Do you want to get the most out of the time and money your company devotes to online advertising? One of the best ways to make certain that you’re maximizing your pay-per-click return on investment is to put your campaign in the capable hands of a professional PPC management service.

3 Reasons You Need Professional PPC Management Services

• Stay Focused on Your Business: Running an effective PPC campaign takes time and daily commitment. If you try to do this yourself, you’ll be taking yourself away from the core tasks of running your business. Using a professional service allows you to keep your efforts directed where they need to be: on building and running a successful enterprise.

• Ongoing Assessment: Pay-per-click campaigns have to be monitored closely and optimized continually to bring about the most profitable results. Even if you’re able to set up your own campaign, chances are you don’t have the time or expertise necessary to monitor the results and make solid data-driven decisions. An expert service can provide the ongoing management that’s necessary to enjoy success with this type of advertising.

• Cost Control: Quality keyword bid management is the key to getting—and keeping—the right keywords at the best price based on the profit they create for your company. Without an expert managing your online advertising every step of the way, it will be difficult (if not impossible) for you to both manage risk and stay on top of this highly competitive, ever-changing aspect of online advertising.

eMarketer recently wrote on industry studies measuring the effectiveness of online advertising.  Over 60% of companies in one study did not believe their current approach measured web strategy effectively.  In another study, less than 40% of respondents had complete confidence that they were measuring the right things.

Why is there so much confusion about measuring online marketing, ostensibly the most measurable activity in the history of marketing?

The truth is that tying online marketing to profits involves a fair amount of complexity, yet if tied to profits, people are very confident in their strategy and metrics.  Here are three reasons why people lack the confidence they should have, and what to do about it:

1. Traditional metrics are often about web server performance, and not about customers and profits.  If your company relies on “hits”, “unique visitors”, or “time-on-site” in its top-level marketing reporting, chances are it has a problem with its web metrics.  At best, these traditional metrics are only early indicators. At worst, they are completely misleading. Web site optimization needs to be focused on measurements of engagement, value, and revenue.

2. Tying marketing to revenue and profit requires ancillary data.  Companies may realize that marketing success metrics lie with revenue, but are unable to tie revenues to marketing because sales and profit figures live in different systems, databases, or departments.  Someone, and probably Marketing, needs to bite the bullet and take ownership of this problem.  The more that these data gaps are filled, the clearer the true measurements of success will be.

3. You need to factor in time. A very common problem in assessing marketing is forgetting to factor in time, whether measuring the time from first visit to action, or from lead to close.  Revenue generated right now should not be measured against current marketing cost because the revenue being generated right now stemmed from marketing done in the past.  Whether that was yesterday or six months ago will be critical in terms of how marketing strategy, tactics, and cost are assessed.  Companies that ignore the time factor will draw incorrect conclusions about cause and effect, will devise misguided strategies based on those conclusions, and will have a very difficult time optimizing their online marketing.

The good news is that companies don’t need to live with bad metrics or uncertainty about their online marketing. Smart metrics allow for smart choices.

Affiliates often advertise on the same search keywords as the companies they work with. In theory, this is a great way to keep products exposed and sales continuous, but also an effective way to drive up bid prices. An example:

The toy company Splash has launched a search campaign for their newest squirt gun, the ICE-Blaster. XYZ Toys is an affiliate that will bolster online ICE-Blaster sales.

Both company’s search campaigns include the brand term ‘iceblaster’. Considering the direct relevance to the name and the highly-targeted traffic the SERP will attract, the cost-per-click (CPC) should be relatively inexpensive.

However, because Splash never established affiliate bidding and position rules with XYZ Toys, both companies instinctively bid for first position, raising the competition of the term and inadvertently increasing each other’s CPC.  Worse yet, both Splash and XYZ are sending search traffic to the same domain, Splash.com. Google will only display one ad per domain on a results page. Because Splash is bidding less on the term, their ad is not being displayed, which creates inconsistencies in impression share, spending and sales.

Splash can avoid raising CPCs and losing impressions by implementing and enforcing strategies such as controlling affiliate keyword lists, coordinating affiliate position targets, and requiring the affiliate to use a separate domain.

A well-designed affiliate strategy can significantly improve your online presence and provide cost-effective sales, but requires planning and coordination in order to be efficient and to allow you to maintain control of your brand.

