4 Benefits of Hiring a PPC Consultant
4 Benefits of Hiring a PPC Consultant
While the process of setting up a PPC campaign may seem straightforward, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll achieve success quickly. PPC consultants have years of expertise in the field and understand how to optimize advertisements for the greatest return-on-investment (ROI). Companies wary of entering the PPC world should consider approaching a PPC consultant for strategic direction.
For those without a strategic plan or experience, PPC can cost a business wasted ad spend. Many common pitfalls prevent success with PPC campaigns, often resulting from inexperience in the field.
There are tons of factors to consider when developing a PPC campaign, including keyword research, ad relevance, bidding challenges, landing page quality, low CTR (click-through rate), and more.
You’ll likely run into at least one of these challenges when trying to set up PPC campaigns on your own, so it may be beneficial to leave these critical technical elements to a seasoned team of PPC consultants.
View The Manifest’s list of vetted PPC professionals.
4 Benefits of Hiring a PPC Consultant
- Cohesive, cross-platform planning that makes strong ads
- Traffic that leads to conversions
- Thoughtful budget allocation that saves you money
- Iterative, quick strategy adjustments that save you time
A PPC consultant can inform your entire PPC strategy and provide essential insights into how to appeal to your intended audience in the digital space.
Craft a Holistic Plan Across Platforms
Hiring a PPC consultant or team to examine and advise on your PPC strategy will help your efforts become more cohesive.
When constructing your PPC budget and strategy, you’ll have to account for a multi-platform approach to reach a broad audience. PPC consultants understand how to integrate and execute a PPC effort across search engines and social media platforms.
Companies can invest in paid advertising in countless places online, including:
- Google (search and display network)
- Microsoft (formerly Bing Ads) (search and display network)
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Snapchat
- Quora
- Pintrest
- Amazon
- Mobile in-app
- Taboola
- Spotify
- Pandora
Ads on different platforms have different sets of requirements. For instance, the cost for targeting something on Facebook may not look the same as targeting the same attribute on TikTok.
Additionally, most ads on social media require visual components, while search engine text ads only need ad copy. For example, if someone searches for “wedding flowers” on Google, they’re going to be met with a series of ads on the top of the first page of search results.
Much like organic search results, these are text-first and include a link to a landing page. They’re marked as advertisements with the word “Ad” at the top left of the listing.
What you don’t see is the back-end efforts required to ensure your ads are showing up in the right place, at the right time, to the right people. From regularly performing negative keyword audits to manually adjusting bids to zipcode geofencing—a PPC campaign requires constant monitoring and attention to detail.
Social media ads, on the other hand, require heavy lifting on the design side. Depending on the platform you choose for your ad, you will likely need to include photos, graphics, or video content that abide by specific platform dimensions for optimal placement.
The video-sharing platform, TikTok, is a space for paid ads that are videos.
Source: TikTok
These video ads come up organically in a targeted audience’s “For You Page” along with captions, a subscribe button, and other features of a typical TikTok video.
Paid ads on Google and TikTok appear very differently and require different inputs, but that doesn’t mean that companies should shy away from the benefits of attracting audiences across channels or from engaging in a multi-platform approach.
While these nuances may seem complicated, PPC consultants offer years of experience to your company. By paring market research in your industry with their own expertise, they’ll contribute to business growth.
PPC agencies understand how to piece together a holistic strategy that includes most platforms in order to achieve desired results.
Ensure Traffic Generates Conversions
Anyone can set up an ad campaign via Google Ads and drive some additional traffic to a website. However, if that traffic doesn’t convert, you’re spending money connecting with the wrong audience.
Experienced PPC consultants understand your main goals for ad campaigns are conversions at the lowest cost possible and that many factors contribute to funneling the right traffic to the most effective landing pages.
For instance, all PPC campaigns consist of these crucial elements:
- Enticing ad copy
- Engaging graphics or visuals
- Target keywords
- Focus on a target audience
- Strategic budget allocation
- Functional landing page optimized for maximum conversions
Users you have targeted with the ad are meant to be intrigued by the ad copy and imagery, leading them to click through to a relevant landing page to inspire a purchase. Aligning all of these efforts is no small task.
