Would you like to start generating leads and sales without the long delays involved in establishing an SEO or PR campaign? Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) can bring in new business in hours, making it a great choice for quickly increasing your sales.

From Facebook Ads to Google AdWords, today’s top PPC advertising platforms are designed both for experts and for beginner advertisers, making it tempting to think your campaign is best when you manage it personally.

However, unless you’re a PPC expert, running your campaign on your own could end up costing you more – both financially and in terms of time – than hiring an agency to manage your company’s PPC account on your behalf.

In this post, we’ll look at eight of the pitfalls of trying to build and manage your own PPC campaign, from overpaying for a bad ad position to targeting keywords that are much less lucrative than they appear to be.

Building (and managing) a PPC campaign is a time consuming task

PPC has a reputation among online marketers as a hands-off marketing channel. A successful PPC campaign can, according to many people, continue to bring in leads without the constant tinkering that other marketing channels require.

While this is sometimes true, it’s generally not the case. PPC campaigns in smaller, less competitive industries can often run with very little management once they’re built and optimised, but campaigns in competitive industries require a lot of work.

From adjusting bids to making sure you’re ahead of your competitors to tweaking your ad and landing page copy for optimum Quality Score, a PPC campaign needs a lot of care, attention and analysis in order to be successful.

Add in conversion tracking, calculating return on investment, managing hundreds (or even thousands) of different keywords and you’ve got a full time job – one that’s best handled by an experienced PPC expert.

You might know a little, but a little knowledge can be dangerous

From frequency caps to keyword match types, there’s a lot more to PPC than many people think. Knowing a little might help you set up a very simple campaign, but it could cost you a lot when you need to run a large PPC campaign for your business.

PPC agencies have experienced staff with a wealth of knowledge on every aspect of digital advertising, from simple things like designing great creatives to the best way to bid on a certain platform. When you hire them, you get all of this experience.

Working with an agency gives you a dedicated account manager

Google’s support for small AdWords advertisers is infamously unhelpful. While the AdWords help documentation offers detailed information on most topics, it doesn’t cover everything, leaving you in the dark when you run into a campaign problem.

PPC agencies often have dedicated account managers at Google, Facebook and other online advertising platforms that they can call on for assistance, insights and tweaks to your campaigns.

This means that when your campaign runs into an issue, it’s solved after a quick and simple phone call, saving you hours of searching the AdWords forums for an answer from a Google rep or another advertiser.

Many PPC platforms push you into paying more than you should

There’s no need to target hundreds of broad match keywords in order to get traffic on AdWords. Likewise, you don’t always need to bid using Facebook’s suggested bid price to get impressions for your Facebook Ad.

Many PPC platforms are designed to encourage users to bid above the market price, increasing their average CPC and reducing their campaign’s performance. When you bid high, you do get more visibility, but it comes at a significant cost.

When you work with a PPC agency, you’ll work with people that know the ins and outs of each PPC platform, letting them maximise the amount of traffic you get at a far lower CPC or CPM than Google or Facebook’s recommendation.

An expert can help you grab the top spot for less than the second

Think you need to bid high to get the top ad position on AdWords? Not so. With the right clickthrough rate and Quality Score, it’s possible to grab the top spot without bidding more than your competitors.

Creating effective ads and landing pages is both an art and a science. While you may know your product better than anyone else, it’s highly likely that a PPC expert will be able to think up a more effective way to write your ads for optimum CTR.

PPC is acronym central, so prepare to start reading and learning

From CPC and CPA to CTR, CPM, SEM, SERP and more, the digital advertising world is full of acronyms. While some of these are easy to understand, others will usually leave you scratching your head and frantically searching Google for an answer.

In some cases. mistaking one acronym for another can cost you a significant amount of money. Mistake CPM for CPC and you could end up paying three times the market price to buy impressions for an ad with an abysmal click-through rate.

Unless you like spending hours researching the difference between ROS and RON – one is targeted, the other is anything but targeted – it’s best to give control of your PPC campaign to the experts.

Today’s PPC platforms are far more complex than they used to be

When it first launched, Google AdWords was a simple advertising platform that let you do one thing: buy ads alongside searches. Today, it’s a search network, a mobile ad network, a display network, a video ad network and lots more.

Likewise, Facebook Ads has morphed from a simple CPM platform for sidebar ads into a hugely powerful and complicated marketing platform offering Newsfeed ads, sidebar ads, conversion tracking, custom audiences and hundreds of other features.

Every year, PPC advertising gets more and more complicated. One wrong setting – whether it’s choosing the wrong keyword match type or targeting mobile users by mistake – could cut your campaign’s conversion rate to a fraction of its potential.

 

Going “cheap” on your PPC campaign can be incredibly expensive

In PPC, more traffic isn’t always better. If you’ve only just started your campaign and haven’t yet removed ineffective keywords or display placements, every click you get is costing you money.

Going “cheap” on your PPC campaign and managing everything yourself often costs you far more than hiring an agency. Target the wrong keywords with a high budget and you’ll spend more in one day than it would cost to hire an agency for a month.

From adding the right negative keywords to choosing the right match type for your campaign, a PPC agency will take care of the essentials before your campaign goes live, saving you hundreds (or even thousands) of pounds in non-converting clicks.

 

If you’d like to speak to one of our PPC experts get in touch today.