Successful paid search marketing in the legal vertical begins when profit is reflected in your keyword optimization. Assessing campaign data with the added conclusions of realized clients, case revenue and client cycle will emphasize the effectiveness of individual keywords by giving them a tangible value that matures through its lifetime.

Measuring keyword performance on cost-per-lead (CPL) alone begets misguided bidding strategies. Although top converting keywords may have a low CPL, resulting leads must produce paying clients in order to be profitable.

Tie case revenues to their attributing keywords, developing the quantifiable effectiveness of the keyword over time. However, keep in mind that knowing current keyword values is only part of the assessment process.

Because close rates vary, it is illogical to punish a keyword for poor performance if the leads it produced have not been given the proper amount of time to be realized. Define lead-to-client cycles to avoid penalizing keywords by reducing bid prices based on incomplete data.

Other factors to consider when optimizing performance on revenue generation include assessing value by case and division type, the value of repeat business, expenses (e.g., research and travel time), targeting ads to an audience looking to act rather than conduct research, geography, and performance targets by the various branches of law to account for differing revenue by the case types.

In a move that would shake up the Mobile advertising world, BusinessWeek announced that Apple and Microsoft have been discussing a deal that would make Bing the iPhone’s default search engine. Currently, that honor is held by Google, which is run by mobile advertising company AdMob, Google’s recent $750 million dollar acquisition. Although users would still be allowed to switch their default back to Google, the coveted “default search engine”, would certainly result in a gain in market share.

In 2009, Google accounted for almost 88 billion searches or 67% of the global search market. Bing registered just 4.1 billion, but did grow 70% over Microsoft’s previous year with Live. Microsoft has a long way to go before it catches Google in the search market, but an iPhone move to Bing would be a large step in the engine’s uphill battle.

Internet marketing has expanded into yet another channel in recent months as a few startups are attempting to tackle the world of Twitter marketing. From the beginning, companies have used Twitter as a PR outlet to announce updates, offer coupons and deals, and connect with followers. The San Francisco Chronicle reports, however,  that in the last six months a few startups have now ventured into Pay-Per-Tweet marketing, where companies have reportedly paid celebrities between a few dollars and $10,000 to tweet an ad for the company.  Similar to PPC search engine marketing, firms are then paid per click-through.

With celebrities having upwards of 1.5 million followers and growing, Pay-Per-Tweet marketing could be a great way for companies to reach a targeted audience. How profitable it is for the advertiser remains to be seen.

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Large ad groups can negatively affect your performance. Poor performing keywords drag down the Quality Score (QS) of better performing keywords in the same ad group. This ultimately impacts impression share and raises click costs.

QS helps determine your actual Cost-Per-Click (CPC). Google assesses the relevance of your keywords, ad text, and landing content, as well as the click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and ad group. Optimizing an account can be difficult to do with ad groups that include too many keyword themes. To help keep QS up and CPCs down, you will need to draw as straight a line as possible from search query to keyword to ad copy.

Try distributing keywords into smaller, more tightly focused ad groups. There is no “magic” number of terms per ad group, so organize keywords into new groupings based on logical themes. For automated assistance, use the Keyword Grouper tool available in Google’s free Adwords Editor, which can identify keyword themes, create ad groups, and copy existing keywords and ads into them.

Once tighter ad groups are developed, write ad copy focused solely on the keyword themes that include the keywords in the ad group. More specific ad text attracts a more targeted audience.

One way to optimize your Google AdWords Content Network performance is to monitor the domains you are being placed on. Knowing where your clicks are coming from and if they are helping you to be profitable will give you the upper hand in optimizing performance.

Google’s Placement Report shows which domains are hosting your ads and how the placements performed. Keep in mind that impression, click and cost data can be dangerously misleading without conversion data attributing accrued leads or sales to each of the domains.

If Google conversion tracking is installed, conversion data will be included in the report. If you use a separate conversion tracking system, pull a report that includes the referring domain.

First, identify domains not consistent with your service, company or industry. Next, identify poorly performing domains by calculating each domain’s cost-per-acquisition and projected profit. Keep in mind that the Content network often requires more flexible expectations than the Search network due to its lower volume. Block these sites immediately to avoid further wasted spend.

To block domains, head to Google’s Tools page and choose Site and Category Exclusions. There you can add the domains to exclude.  Your CPA should improve.

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