What Is PPC Management? (And Do You Need It?)

What is PPC management?

Pay-per-click (PPC) management is the process of overseeing and managing of a company’s PPC ad spend and strategy.

What is pay-per-click (PPC) management? It’s one of the best ways for your business to increase its return on investment (ROI) from PPC. With PPC management, someone (like a PPC specialist or PPC agency) oversees and manages your PPC strategy and campaigns, so you can maximize your ROI.

Whether you’re thinking about investing in PPC advertising management or looking to invest, this post offers answers to the most common questions businesses have about professional pay-per-click management, from what it includes to how much it costs.

Key Takeaways

• PPC management is the process of overseeing a company’s PPC ad spend and overall strategy
• Effective PPC management helps you continuously improve the results and return on investment (ROI) of your PPC campaigns
• A PPC management specialist or agency will conduct keyword analysis, channel targeting, competitor analysis, monitor your campaigns, create landing pages, perform testing, and more
• You should consider hiring a PPC management agency or specialist if you are new to PPC, don’t have an in-house advertising team, or don’t have the expertise to successfully manage your campaign.

Keep reading to get answers to questions like:

• What is PPC management?
• What does a PPC specialist or agency do?
• What are the benefits of PPC management?
• How much do PPC management services cost?
• Should I hire a PPC management company?
• PPC management FAQs

Or, for an instant evaluation of your existing PPC strategy and campaigns, contact us online to request a free PPC audit. You can also give us a ring at 888-601-5359 to claim your audit, which is available to businesses with five or more employees and a monthly ad spend of at least $1000.

Questioning the quality of your SMB’s PPC performance?

Get your FREE PPC audit from WebFX today!

Submit

What is PPC management?

PPC management is the process of managing a company’s PPC strategy and budget. With PPC ad management, you manage your campaign in-house or use a PPC agency. No matter who works on your campaign, PPC management focuses on creating and optimizing your PPC campaign.

What does a PPC specialist or agency do?

Now that you have the answer to “What is PPC management?” let’s look at what PPC advertising management involves — specifically in the context of a PPC specialist or agency.

Keep in mind that some agencies offer PPC consulting services, where they only tell you how you can improve your PPC. But others will actually do the work for you. (WebFX offers PPC consulting and PPC management services.)

If you opt for PPC management services, here’s what you can expect your PPC specialist or agency to do for you:

• Keyword analysis
• Channel targeting
• Competitive analysis
• Landing page creation
• Campaign monitoring
• PPC testing

Keep reading to learn more about these day-to-day tasks:

Keyword analysis

An essential component of PPC campaign management is keyword analysis. It involves choosing the right keywords for your ads, like when launching a PPC campaign on Google. Key terms and phrases trigger PPC ads to appear in search results. You need to choose the right keywords to help your ads appear in relevant search results. With PPC management, you’ll conduct keyword research to find related key terms for your ad.

Channel targeting

When you ask, “What is PPC management?” many people will say it’s the process of managing ads in Google search results. While search ads are the main type of PPC ads, they aren’t the only ones.   Google offers not only search ads but also display ads. With Google display ads, your ads appear on third-party sites.   Additionally, Google isn’t the only channel for running paid online ads either. Search engines like Bing and social media networks like Facebook are also part of PPC advertising management.   When you do PPC management, you may manage multiple channels of advertising, depending on your business’s needs.

Competitive analysis

Whether you do your PPC campaign management in-house or partner with a PPC company, you’ll perform a competitive analysis. Your competition will run PPC ads, so you must keep tabs on what they’re doing so you can outperform them. The competitive analysis involves monitoring:

• Bid amounts: Keep tabs on how much your competition bids on PPC ads to see if you can optimize your bids to get more from your budget.
• Keyword selection: Your competition may target keywords you haven’t discovered yet. While you shouldn’t copy all your competition’s keywords, it can help you find new keyword ideas for your campaign.
• Ad copy: Along with keywords and bid amounts, you’ll want to analyze ad copy. If you’re bidding on the same keyword, you can look at your competition’s ad copy to see if they’re doing something more effectively that allows them to get better placement and better results.

Competitive analysis is a critical component of PPC campaign management that allows you to drive success. It allows you to see how your competitors create successful PPC campaigns and use that information to build ads that are more relevant and get higher positioning.

Landing page creation

Your landing page is a core component of your PPC ad campaigns. With PPC advertising management, you’ll focus on creating landing pages that keep leads engaged with your content. When someone clicks on your PPC ad, it takes them to a landing page.   So, for example, if you’re selling bistro sets, sending leads to a landing page focused on bistro sets makes sense. With proper PPC management, you can create a landing page that fits your advertisement and provides your audience with the information they need.

Monitoring

Another part of pay-per-click management is monitoring.

When you launch a PPC campaign, you want to track it to ensure it’s driving results. With PPC campaign management, you monitor your campaign’s performance to see if you need to optimize keyword targeting, update ad copy, or change your landing page.

Monitoring helps you know if you’re getting the return on investment (ROI) you want from PPC.

Testing

Along with monitoring, PPC management services should also encompass testing.

