PPC for Agencies: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing for digital agencies is a competitive area with high average cost per click rates for agency related keywords. So, it requires a focused approach to reach businesses and individuals that are looking for digital agency services.

 

Whether you’re a digital marketing agency, web design agency, social media agency or other, you need to manage your campaigns regularly to improve performance.

 

I’ve listed here some tips that you’ll find helpful in managing your campaigns. And feel free to contact me below if you have any questions about my Google Ads services.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

 

Make sure you’re tracking all enquiries you’re getting, and not just for your PPC traffic in Google Ads. So, you should track all your advertising platforms and traffic sources and the best way to do that is in your Google Analytics account. And you can setup goal tracking in Analytics to track your leads using one of the goal templates that are available.

 

 

And you can import the goal into Google Ads for conversion tracking. Also, you should setup call tracking to track calls from your ads and your website and you can do this from within your Google Ads account.

 

For call tracking in your ads, you’ll need to add call extensions and use the Google forwarding number to track calls. And to track calls on your website you will need to create a call conversion in Google Ads and add the code to your website.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

 

PPC marketing for digital agencies can be a challenging area because of the search terms that you’re likely to get as you run your campaigns. If these are not controlled with the right match types and negative keywords, you’re likely to get many search terms that are not relevant for your business.

 

So, one exercise you should carry out regularly is check your search terms report to see what searches you are getting. And if you find any that are not relevant, just select them and ad them to a negative keyword list. Or you can add them at the campaign or ad group levels.

 

 

3. Check Recommendations

 

When running PPC campaigns for digital agencies like web development agencies, marketing and social media agencies, it’s important to keep a close watch on the performance. That means updating the campaigns regularly. That can be difficult especially when you’re relatively new to PPC advertising.

 

So, the Recommendations page comes in handy because it shows areas of improvement for your campaigns. It provides different recommendation types relating to areas like your responsive ads, keywords, dynamic search ads, bid strategy and so on to improve performance.

 

 

However, not all recommendations will be relevant. So, you need to check each of them to see if they will help to improve your ads and what the likely impact will be. Then apply the ones that you find relevant and dismiss any that are not. Dismissing is important too because it trains the machine learning system to send better recommendations in the future.

 

Also, this improves your account’s Optimisation score and brings it closer to 100%.

 

4. Find new keywords

 

As part of your campaign management, continue to look for new keywords to add to your campaign. This will help you target other search terms that you may not have been targeting before and potentially lead to more enquiries and leads for your digital agency.

 

The Keyword Planner tool is a good tool to use. Use it to carry out keyword research and forecasting to see how much you should increase your budget by. Also, use the tool to scan competitor websites for any potential keywords that you could add to your ad groups.

 

 

And consider adding broad match keyword versions or your existing phrase and exact match keywords. This will help to drive more searches and increase your conversions.

 

5. Update bid strategy

 

Bid strategy is a recommendation you’re like to see on your Recommendations page after you’ve been running your ads for some times. This is especially the case if you’ve launched your campaign with a Manual CPC bid strategy or Maximise Clicks and have started to get a good number of conversions.

 

The machine learning system is likely to recommend you switch to an automated Smart bidding strategy like Target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) to bid more efficiently and effectively. However, like other recommendations, first check to see if it’s relevant for your campaign and if it’s likely to lead to an uplift in performance.

 

Also, take some time to review other automated bid strategies like Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) to see if they could be of benefit to your campaign.

 

 

Just be aware though that changing a bid strategy is a big change and will place your campaign in learning mode. And performance may drop temporarily while it is learning. So, give the bid strategy about two weeks to learn and adjust itself.

 

6. Do competitor analysis

 

An effective PPC strategy for digital agencies is to use a competitor research platform like SERanking to see what other agencies are doing. This platform and similar ones will reveal the search queries that their businesses are appearing for and some of the keywords they are bidding on.

 

 

And you’ll be able to see where they rank for them on average, whether at the top or bottom of the results pages. Also, you’ll be able to see the level of competition for each search keyword and how much they pay on average for them.

 

All this will help you to continue building your keyword list and drive better targeted audiences and achieve a good ROI.

 

7. Check Quality Scores

 

Quality Score is a metric worth watching regularly. As a keyword metric it shows how different areas of your campaigns are performing include keywords, search queries, ads, landing pages and more. So, it covers a lot of areas in your campaigns.

 

 

To improve the quality scores and bring them closer to 10/10 you’ll need to work on the three contributing factors. So make sure visitors are engaged on your landing pages by providing fast loading pages and testing your navigation to see if pages are easy to access.

 

Also, make sure the search queries are closely related to your text ads and ensure they are included in the headlines. This will improve the ad relevance and expected click through rate.

 

Case Study

 

Now Listen PR is a digital marketing agency that offers its services to independent artists and major labels across Europe, the US and Canada. They operate in a competitive area with more competitors joining the industry, which drives average CPCs higher. I setup a new Search campaign targeting all their locations and their ROI increased by about 300%. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

 

My PPC advertising services for digital agencies are designed to help you to target people and businesses that are in the market for your services. To find out more about my services, please contact me below.