Strategy Digital Advertising

Why Hire an Agency to Manage Your PPC Campaigns

connor
Written by Connor Brown
on 28 Jun 2019

The online world is noisy. And although you have something great to offer your potential customers, it can difficult to be heard. So one-way businesses capture attention online, is by ‘buying’ traffic with ads online.

Buying traffic allows businesses to break through the noise. But more importantly, to break through the rest of the messages people receive across a multitude of channels. Advertising channels include but are not limited to Google Search/Display, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

One of the most difficult things to do is make sure that your ads are shown at the right time, in the right place, to the right people.

You can manage this yourself if you have an understanding of how the different ad platforms work and a knack for visual design/ad copy. Or, you can engage a marketing agency which offers a PPC service as part of its services.

All business owners appreciate that they need to see some result from their advertising spend. for this reason, it literally pays to put your budget in the hands of professionals whose job it is to do so.

Agencies manage tens of thousands of dollars spend each month for a portfolio of clients. With this comes a huge benefit for yourself as an individual business. Rather than using your budget to test what works and what doesn’t, an agency can apply what they’ve learned over years of PPC management and apply it’s learnings directly to your situation.

If you have an understanding of the different ways to set up campaigns across the different platforms you can start straight away.

(Read: The Facebook Ads Setup Proven To Boost Your Leads & Sales)

However, many businesses don’t have a dedicated employee for ads and often the owner won’t have time to do it themselves. Handballing the research, set up, graphic design, ad copywriting, targeting audience research, settings, etc onto a digital agency is what some would call a ‘smart move’.

What to expect

Reset Foundations
When you first talk with an agency they will want to talk about target markets and your products/services. But they will also want to talk about how your paid strategy works in with your sales process as a whole.

Paying for traffic is all well and good, but if no-one is taking action when they get to your website because it’s broken or the offer isn’t attractive, it can thwart even the soundest paid search campaign.

Factors like page speed, technical issues, aesthetics and structure can impact the campaign.

Pro Tip: We always recommend having a dedicated landing page where we create a ‘controlled’ environment for paid traffic visitors. This gives visitors the best chance of converting after clicking on a paid ad.

Tracking
Agencies have robust systems for tracking their clients’ campaigns. One metric they like is conversion tracking. They would use conversion tracking as a KPI for their success so they can tell what’s working in your campaign.

Utilize your own development team to implement the tracking code across your site/landing pages or lean on the agency who should be able to lead you through how to set it up properly.

campaign performance-1

Setting goals & budget
In the first meeting, an agency will want to know what your goal is and what budget you have set aside to achieve that goal. There are some minimum requirements in regards to spending. So in your meeting, an agency will likely recommend a best-spend based on your goals. But it’s often good if you come in prepared with a figure that you’re comfortable spending.

When setting goals, it’s never a bad idea to see what results are standard for your industry. But at the same time, recognize that every product, service, and business is different.

Both the business and agency should do due diligence on which paid traffic channels are most likely to generate results within a margin that makes it worthwhile.

If you track leads generated instead of sales, you should endeavor to understand how much each lead is worth to your business.

Keywords
If you’re planning on running ads through Google search, an agency may be more than happy to do the keyword research (which keywords your paid campaign will target).

However, if you have several different or similar products/services, it’s a good idea to help them understand which is a priority.

Plan a couple of months ahead
The timing of the start of a new engagement is critical. An e-commerce company, for example, might not want to start work with a new agency in Q4 when holiday sales can make or break their annual results.

An agency needs to build in a buffer for onboarding and ensure that they have an adequate runway to make necessary changes to the account before the client’s busy time of the year begins.

Conclusion

Hiring a PPC agency is like hiring a tour guide in a foreign country.

  • You may not speak the language, but they appreciate you trying
  • You may have an idea of what you’d like to do, but it’s best to let them show you around
  • It gives you extra insight, companionship, and a little more security
  • They’ll make sure you get the most out of the experience

Make sure to contact us if you’re looking to get started with your PPC campaigns. We’d love to hear from you!

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