Put simply, PPC experts pair the right keywords, copy, and landing page together to reach intended audiences at the right place in the marketing funnel.
Source: Sprout Social
Users look up search terms at different stages in the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. The further down the funnel, the closer the user is to purchasing something.
It’s important to note that each customer has different needs at different stages of the funnel. Companies must reflect these needs in their advertisements to ensure qualified leads and traffic to their landing pages.
An experienced team of PPC consultants can hit the ground running—saving you precious time, money and frustration.
Optimize Your Budget
One of the most daunting parts of working on PPC campaigns is maintaining a thoughtful, practical, and intentional budget.
While PPC tends to work more quickly than other digital marketing activities such as SEO, it’s also easy to lose money to ineffective advertisements. Additionally, there are several ways to spend your advertising budget, some common terms include:
- Social Media Ads
- CPM (Cost Per Mille): the price of 1,000 impressions on an advertisement
- CPC (Cost Per Click): the price of each click on an advertisement
- oCPM (Optimized Cost Per Mille): the price of 1,00 impressions on an ad to a targeted audience that’s more likely to click on the content
- Search Engine Ads
- CPA (Cost Per Action): the price of a user taking specific action concerning an advertisement
- ECPC (Enhanced Cost Per Click): the price of a user’s click in an automated system that adjusts your bids for clicks that are more likely to lead to conversions
Not to mention numerous bid strategies which differ depending on the type of campaign running. It’s challenging to know which bid strategy to pick without an experienced PPC expert in your corner.
For example, automated bidding is a popular, easy option but has several pros and cons of its own (spoiler, Google wants you to choose this option more often than not).
Managing a budget with different bidding strategies across various platforms can turn into a job of its own. That’s one area in which a PPC consultant can be beneficial in optimizing and properly allocating your budget across campaigns. With their help, you can start decreasing spending while increasing conversions.
Make Quick Strategic Adjustments
Even for people with experience in paid advertising, it’s doubtful your strategy will be 100% perfect on your first try with a new campaign. That means you’ll need to tweak and optimize it over time.
Hiring a PPC team dedicated to tracking your campaigns' continued success is a great way to make sure your PPC efforts are genuinely iterative. Further, while they’re optimizing your PPC program, you can put all of your time into running your business.
It’s easy to adjust PPC elements on industry-standard tools such as Google Ads, but that isn’t helpful if you don’t know what you’re modifying and the potential ramifications.
Having an expert to make the adjustments is most efficient and less risky. A dedicated PPC team will also track performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) and make thoughtful changes much more quickly.
Additionally, a PPC consultant can offer tactics such as split testing or AB testing that make iterative campaigns feel seamless.
In a split test, the team will make several different iterations of the same advertisement. One key component of the original ad is adapted in each version, allowing your team to track audience preferences all at once.
According to digital marketing agency JEMSU, “A lot of people think testing in Google ads – or any platform at that – consists of just making a separate campaign, ad group, or ad with the changes they want to test. It’s not that simple. You have to use the split testing options that Google provides properly to ensure that the system tests both sides equally and independently from each other.”
Experts recommend that once you find out which ad is the most effective, immediately increase your investment in that ad to avoid ad fatigue.
Strategies like split testing will help PPC teams make effective changes to your campaign using metrics and data to guide decisions. In these efforts, PPC consultants are not only strategic thinkers but huge time-savers for your team.
A PPC Consultant is an Asset To Digital Marketing Efforts
PPC is more complex than it may seem at first glance. Tons of challenges wind up losing companies money. PPC agencies can prevent high costs and boost businesses’ ROAS (return on ad spend) by following industry best practices.
Companies without much experience in paid advertising online should consult with a PPC expert on crafting a solid plan before moving into the execution stage too early. That way, you’ll feel confident with both the PPC consultant and strategic plan from the very beginning.
Additional Reading
