Internet Market Today

So, you have been doing paid search marketing and are now looking to get an “expert” help. Well before you jump over just any wannabe, there are a few things you should know. Hiring a PPC expert or an agency can definitely prove to be a big help, however doing it wrong will only cost you money and there will be minimal to no returns at all. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, there is competition already, in fact, too much competition. And if you are thinking that “competition is good”, its only good for customers and not if you are on the other side (i.e. Business owner).

Is your Niche too small?

This in fact happened to me recently, I was working with a client whose service was to investigate podiatrist malpractice. Now the market for podiatrist is definitely considerable in size but people looking for investigators for foot malpractice is really low.

As soon I took over the project, I informed the client and we mutually agreed to stop advertising for those keywords as they were unable to get enough traffic and hence the conversion would have remained low as well.

So, you may think that you everyone wants your service in the world but the reality may be far different. One way to find this by your own is to use Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends

If you have data similar to above, then you are in a big trouble. Knowing a bit about your target market is only going to benefit you. And you can also save money on nonconvertible clicks and service fee of the PPC agency.

Do They Have Credentials?

Google actually provides certifications for marketing professionals. Before you hire anyone to work on your campaign, just do a bit of research on them, especially if you are hiring an agency, check if they hold a partners status:

  • Look for the official Google Partner badge on the agency’s website or ask them to send you the link
  • Click on the badge and verify it on Google’s official portal

find a partner for your ppc campaign

  • Here you can look for agency that fits your need, or you can verify the credentials of agency with whom you are already negotiating

What is their Analysis process?

Are they going to analyze your website? Analysis is definitely the biggest part, any campaign is bound to fail if its based on minimal or no research at all. You should always ask what their process of analyzing a new website is. Being a marketer if I don’t have product knowledge of what my client is trying to sell, its very tough for me to sell it.

Keyword Research

How are they going to research the keywords, what tools will they be using for it? Is there any approval process? Will the keywords be shown to you before they upload it in the campaign?

If you are setting up a search campaign then keywords are one of the most important factor as they’ll trigger your ads. Irrelevant or too generic keywords can bring in tons of traffic but that will be of no use. Lets say you are selling computers online, by just targeting “computer”, you are definitely going to bring in a lot of visitors to your website but they may not be an ideal audience as the phrase is too generic and research oriented rather than based on buying intent.

Google Ads also offers keyword match option, which if used correctly can get you heaps of conversions from visitors.

Match-Type

Testing Process

Are they going to split test the ads and/or landing page? Marketing is a high risk game and you may never know what will work out best until you test it out. If the agency is not going to split test to find the best then they are certainly not A list players of the industry.

As you can see in the example below, a mere inclusion of price in the same adcopy took the Click Through Rate from 2.31% to 3.89% which will be considered to be good by any PPC marketer.

CTR-Comparision

Even a bit of tweak on your landing page has the potential to sky rocket your conversions from Adwords. Unbounce has done a case study about tweaks on landing pages that increase conversions of the websites.

Campaign Tweaks

In order to stay ahead of your competitors, you have to keep tweaking the campaign and tweaking involves a lot of small but necessary changes to the campaign like, regular bid management, adcopy changes, inclusion and exclusion of keywords etc.

Adwords offers both Automated and Manual bid management option.

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