PPC Advertising Management Process Guide for Ads That Actually Convert

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising reaps a ton of benefits for your brand so long as you have a smooth PPC management process, to begin with.

For one, a good PPC management process helps you create cost-effective campaigns; delivering more value for your ad spend. Another is that it helps you create more meaningful ad experiences for your audience who, in turn, will reward you with more engagements.

On the other hand, approaching PPC management in a disorganized fashion can result not just in a massive waste of resources, and turn away your audiences.

Don’t let your business fall into the latter category. As a veteran PPC advertising management agency, we’re to provide you with a data-driven process that has reaped massive returns for our clients.

What is PPC advertising management?

Pay-per-click advertising management, in its simplest form, is a practice of overseeing your paid campaigns online. This encompasses the budget, ad executions, testing, optimization, and reporting.

You can have an in-house team doing this, or enlist the help of an expert PPC agency to handle your PPC campaigns ensures your company makes data-informed decisions that will drive you to achieve more consistent results for business growth.

This strategy allows you to make the most out of your PPC ads without breaking the bank.

The data-driven PPC advertising management process

At Propelrr, we don’t do anything unguided by your goals and objectives. Be it for our own organization or yours, you can trust that our process will always begin with setting and aligning goals.

What follows that goal-setting is more meticulous steps that are outlined and expanded on by our PPC team lead Paul Delgado, and the Propelrr PPC team.

1. Identify your objectives and goal.
2. Research your target market and their behavior.
3. Segment your target audience.
4. Define your channels and targeting.
5. Create targeted ad copies and landing pages.
6. Set up analytics and data tracking.
7. Conduct performance and data analysis.
8. Optimize your campaigns to meet set objectives.
9. Continuous review and optimization.

Data-driven PPC Management Process. Does the process in your business or that of your partner agencies look similar? Or are there steps that are missing in it? If it’s the latter, you’ll have to begin questioning if it’s been effective in meeting your PPC advertising goals. And if the answer to that is no, then let me urge you to read on. Photo by Propelrr.

1. Identify your objectives and goals.

To reiterate: The first thing that you need for your PPC management process is to determine your objectives and goals.

Pursuing a PPC campaign without clear objectives and goals increases your chances of failure, while guided strategies are more likely to succeed. You’ll want to ensure that you’re not tipping towards the former as paid advertising entails costs – and great ones, at that.

“Asking the most important KPIs for your business and foreseeing the outcome you want to achieve.”
– Paul John Delgado, Propelrr PPC team lead

Every penny counts in the tough and competitive field of digital marketing and advertising. And having these goals will help you direct not just your initial steps, but also actions you need to take when met with hurdles.

Paul suggests that you start with this step by “asking the most important KPIs for your business and foreseeing the outcome you want to achieve.”

These priority KPIs and envisioned results will then help you to identify more specific objectives and actions that would help your specialists come up with accurate and effective campaigns for your business.

It pays to practice being a data-driven marketer in this step – look into your customer, company, and industry data, to help craft sound goals. Doing this inspection will put things into perspective and validate whether or not your goals are relevant to your internal and external stakeholders.

In short, don’t skimp out on doing your audits and market research.

2. Research your market and their behavior.

Second, and in connection to the previous step, is doing research into your target market.

This step is where you should care to be meticulous and uncover information about your audiences that can help you target your campaigns. Remember that, your campaigns should make sense to them, above all. Your main task here should be to uncover pain points, needs, and desires – essentially feelings – that are strong enough to compel them to act.

Knowing your customer is powerful. You can anchor your campaigns based on their values or on the [buying] stage they’re in.
– Paul Delgado, PPC Team Lead for Propelrr

If you’re advertising to loyal customers whom you’ve found out already have a feeling of familiarity with your brand, this will cue you into developing conversion copies that pique on that feeling of closeness. But you can only truly find out how best to communicate with them if you conduct the necessary research.

An understanding of the psychology in advertising demonstrates the importance of understanding your customers’ behavior in this.

After you’ve conducted thorough research, you’ll actually be able to uncover information beyond that from your primary target market. After the process, you should be able to identify three key audiences you can potentially target in this sequence as per the team’s recommendation:

• Define your core audience. This is a must-have as we are targeting customers who are possibly interested in your brand and what it has to offer.
• Identify your loyal customers. These can be verified through your customer or lead generation lists, and website visitor data. Since these customers are the most likely to generate repeat conversions, we will want to target them first.
• Target lookalike audience. As per definition, these are new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they share similar characteristics to your existing loyal customers. In this way, we can target new audiences we haven’t reached yet, as long as we have deep insights into our existing or loyal customers.

