PPC Management Company or not? How to Crush 90% of Competition on Google.

Pay Per Click advertising is an interactive marketing medium, This means you must actively participate! Running PPC Advertising in Competitive Industries is hard work and ultimately you get out, what you put in. Just like everything else in life, results oriented activity is very important. No sports team ever won the super bowl or the World Series without doing some work. And you are not going to “smoke” your competition without some investment. Those that are successful are typically using a PPC Management Company. But lets get into the details how it works and how you can do it on your own.

1. You'll need to use tools to help manage, update, research, track, and interpret results. Some of these tools we use for Search Engine Marketing includes wordstream , ispionage, semrush, and adwords editor.

2. Successful advertisers are active in their account performing and working towards specific goals. Such goals include things as increase conversions by x% or removing account waste by adding negative keywords, or increasing the Click through Rate (CTR) by x %, or landing page creation.

3. Success is about being relevant. Your ads must match your keywords, and the respective landing pages. The more relevant your advertising, the better the CTR, the higher your quality score, the lower your ad spend, and finally the higher your Return on Investment (ROI).

4. Success comes from being action oriented, not endless interpretation of data. The PPC winners look at the data, and reports and quickly move on what they think that it means. Sometimes they’re right, and sometime not. The mistakes are discovered and then corrected. It is important that you keep moving forward.

5. Success comes from continue keyword discovery, finding new keywords that convert and killing keywords that are poor converters, eat up your ad spend, or damage your click through rate (CTR).

6. The winners make a plan and work it, little by little. Their accounts and advertising rise to the top in the PPC rankings for less money than the competitors, and convert more sales. Less than 10% of PPC advertisers achieve this kind of success and the irony is that it is available to all advertisers and at every spend level.

NO… not everyone can win the Superbowl, you need a lot of God given talent, some luck and a ton of hard work. However, the playing field is level for PPC, every account starts at the same place and anyone can master the tools, the research, and the follow up. All you need is some hard work. SO how to you start winning PPC campaign? Well the starting isn’t that hard, but the first thing we would do is look at your current business and break it down into all the individual services you provide and then identify your best customer. Now all of these thoughts are important because they give you clues to the keywords you need to use.

The best way to start is to use Google’s keyword tool and software like Ispionage .The really neat thing about the spy tools is that they will give you many of your competitor’s keywords and corresponding ads! Now a good portion of your work is done, but don’t copy any one competitor’s setup. You see most advertisers, over 90% in fact have some serious flaws in the advertising.( why do you think Google makes so much money?) Most PPC accounts have at least 30% to 50% waste in the setup! No we’re not exaggerating! Ok so now you have your services and your competitor’s ads, so what is next?

Well, Google PPC is broken down into Campaigns and Sub Campaigns (called adgroups) Next you write your add, set your bid price and lastly your negative keyword list. We haven’t spoken about this before but negative keywords are just as important as regular keywords. You see Google uses various matching types for its keywords. The default setting, Broad Match, will trigger your ad for search terms that are barely similar to your keywords. One of the most important rules for PPC advertising is to only show your ad to people that are most likely to need your services. Otherwise it wastes your money. Even if your ad doesn’t get clicked, this scenario will cause problems. If you ads aren’t relevant to the search term don’t get clicks, then that costs Google money (opportunity cost of showing your ad verses some else’s ad that is more relevant). So if you ad doesn’t get clicked enough times in Google’s eyes, then they will hit your account with a penalty in the form of a poor quality score. This score drives up the cost of your related advertising.

So after the campaign is setup, go back in and put in some obvious terns that you don’t want such as “do it yourself” or how to guide, or tips. They easiest (but not the fastest way to find good negative terms is to use Google’s predictive text feature on their home page. Now what you need to do is repeat this process for every service you offer. When this is all done we recommend some conversion tracking. The built in tools that come with adwords are a great start, we personally swear by the search query reports. But you can also setup conversion tracking for when someone completes a task on your website, like submitting a contact form, or even calling the phone number. Conversion tracking helps you find out what keywords are performing and what’s just costing you money. For Conversion tracking we personally use marchex call analytics, If By Phone (www.ifbyphone.com), and Google Analytics. There are many other 3rd party solutions on the market and many are just fine. The important thing is that your track your results and use the info to update the account. Finally repeat the steps above consistently and your on our way to succeeding!