You’ve been running ads for months now, with a weekly spend that hasn’t yielded much in terms of results. You may be getting some clicks or visits to your site, but not the calls or sales you’re hoping to see. Something is wrong, but you’re not sure what.
You’re not alone, though. Thousands of small businesses spend money on pay-per-click ads every day, but do not see a decent return on them. It’s easy to spend money on ads, especially with platforms like Google Ads, which promise to let you start a campaign in minutes, or Facebook, where you can simply click a button to boost a post.
But it’s one thing to start a campaign, and it’s another to run it well. It’s the gap between those two things where your money is going to disappear.
GOA-TECH is a digital marketing agency that works with businesses like yours, who are frustrated, confused, and ready to stop throwing money down a drain and start doing something about it.
Why Most Pay Per Click Advertising Fails Without Professional Help
Now, let’s take a closer look at what’s probably going wrong with your PPC advertising. According to Statista, 58% of small businesses don’t utilise digital advertising to its full potential, as managing the tools involved is extremely complex.
This means that more than half of businesses running ads are missing out on money even before they’re aware of it. Most business owners running their own pay per click campaigns have the same common mistakes, and the ad systems themselves don’t exactly point out what you’re doing wrong.
Reasons why your ad spend isn’t converting:
- Wrong audience: You might be misunderstanding who your converters are. The best PPC agencies use marketing strategies to determine who your target market really is, not who you assume it should be. Then work on optimising them.
- Wrong bids: Pay-per-click advertising systems reward smart bidding, not the highest bidder. Without the knowledge of how this system works, you’re probably overpaying for your ads or getting outbid by someone who’s bidding more intelligently. Good marketing companies will use advanced bidding strategies that change according to performance results.
- Wrong post-click experience: You click on a PPC ad – that is a success in itself. However, when you land on a page that does nothing to persuade you to take the next step, you leave immediately. This is not the fault of the ad itself. This is the fault of the post-click experience. Proper digital marketing strategies involve the entire customer journey, not the ad itself.
- Wrong keywords: Searching “shoes” versus “women’s running shoes in Austin” attracts vastly different searchers with vastly different intent to buy. Using general keywords wastes advertising budget on people who are unlikely to buy from you in the first place. Specialised keywords can boost conversions.
- Ignoring negative keywords: If you are in the dog food business and your ad pops up when someone searches “hot dog restaurants,” you are wasting your advertising budget on people who have no interest in doing business with you in the first place. Wrong targeting can waste 40-60% of a small business’s Google Ads budget.
The Real Cost of Running Ads Yourself
Individuals don’t engage a PPC firm because they view the management fee as an added cost on top of the ad spend. This, again, is a misperception.
Think about your current spend. If your marketing and advertising campaigns are running and not converting, you’re throwing money away, just at a slower pace. If your ad spend is $2,000, and your conversion rate is 1%, you’re getting 20 conversions. If your conversion rate is 3%, you’re getting 60 conversions. It’s the same ad spend, triple the results.
PPC management can cost anywhere from 10-20% of your ad spend or a flat fee. This fee will pay itself off immediately by saving you money on unproductive clicks and increasing your conversions. Not only that, but when you have one of the best agencies, you’re not spending more money; you’re spending your money on results.
Time can be another reason why someone may not engage a PPC firm. It takes hours a week to effectively manage PPC campaigns. These hours can be better spent on your business or your customers. A great PPC firm will do all the work for you.
What PPC Companies Actually Do Differently
Hiring a PPC management company is more than just outsourcing your ads. It’s a data-driven, test-and-optimize methodology that a business owner cannot do on their own.
What professional PPC services include:
- In-depth keyword research and analysis: They look at competitors, industry, and market gaps that a new business owner wouldn’t know to target.
- Logical campaign management and structure: They organise keywords, write ads that are specific to a group of keywords, and match them to landing pages to maximise conversions immediately.
- In-depth A/B testing: They test headlines, descriptions, CTAs, and landing pages. They only use what is proven to work.