As a final note to stress the importance of knowing your target market’s behavior, Paul asserts that “knowing your customer is powerful. You can anchor your campaigns based on their values, on the [buying] stage they’re in, etc. it takes a lot of data and analysis to understand your customer.”

3. Segment your target audience.

After doing your research, market segmentation is the next step in your PPC management process. Segmentation, as the name suggests, is categorizing your target market into smaller, specific groups of audiences.

Although it’s far easier to just go broad in terms of audience targeting, this is not advisable as you can end up wasting resources. Paul affirms that segmentation is critical to working and making use of resources more efficiently, and added that:

“We can tailor campaigns to be more personalized to them and [reach them] on the time when they are most likely to make a purchase.”

These ads and ad campaigns deployed and managed accurately, will save you a lot of effort in the long run in the aspect of optimization. Moreover, it also helps you not just win the conversion.

There are different types of marketing segmentation, namely demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic. Understand more about them in this guide and how you can start planning your own marketing segmentation strategy.

4. Define your channels and targeting.

Now that you have segmented your consumers, it’s time to focus on defining your channels and targeting your PPC campaigns. For channel management, you have to pick the exact platforms your target market engages with. For example, if they are active on Facebook, your best bet is running Facebook Ads.

Once you’ve identified your distribution channels, you can then proceed to program your ad targeting for the platform and its users. Targeting helps you gain more conversions, improve your services or products, and build brand loyalty among your different marketing segments.

In this step, make sure to take note of these two tips from the team:

• Always test a portion of your ad. It may be the image copy only, the key visuals, caption, headline, or anything under the sun. Just test 1 every cycle. This is to learn what would be the most engaging ad for our audience. A sample A/B test could be an ad with a shorter caption versus one with a longer caption.
• Check your landing pages if they’re working. The landing page is where your customers will complete the transaction, not the ad. So before deploying ads, always check, double-check, and triple-check, if the landing page for a campaign is appropriate to your ads and is working properly.

BONUS TIP: Read the different ad policies for different platforms. Each platform will have different targeting optimization techniques. Familiarizing yourself with them will help you run more sophisticated ad experiences.

5. Creating targeted ad copies and landing pages.

Here’s where all your efforts for segmentation, channel management, and targeting become more concrete.

Landing pages

In this step, you will begin creating personalized ads and landing pages developed specifically for the campaign. This means you’re not just using page loading speed optimization techniques but other landing page optimization techniques that bring home the conversion. Some items you should be checking off your to-do list for landing page optimization are:

• The headline must have a clear value proposition.
• Copy and content should build credibility and trust.
• The call to action (CTA) should be clear and specific.
• The overall design must be aligned with the brand.
• The landing page content must guarantee security.
• The page design should be convenient to use.
• The page should provide positive feedback.

A note on copywriting

For copies, remember to just keep it simple. Clarity trumps persuasion, after all. Here are a few copywriting formulas that have been proven to work, time and again:

• Problem – Agitate – Solution (PAS). Present a relevant problem or pain point, draw out the need and urgency by providing emotional cues, then provide the solution to follow through on those feelings with action.
• Features – Advantages – Benefit (FAB). Simple and straightforward, this formula involves detailing your product or services’ features (what can you offer), advantages (what makes you different), and benefits (how much would this mean for them).
• Attention – Interest – Desire – Action (AIDA). Begin by capturing the reader’s attention with words that spark their interest. Then, write about what makes your brand interesting. Next, entice them to crave your product or service. And lastly, bring it home by compelling them to take action.

Achieving a seamless transaction with the combined powers of compelling copywriting and efficient landing pages, are sure to get the action your ad intended to instigate.

ADDITIONAL READING: 11 Killer Copywriting Tips You Should Be Doing

6. Set up analytics and data tracking.

Analytics and data tracking help you make data-driven decisions, which then improve your business performance. However, it is not as checking back on your metrics at the end of your campaign. That would be far too late.

That’s because data insights are best gained and put to good use with vigilant monitoring. On that other note, our PPC team recommends that your reports be done monthly, weekly, and even daily. They add that meticulous attention to your ads is needed for checking if you are right on track to meet your goals.

“This [in turn] could help you in optimizing different campaigns. Need to change your bid? Need to change the campaign strategy? Need to review your audience? This [reports] can help for this.”
– Propelrr PPC team

And, above all, don’t make the mistake of forgetting to set up your data analytics tracking. Often, PPC advertisers get stuck in the planning and execution of the ad material, or other aspects of the campaign, and forget to do this.