When you run your advertising campaign, you need to test different parts of your ad so you can ensure you’re putting out the best version of your PPC ad. When you conduct testing, you can test anything from your landing page title to your ad extensions.

Platforms like Google make it easy to test your ads. With responsive ads, Google creates multiple versions of your ad copy and creatives to deliver the best version to audiences based on their searches. It helps you provide a better ad experience for your audience and get a better ROI from PPC.

What are the benefits of PPC management?

Now that you know the answer to the question, “what is PPC management,” let’s explore a few of its benefits and it’s important:

1. It saves you money

One of the biggest benefits of PPC campaign management is that it helps you save money. Managing a PPC campaign involves monitoring the results of your ads.

As a result, your manager will be able to identify the ads that are performing well and the ones that aren’t. That means you won’t need to worry about wasting money on ads that are driving sales or revenue for your business.

2. It improves your return on ad spend (ROAS)

Another important benefit to note is that PPC advertising management also improves your ROAS. ROAS is the profit you earn from your ads.

Your PPC manager will continuously make optimizations and improvements to your campaigns based on your results.

For example, if they notice that a certain landing page layout results in more conversions, they can improve the rest of your landing pages so you can maximize your profits.

3. It helps you power business growth

With the right PPC management strategy, your company will be on its way to driving amazing results with PPC.

Your manager will help research the highest-value keywords to target, optimize your bidding strategies, research your competitors’ ads, and much more to ensure your ads are always driving revenue.

How much do PPC management services cost?

So, you’re interested in PPC management services, but before you dive in, you want to know how much it costs.

On average, businesses can spend anywhere from $100 – $10,000 per month on PPC advertising in 2024. But keep in mind — this doesn’t account for hiring an outside agency or hiring in-house staff to manage your PPC.

So, let’s look at two PPC management cost models:

• Doing your PPC campaign in-house
• Hiring a PPC management company

In-house PPC

If you do your campaign in-house, your biggest costs come from maintaining staff.

Salaries are the most significant in-house expense. If you have multiple people from your marketing team adding PPC to their to-do list, you must consider their salaries and any additional compensation, like benefits, as part of your cost.

Another cost factor is time.

If your team members are busy running your PPC campaign, it’s going to take up their time from working on other tasks. While this isn’t a monetary cost, it can affect tasks that have a financial impact on your business.

Should you decide you don’t want to take team members away from their tasks, it leads you to hire additional employees. Hiring more employees will add more salaries you’ll have to account for in your company’s expenses.

PPC management company

When you hire a PPC management company, the costs will depend on the type of package you get from your team. Some companies will have a set rate, while others will charge based on how much you’re spending on PPC ads.

PPC management agency pricing can range from $501 – $3000 per month. The exact price of hiring a PPC management agency depends on a variety of factors like your company size, industry, the agency’s experience, and more.

Should I hire a PPC management company?

You’re looking at everything PPC campaign management entails. After considering all the information, you’re wondering: Should I hire a PPC management company? A PPC company can come at a great benefit to your business.

Let’s look at a few reasons to hire a PPC management agency to handle your campaign:

You want to work with someone that specializes in PPC

If you and your team aren’t familiar with PPC, it can be a challenge to know how to run a campaign successfully. When you partner with a PPC campaign management company, you’re partnering with experts that know how to create successful campaigns.

You want someone to monitor your campaign for you

You have a lot on your plate and don’t have the time to run and monitor your PPC campaign. Considering 72% of companies haven’t looked at ad campaigns in over a month, hiring a PPC company is valuable because it can help you stay on top of your campaign.

You want to stay on top of your competition

When you have experts working on your PPC campaign, they’ll know how to optimize your campaign to get results. That means that you’ll compete better with other companies who run PPC ads, which means more leads and sales for your business.

You want to save time

If you hire a PPC management company, you have more time to focus on other projects.

PPC campaign management saves your team time because you don’t have to carve out the hours to run, manage, and monitor your campaign. If you’re looking to partner with experts that will save you time and improve your PPC results, a PPC company is right for you.

PPC management FAQs

Get answers to frequently asked PPC management questions below!

Who should hire a PPC management company?

You might want to considering hiring a PPC management company if you:

• Are new to online advertising
• Lack an in-house digital advertising team
• Don’t have the time, manpower, or knowledge to oversee and improve your PPC campaigns

What does PPC management include?

PPC management includes a variety of strategies and tasks, such as:

• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• PPC ad bidding
• A/B testing
• Ongoing campaign monitoring and optimizing

Can you manage your own PPC campaigns?

You can manage your own PPC campaign, however, it’s important to consider if you have the in-house resources to accomplish this. For example, you’ll need to have enough time to monitor your campaigns and the knowledge to understand what to improve to achieve the highest return on investment (ROI).

Invest in PPC advertising management today

PPC management is critical to driving success with PPC.

With the right PPC strategy, you can generate leads and revenue for your business. Feeling overwhelmed by PPC advertising management? No worries! Partner with a PPC company like WebFX!

As a Google Premier Partner, we’ve managed over 650 PPC campaigns. With over 28 years of experience, you can count on our team of experts to help you manage your PPC campaign and drive the best results to grow your company.

If you want to learn more about PPC management, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our PPC management packages!