- Accurate conversion tracking: You can see exactly what your cost per lead and cost per sale are, and connect every dollar of your ad spend to a result. Without this, you’re basically flying blind.
- Ongoing management and optimisation: They make adjustments to their campaigns every day of every week to keep them working efficiently.
A full-service PPC-focused agency is like a system that learns and improves over time to give you consistent ROI.
How To Identify the Best PPC Marketing Agencies
Not all digital advertising agencies are true to their words. Some ppc agencies are only after your money, and once you give it to them, they’ll provide you with nice dashboards but won’t improve your performance.
Green flags of a ppc agency:
- They ask you for information regarding your business prior to their proposed solutions to your problems.
- They are honest with you regarding their costs and what you can expect from their services.
- They provide you with a ppc audit before any commitment to their services.
- They are experts in your type of business, such as e-commerce, service-based, etc.
- They provide you with references from actual clients, such as measurable ppc performance across different ppc platforms.
Red flags:
- They guarantee you rankings and/or results, but the truth is that even the best pay-per-click companies cannot assure you of the outcomes.
- They don’t provide you with monthly reports, or worse, they don’t provide you with any information regarding your campaign’s performance.
- They want you to sign a long-term contract with them prior to any actual performance.
- They handle your Google ppc but you’re unable to access your accounts.
- They provide you with a generic strategy that fails to take your industry into consideration.
Questions to Ask Before Hiring A PPC Agency
Prior to working with a PPC management firm, it is vital to have clear answers to the following questions:
- Who will manage my campaigns on a daily basis?
- How do you track and report ROI for my PPC campaigns?
- What is your process for daily optimization of my campaigns?
- Will I have access to my Google Ads account at all times?
- How long will it take for a new client to see improvement in their PPC campaigns?
- What is your contingency plan if my campaigns are not doing well?
- Do you work with other businesses in my industry, or do you have direct competitors as clients?
A good performance marketing agency should have no problem answering all of these questions and should, in fact, expect them.
If a PPC marketing firm becomes defensive about answering your questions, it is not worth your marketing budget, despite all the marketing buzzwords they like to throw around.
Setting Realistic Expectations for PPC Advertising
Just because you hire professional ppc management services or a full-service digital marketing agency does not mean you are going to see instantaneous results. The fact of the matter is that pay-per-click advertising does take time to optimize, even for reputable ppc companies.
Here’s the typical timeline for ppc success:
1. Weeks 1-2
Set up PPC advertising campaigns, conducted keyword research, reviewed landing pages, and implemented the conversion tracking system. A good ppc advertising agency should set up the foundation before they ever spend a single penny on advertising.
2. Weeks 3-4
The ppc ad campaigns are launched for the first time. At this stage of the process, the agency is collecting real-world information on how your audience actually responds to the advertising.
3. Month 2
The first round of ppc advertising optimization is based on the real-world data that the agency has accumulated so far. At this stage of the process, the professional ppc management agency starts making the adjustments that actually make a difference.
4. Month 3 and Beyond
At this stage of the process, the ppc advertising strategies are continually being refined to better meet the needs of the market. The cost per acquisition continues to decline, and the results become more and more predictable.
Most businesses see marked improvement by the second or third month of the process. The key metric to look for is not the number of clicks or impressions; instead, you want to see if the cost per acquisition trend is moving in the right direction and if the resulting sales are actually generating revenue.
Making the Smart Move for Your Ad Budget
Want better results? Want higher ROI? Want ads that actually work? It’s time to stop managing your own PPC ads and let the pros handle it.
Managing your own ads and watching your money slip away without any results is not a strategy; it is a slow leak. If you’re spending weeks managing your own ads without the proper knowledge, you’re essentially throwing money away.
Contact us at GOA-TECH, and we are here to help you stop the ad bleed and bring you the returns on investment that digital ads promise. Remember, having trouble with PPC ads doesn’t mean PPC ads don’t work. It means you just haven’t had the right people managing your ads yet.
