you stand out from the rest.
Positive people are better risk-takers because they know that even if an idea fails, the eternal optimist in them will find value in that bad experience.
When you’re always thinking negatively, you won’t even bother trying out-of-the-box ideas because you’ll automatically assume they are doomed to fail.
You need to be optimistic and believe in your strategies, even when there is no guarantee that they’ll work out.
Attitude directly affects your energy. If you’re in a poor mood, you don’t have a lot of motivation to get tasks done and succeed.
As a manager, this means you’ll become fatigued and overwhelmed quickly by the amount of work in front of you. You’ll end up dedicating less and less time to your campaigns.
That’s not a winning strategy!
On the other hand, a positive attitude can lift you up. PPC managers have a long list of responsibilities. This added energy will help you stay on task and get more done.
You need this energy and optimism to navigate the frequent setbacks and obstacles of PPC marketing. You’ll have the drive to keep moving progress forward, even after a temporary failure.
Your attitude either drives you or defeats you!
Successful PPC marketing takes persistence and continuous improvement. It is not a sprint, but a marathon.
As an energized optimist, you have the drive to keep going and improving your accounts. You understand that one step back can quickly be replaced by two forward, as long as you work for it.
This is precisely the attitude you need to produce long-term, exponential growth.
There’s a common misconception that progress stacks incrementally. Let’s say your goal is to acquire 100 new customers through PPC ads by the end of the year.
At the midpoint, you’ve only managed to acquire 30. With a short-term, incremental mindset, you assume that you’re going to fall short of your year-end goal. You should have 50 new customers by now!
This makes sense, right? If you have to drive to a destination an hour away, you should be halfway there in 30 mins.
The problem is that growth isn’t finite, like distance. The longer you work towards progress, the faster growth occurs.
Even though you’ve only accrued 30 customers at the midpoint, the exponential curve makes it possible to generate 70 more in the second half of the year.
You need the energy and optimism of positive thinking to maintain the course long enough to experience this exponential progress.
We’ve established that being positive is one of the things that makes an advertiser effective. Staying on the positivity track, however, is easier said than done.
Again, there is a natural inclination to focus on failures over successes. In the early stages of managing a new PPC campaign, you’re going to experience many shortcomings.
In this section, we’ll look at some tips to help you maintain positive thinking.
PPC managers are often juggling multiple goals and objectives at once. Each campaign typically has its own purpose or mission.
Between all of these objectives, it can be easy to lose focus or forget what you want to achieve. Not to mention, your goals can change as time goes on.
Before creating or editing your campaigns, take some time to reflect and address the mental side of things. Address what your goals are and how you plan to accomplish them.
Also, take a mental inventory of your attitude and mindset. How do you feel about your goals and planning? If you find yourself in a negative mood, try to look for ways to shift that thinking.
No one is perfect and mistakes are bound to happen, especially in advertising. As mentioned, every failure or mistake can be a possible learning opportunity.
What makes an advertiser effective is their ability to make the most from even the worst failures. It’s how you handle mistakes that matters.
Address why the mistake happened, what metrics and dimensions are involved and how you can resolve it.
Once the problem is fixed, move on. The longer you linger on your failures, the more that negative attitude starts to creep up.
Your daily workload can get out of hand quickly, especially if you’re managing a huge Google Ads account.
When this happens, it is easy to become overwhelmed and tired. Fatigue starts to set in and you lose that vital energy and optimism you need to stay positive.
Be sure to make room in your schedule for yourself. Take time to regroup, relax and reassess your progress.
There are plenty of productivity and time management tools that can help you optimize your day and alleviate your routine stress.
In PPC marketing, change is a double-edged sword. On the one side, change creates opportunities to improve your campaigns and grow your success.
However, change also creates problems and obstacles. The majority of your time as a PPC marketer is spent managing changes in your account.
If you don’t pay attention to these shifts, trends and other fluctuations, it can cause serious problems. An unexpected change to even one of your best campaigns can cripple performance.
You have to be ready for these changes and prepared to adapt. If you shy away from change, you’ll be left behind by the competition.
Managing a PPC account is a massive undertaking. There are so many possible changes happening all at once. It’s a battle just to stay on top of it all!
Your campaigns always need attention. There is never a point where you can set a strategy and forget it.
This puts tremendous pressure on you as the manager. That pressure becomes a breeding ground for negative feelings and thinking.
Not only is it difficult to detect all of these constant changes, but it’s also frustrating to determine which ones need the most attention. In other words, what changes matter to your success?
This is where PPC Signal shines.
PPC Signal is a Google Ads management tool that uses AI and machine learning to automatically detect, analyze and present noteworthy changes in your account.
As a manager, this means that you no longer have to spend countless hours monitoring your data for changes. PPC Signal does it for you.
Every change that the system detects and determines is significant, whether positive or negative, appears on the PPC Signal dashboard. The total number of active signals appears at the top of the page.
On the left side, there are filtering options to sort your signals by account, campaign, ad group, keyword, location, device, time, metric, quality and type.
For instance, you could filter your signals to only show changes that pertain to CTR.
Let’s take a closer look at a signal to see what information is included.
You can click the Explore button at the bottom to see an expanded view of the data.
This easy-to-use system allows you to better maintain the positive mindset that is so crucial for PPC success.
You’re always going to have negative changes impacting your campaigns. PPC Signal brings these risks front-and-center so you can resolve them promptly.
If you aren’t sure how to fix the problem, the tool even recommends an action. This means that you always have ways to improve your account.
You never have to dwell on your mistakes or failures because PPC Signal maps out the road to resolving any downturn your account faces.
This means that you can focus 100% of your time and attention on making improvements and growing your success.
Even if you set out to resolve just one or two signals a day, it will begin to build that exponential progress that you need.
You’ll minimize your risks, maximize your opportunities and build a winning account that competitors won’t be able to reach!
A positive state of mind is what makes an advertiser successful in the PPC industry. It’s something that you need to work at consistently to maintain.
Every so often, you need to evaluate your mental state and take charge of your thoughts, attitudes and habits. Are you staying motivated and positive?
Or, are you allowing negativity and failure to infect your thought process and create a self-defeating attitude?
PPC Signal is dedicated to improving your management processes, but it also helps you maintain this positive attitude.
By consistently providing you with signals and opportunities for improvements, you won’t have time to focus on your mistakes.
You’ll be too busy making positive changes to your campaigns that build unbeatable growth!
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