Why Hire A Professional Search Engine Marketing Company?

Google Ads & Microsoft Advertising PPC is no longer a simplistic platform. There is so much that goes into research, setup, management, tracking, and reporting of an SEM account. Each step is pivotal in ensuring your account is performing as effectively and efficiently as possible. Below is just a high-level description of what is involved, and in the real world, there is a lot more to this. Doing account setup and management on your own and not through professional will most likely result in wasting a lot of money through irrelevant traffic, not knowing ROI due to lack of tracking being implemented, not having the right keywords, negative keywords or ads setup and many other aspects.

Research The Keywords

In this category, one needs to find out (research) the keywords that need to be used within the account. There are many ways to do this, one of which is using the Google Keyword Tool. This is also where you want to see the average monthly search volume of all keywords being used. Knowing this will allow you to propose daily budgets for the client. For example, If I found that there are 100,000 searches a month of relevant keywords, and estimate that 3% of those queries will result in clicks, that would be a total of 3,000 clicks per month. Then, if the average cost per click is 0.50, I know that for this search campaign, the recommended daily budget would be $50.00 per day / $1,500.00 per month – 3,000 X 0.50 = $1,500.00. For other search campaigns, the same method should be used.

Setup Your Google Ad Campaigns

After the research is done, search campaigns and ad groups need to be built out. Keyword research is already done. However, you will need to start building out a negative keyword lists as well. You also should create three ads per ad group need to be made. This is also the time that ad extensions need to be created, such as sitelinks, call-outs, call extensions, and so forth. The account settings also need to be optimized. For instance, bid strategy, ad scheduling, mobile, desktop and tablet bid adjustments, all need to be done. This is also the time where remarketing campaign or other display type campaigns can be built out. During the setup process is also a good time to link up to Google Analytics to Google Ads, gather all lead and sales conversion tracking code, call tracking, and remarketing code to be added to the client’s website.

Managing Campaigns

You have now launched the account. The first two weeks always seem to be the most intense regarding management because things are settling in, and there is a learning curve. The account rep needs to run the search term report to ensure traffic is relevant, adjust bids for averaging ranking and cost per click, monitor CTR’s, make sure that all tracking is working, monitor cost per lead, cost per conversion and lastly, communicate with the client on the status of the account as a whole.

Tracking Results

Clients invest money in their SEM accounts. They need to know what their ROI is and whether or not marketing is effective. You will not be able to gauge this without having the proper tracking implemented properly. For Brick and mortar companies, this would be website contact form lead tracking and call tracking. For e-commerce businesses, this would be sales conversion tracking and call tracking. When implementing tracking, it not only helps the client understand their ROI but also provides the PPC professional with valuable insights such as what keywords are resulting in such calls, forms, and sales. From there, the optimizations can be made on the account based on what is working and what’s not.

Reporting

Each month, the client should get a formal report. The report should include campaigns, keywords, click traffic, CTR, total spend, amount of tracked leads (calls, forms, sales), lead conversion rate, and should indicate “highlights” that are good but also outline areas that could use improvement. Areas of improvement are also known as next steps. For example, Campaign ABC is doing very well as it is at a 10-1 return. I know this because spend was $1,000.00 but tracked sales were $10,000.00. However, I noticed that the budget for this campaign is limited. Therefore, I will want to address this with the customer in the report and also at the formal account review meeting.

It is highly recommended that you get a Google Premier Partner to execute the setup and management process. Although there is a cost associated with this, you will end up paying more in the long run by not hiring a competent professional due to lost sales from account mistakes and wasting money on irrelevant traffic.