Internet marketing or digital marketing as it is called now – it’s simple to get into but can be extremely difficult to master. And that mastery comes with a steep price – a whole lot of your time. Can you afford to spend all of that time learning the ins and outs of internet marketing while you’re running your business at the same time? Or would you be better off partnering up with a freelance PPC manager?
WHAT IS PPC ADVERTISING?
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. Pay-Per-Click ads are online advertisements that your business pays for, as opposed to unpaid business-boosters like SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
If you’ve been on the internet, you’ve seen PPC ads. You know when you do a search on Google (or other search engines) and the top responses have the word “Ad” in bold beside them? Those are PPC ads – businesses are paying Google to put them at the top of the search results, in the hope that you’ll click through to their websites.
Or if you’ve been on a website that has a little advertisement on the side, usually with a picture of a product or a service, that’s likely a PPC ad in the form of a display advertisement too.
Using the Pay-Per-Click model, every time an ad is clicked, your business (or another PPC advertising business) pays Google for that click. The cost per click can be anything from a few cents to a few dollars, depending on the competition of the industry.
Sounds pretty easy right? But here’s the catch – expertly targeted PPC ads have a much higher chance of inviting in viewers who will not only click through but convert into paying customers.
That’s where your friendly neighbourhood freelance PPC manager can swoop in and save the day (and translate your advertising cents into some major transaction dollars).
WHAT DOES A FREELANCE PPC MANAGER DO FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
A freelance PPC manager gives you two instant benefits that will help you build your business.
First, they turn your shotgun approach to internet marketing into a sniper rifle, doing the in-depth research required to really focus your ad campaign on viewers who will actually make a purchase, based on campaign data and a list of their best practices.
Second, they save you a metric ton of time.
There are ample free resources and Google Ads guides available to learn how to set up PPC campaigns for small businesses, and there are even free digital marketing tools accessible for startups, but these methods require a learning curve and a substantial amount of time investment.
A proper PPC campaign that is set up for best performance requires extensive research, planning, strategy, execution, optimization and testing. Not easy to do when you’re also the CEO of your baby blossoming business.
ENGAGING & DRIVING SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC QUICKLY
Search engine traffic is extremely valuable to businesses. Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and any other search engine you’d care to name all have their own algorithms that decide what pops up on the first page when a user does a search.
This process by which digital marketing specialists optimize for the search engine algorithms is what is usually referred to as SEO (search engine optimization). It is a length process which requires consistent maintenance efforts.
That is why most small businesses, specially brick and mortar businesses, cannot wait idly for the efforts of SEO to bring in organic search traffic, as it sometimes simply takes too long.
If you need speed, a freelance PPC manager or PPC specialist can get the campaigns built and running in only a few days.
DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF
Even though PPC ads can sometimes cost as little as a few cents per click, they can still add up. Obviously, you want to get the most bang for your advertising buck.
A freelance PPC manager gives your money muscle by keeping a sharp eye on how your budget is being spent. To do that, they keep track of a number of factors including:
Keyword Bids – Keyword bids are how much you are willing to pay to have your ad show up when someone does a search relevant to your business (based on the key words in the search). The higher the bid, the more likely you are to nab one of those coveted top spots in the search returns.
It’s kind of like an auction. Your freelance PPC manager is the person doing the bidding on your behalf. But it’s not just about throwing out numbers. A good manager will know when it’s no longer worth it to compete for a specific keyword because even if a viewer clicks through they A) likely won’t buy or B) even if they do buy something it won’t be a good return on investment.
On the flip-side, they’re also going to have noted when a bid at the low end of the price scale isn’t worth the cost because the connection between the keyword and your business is tenuous and is unlikely to lead to a sale.
Quality Score – Quality score is a Google thing (Google being the biggest of the search engines by far). It’s essentially Google’s way of rating how much they trust that your ads are pertinent to the keywords of searches. The higher the relevance of your ads to the searches, the higher your ad will rank and the less the clicks will cost.
Your freelance PPC manager will design your internet marketing campaign to max out your quality score. They do this by tweaking your ads to achieve higher click-through rates from viewers doing a search with the selected key words. This is the most important factor in Google’s ranking system.
Your PPC manager will also make sure that the page the click-throughs lead to (called a “landing page”) will be highly relevant.
Additionally, they’ll make sure the text of the ad itself is stuffed full of relevant goodness.
And they’ll keep your business’ overall advertising account with Google Ads in good standing.
Impression Share – An impression share is the statistic that shows how many times your ad showed up in relation to how many times a keyword you’re competing for was used in a search.
Let’s say you’ve opened a vegan catering company called Meatless In Seattle (which is weird because you’re based in Wyoming). You’ve decided to compete for the keyword phrase “vegan party platters”. The impression share statistics show that “vegan party platters” was used in searches 5,000 times in the past week. But your business’ PPC ad was only displayed in the results for 200 of those searches, or 4%. Woof, not good.
Your freelance PPC manager is going to tweak and modify and fix your advertisements until they’re gaining an impression of at least 80%, and preferably an impression somewhere above 90%.
Speaking of keywords…
Keywords – A freelance PPC manager helps you focus your advertising budget on keywords and phrases that paying clients are the most likely to use in their searches.
Search engines rank keywords by competition – Low, Medium, and High. Your manager will sort through these categories and decide which phrases are most likely to convert your internet marketing budget into paid conversions.
These keyword lists can be huge, and it can become quite the balancing act to figure out which words to hit with which ads at which times.
AND SO MUCH MORE
Honestly, the stuff we’ve outlined here is just the beginning. There are other factors like “Managed Placements” (where you deliberately place ads in Google-approved sites as opposed to letting Google do it automatically), layered targeting, dayparting, negative keywords, split testing, conversion tracking, and on and on and on.
It’s a jungle full of metrics and terms that digital marketing nerds say to each other at the bar before they head home to cry themselves to sleep. But here’s the thing – it’s not just lingo, it all matters.
Can you run a highly targeted PPC campaigns and run your business at the same time? Maybe. But you will in essence be doing two full-time jobs at once. If you do decide to outsource the work, hiring the right professionals will allow the experts and specialists in the digital advertising field to optimize your campaigns for your business.
And that’s what makes partnering with a freelance PPC manager so worthwhile. Their expertise doesn’t just help create a killer advertising campaign. It also frees you up to concentrate on your passion – building your business.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK QUESTIONS
We’re here to help! Even if you’re not sure you want to partner up with a freelance PPC manager quite yet, we’d still be happy to help gently ease you into the whimsical world of PPC advertising. So if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
