PPC for Accountants: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

PPC is a proven digital channel for accountants and other professional services. It allows you to target people and businesses that are searching for your services and also raises brand awareness for your business.

The leading PPC platform for accountants and other industries is Google Ads. It has a wide range of tools and provides a complete suite of campaign types to target your audiences.

These campaigns include Search, Display, Remarketing, Video, Local, Discover, Shopping and others. But not all will be relevant to you as an accountancy firm, for example Shopping campaigns.

But with Search ads you can achieve a good return on ad spend (ROAS) as you target customers that are looking for your services.

In this article I include 7 Tips to help you manage your PPC campaigns effectively and improve their performance. Follow the guidelines here and contact me if you require a PPC campaign management service for your accounting firm.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

To see where your leads and enquiries are coming from, you’ll need to setup conversion tracking. This will help you see which of your Google Ads keywords, text ads, campaigns etc are driving conversions for your business.

In your Google Ads account you can setup conversion tracking in the Conversions page under Tools & Settings. There are a number of options you can choose from including tracking website conversions from contact forms and also call conversions.

 

 

And you can also import goals from your Google Analytics account when people fill out a form. This is usually a better tracking option because you can see how your PPC traffic is performing with other traffic sources like Organic, Referrals and Direct and get detailed information.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

Regularly add negative keywords to block searches that are not relevant for you. If you check your search terms report you will see the actual searches that you are getting and this will often be different from your keywords, especially if you’re using phrase and broad match type keywords.

 

3. Find new keywords

PPC campaigns run by accountants should be updated regularly to make sure they are targeting the right people and businesses. So, that means checking for new keyword opportunities to add to your campaign and ensure that it is targeting all the right searches.

There are many ways to find new keywords. These include checking the Google search results pages for related keywords that you are not bidding on and checking competitor sites.

However, a primary method is through keyword research using the Keyword Planner tool in your account. This free tool is packed with features. And besides finding you new keywords, you can also check what the average cost per click (CPC) is and do forecasting to see what you’re likely to spend and what budgets to set.

 

 

4. Update bid strategy

When you first get started with a PPC campaign promoting your accountancy practice, you should use an automated bid strategy. This helps to set bids automatically at auction time and saves you a lot of time. The machine learning system looks for opportunities to increase clicks and conversions with each click and sets the bid to help you get the best position.

 

 

And Maximise Clicks is the best bid strategy you have because it works to get as much traffic as possible for your budget spend.

Later you can test other bid strategies. For example, if you have at least 15 conversions per month you can switch to a Smart bidding strategy like Maximise Conversions with a target cost per acquisition (tCPA).

 

5. Check Recommendations

The Recommendations page shows many opportunities to improve the performance of your campaigns. These are created automatically by the machine learning algorithm when it finds opportunities to improve your campaigns.

 

 

There are many types of recommendations you will see here. This includes keywords & targeting, dynamic search ads, responsive search ads and many other recommendations to help improve your campaign.

You will also see an Optimisation score in there too. This is an estimate from Google Ads of how well your account is set to perform. Applying the recommendations will help your campaigns perform better and raise your score.

 

6. Do competitor analysis

Spend some time checking what PPC strategies other accountants are using. There are tools and reports that can help you with this and and some are free and within your Google Ads account and some are paid third-party tools.

A common tool used by many PPC advertisers is Spyfu. It shows what keywords competitors are bidding on. Another one is SERanking and they both give you a good indication of what other advertisers are paying per month on average.

With SERanking you can use the Competitor research tool that shows what Organic and PPC searches other accountancy firms are appearing for.

 

 

7. Consider broad match type keywords

Unlike PPC advertising for other industries, with accountants the range of keywords tends to be lower. So, there are not as many different variations of searches even when targeting multiple locations.

However, there is still the possibility to find some long tail keywords that are more targeted but get less monthly searches.

So, it may be worth adding broad match keyword versions of your other match types. It’s usually best to start with phrase and exact match keywords and then add broad match keywords later when you want to increase click volumes.

But make sure you have a good negative keyword list to block searches that are not relevant. This includes, among many others, keywords that relate to career-related searches like:

• jobs
• career
• CV
• And others

 

Case Study

PS Accountants is an accountancy practice that focuses on helping its clients to grow. They help small businesses and their affordable service is unbeatable in the market. However, they were struggling to reach their market segments because their campaigns were not targeted well. I setup a new Search campaign with better targeted ads and the correct advanced location settings and they saw an impressive 17% conversion rate for their main ad group. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

Want to know how my PPC services for accountants can help your business? Contact me below to discuss and I will be happy to carry out a full review and send you a Google Ads proposal and quote.