PPC, or pay per click, advertising has become a relatively simple and effective way of marketing your business on the web. Essentially, PPC marketing involves advertisers offering a bid on specific keywords that form part of users search terms, in an effort to have their website displayed near the top of search engine results.
There are a lot of articles and sites on line that tell you that you can put up any internet site at home and do everything yourself from the comforts of your own home. They practically tell you that you can build an empire (and earn millions!) from your own home. However, many activities on the Internet just cannot be done alone and that includes Pay per Click management. Here are ten reasons why:
1. Pay per click management should be done by experts. While you could try the do-it-yourself approach, let's face it, competition in the web is just as fierce - you need to have all the advantages that you can get. When you hire a company for pay per click management, you get years of education and skills of professionals behind your campaign. Companies don't shoot their own videos and put them out as commercials, right?
2. Jack of all trades, master of none. If you decide to do everything on your own, you would have to balance everything for your site. You have to write your own content, do backend and technical work, do research, promotions, advertising, and just about everything else that goes along with being a self-employed webmaster - and that includes managing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. Just because it is possible for you to do it doesn't mean that you should. Unfortunately, when webmasters are not able to devote the amount of time to their PPC campaigns as is really needed, overspending or loss of conversions will occur.
3. Campaigns should be checked regularly. Ideally, main campaigns should be checked regularly, that is, at least once a week. This is because you have to check whether there are new advertisers or others have dropped and change your bids accordingly. Remember, competition is fierce, these days. And if you miss your regular monitoring, you end up either paying too much per click or losing your ranking due to underpayment.
4. Keywords must be competitive. Are you the only bidder on your most important keywords? Or are there dozens of other advertisers all vying for the top positions? If you are the only bidder, you usually don't need to actively manage those campaigns, but you do need to notice fairly quickly when new advertisers come on the scene and react to their bids and positioning. And if you need to keep a competitive spot in paid search for your best keywords, you will need to do a lot more daily hand holding in your PPC accounts in order to ensure that your positioning is maintained.
5. Objectivity. Another person looking at your campaign could provide other insight while you could gain focus on the campaign at hand rather than handle pay per click management. Where would you rather spend your time?
6. You need to track those clicks. Do you know which exact keyword landed your visitor to your homepage? Dynamic keyword insertion is essential to your campaign so you should know which keywords sent traffic to your site and how often. You should also be able to spot trends related to keyword searches to secure your ranking.
7. Track your conversions as well. Tracking those incoming keywords is so important because you should know exactly which keywords and not just which campaigns are converting better than others. Without knowing the specific incoming keywords, you can't determine conversions on a keyword by keyword basis. And for pay per click, conversion rate and not click-through rate (CTR), is more important because keywords with the highest click-through rate could actually be the ones that convert the worst. You would be surprised that while one keyword is doing well for you, similar sounding keywords may not and are just actually money pits for your pay per click budgets.
8. Know which PPC engines work for you. You should also know which of the big three search engines - Google, Yahoo or Microsoft- convert better or not as well for you. This is important because knowing which PPC source has the best converting traffic for your particular site can help you adjust where you could spend the least but earn more.
9. Be able to handle problems. Per-pet-click do have problems like click fraud and you should be able to personally contact someone at each of the major pay-per-click companies you are using to get to the bottom of this problem. That is, if you are even able to detect them, in the first place. And unless you have a big business, there account representatives could be hard to come by.
10. You don't have the time. Let's face it, you need somebody else to do your pay per click management simply because you don't have the time to do all the other things stated above and still come up with good copy, networking and experiment with new ad formats. At the end of the day, it is more cost effective for you to run your pay per click business and let somebody else monitor your keywords, search engines and your daily site activities. Just think about how much your time really is.