This will prove to cripple your campaign, as setting up analytics is crucial to monitor the value of your PPC campaigns – whether they’re costing you or earning you results.

7. Conduct performance and data analysis.

In the same light as the previous step, you will need to conduct performance and data analysis to assess your ad’s performance.

Making use of Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, and other PPC advertising tools will help you get this task done. However, we caution you once again to mind that the helpfulness of data still relies on the analytical skills of the person viewing it.

What this simply means is that means you should make sure that the PPC experts you’re working with are able to provide sound and objective insights into your data. And, more importantly, suggest practical and effective actions to build upon your campaigns and overall business.

Ask yourself and your agency partners: Are their opinions on strategies backed by a solid, and scalable digital marketing strategy framework? What is the backbone supporting their claims?

If they can’t turn up an answer in a snap, then that’s not a good sign.

8. Optimize your campaigns to meet set objectives.

You’re at the last leg of your PPC management process! Don’t worry.

So, your campaigns have been deployed. This means you can sit back and watch your campaigns reel in the buck, right? No. Not quite.

“We’ll never know when the competition for bidding will tighten. You might get caught off-guard and see that the cost of the bid shoots up. It’s best to know when these happen through your assessments and prepare accordingly.”
– Propelrr PPC team

From the data you’ve gathered, we mentioned a little something about developing actionable insights, remember? And this step is where you act on those insights and optimize further. To better explain this, let’s turn to some experience-based tips from the team and Paul for working on this step.

Our team explains that the limit of your bid is not quite the end of your campaign. At this stage, he advises that, rather than packing it up and taking the results as is, “you need to assess if you need to increase the bid, change your campaign strategy, or review your audiences.” Is there something that could be done better? Changed? Or replaced so that we get the maximum result possible?

To him, this necessitates a constant thirst for inquiry into your campaigns so that the best results are delivered to the client. He expounds that at the end of the campaign, depending on your budget and other factors, “you can extend this for more conversions and to achieve your set metrics.”

While that advice is good for your current campaigns, the team also suggests you to note that these results can and should inspire and inform your future campaigns.

“We’ll never know when the competition for bidding will tighten. You might get caught off-guard and see that the cost of the bid shoots up. It’s best to know when these happen through your assessments and prepare accordingly.”

It can be overwhelming if you need to make some major adjustments, but always keep an open mind when optimizing your campaigns. Do not let any new information get you down. Rather, use it as an opportunity to come back with even better PPC efforts.

9. Continuous review and optimization.

There is no perfect PPC strategy or technique. But with constant review and optimization, you sure can hit all your brand goals and reach new heights for your business.

Reaching those heights entails a lot of trials and failures before you get the exact results you’re looking for. Hence, you will need a lot of patience and discipline to go through review after review, and optimization after optimization.

To cut your hassles, bank the data you’ve gathered from your campaigns so you have something to build on, rather than always starting from scratch. And, more importantly, develop more sophisticated and relevant campaigns that are twice as effective as your previous ones.

Why is PPC important in digital marketing?

In the right hands, the benefits of running PPC ads can be endless and valuable to businesses. Apart from being an effective tactic for getting instant conversions, PPC can also be used for customer retention strategies; helping boost ROI.

Other benefits of running PPC ads include:

• Gives you more control over your budget and expected returns.
• Results and campaign performance are easily measurable and trackable.
• It provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional media in reaching new audiences.
• Data from your previous PPC campaigns provide data insights that improve succeeding ones.
• Cross-platform advertising allows you to synergize your online channels and touchpoints.

Key takeaways

Dazed by the lengthy process? We understand. But we also hope that you embrace this tedious process as one that is necessary for bringing more success to your organization.

So as we leave you to implement these tips and start getting in some wins, let’s wrap this up with these final reminders on implementing your PPC management processes:

• PPC campaigns actually work, but you need to have a good PPC management process. To get one, seek help from PPC specialists who will guide you through every step of the process. It can be an arduous task so you need all the help you can get.
• High-performing PPC ads are made from a comprehensive PPC process. Take note of tips to improve your campaigns, and do not miss a single step. Each step is crucial in taking your business to the next level.
• Continuous review and optimization need to be done. Discipline yourself into welcoming new information and making adjustments for your campaigns. Maintain loyal customers and gain new audiences with new information that you gather from your brand’s ad performance data.

Looking for extra help in your PPC campaigns? Don’t worry, we got your back! Leave us a message on our Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages, and we are sure to assist you in every step of your PPC efforts.

For in-depth articles on various steps of the PPC management process, make sure to subscribe to the Propelrr newsletter.