Online advertising has become an essential component of any marketing strategy. And within the online advertising world, no tool is as valuable as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. PPC advertising is a straightforward marketing strategy that helps businesses drive new traffic to their websites and boosts their conversion rates. How? It’s simple – by placing ads in front of people willing to spend money.
As important as PPC is, there are still many companies that get it wrong. This is particularly common with small and medium businesses that don’t have an in-house digital marketing expert who can take care of a PPC campaign. Instead of outsourcing the campaign to an agency, some companies try to DIY their digital advertising after reading a couple of online tutorials. Suffice to say, the results are usually unsatisfactory.
In an increasingly competitive digital marketing environment, it takes a true PPC expert to know what truly works and what doesn’t. So, if you’re thinking about taking shortcuts in your PPC strategy, please think again. In 99% of cases, DIYing a PPC campaign ends with a wasted marketing budget and a few months’ worth of work chucked in the bin.
Imagine trying to start a television advertising campaign without enlisting the help of experts. It sounds ridiculous, right? Well, paid advertising campaigns on the Internet are no different. To make our case, we’ve put together a list of the 4 biggest reasons why you shouldn’t DIY your PPC campaign.
1. Google Ads is more competitive than ever before
Google Ads is by far the most popular PPC service there is. This platform allows advertisers to display ads on Google’s search results pages and its extensive advertising network.
Google Ads is almost as old as the Internet as we know it. Launched in 2000, it was originally called Google AdWords and it worked in a relatively simple fashion. Companies would place an advert on Google’s search engine pages and had to pay a certain amount of money whenever someone clicked on the ad. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the gist of PPC advertisement remains the same after more than twenty years.
So, what has changed?
The main difference is that paid advertisement has grown a lot more complex and competitive than it was at the beginning of the 21st century. Around 45% of small businesses have a PPC strategy in place. What are the consequences of this growth? That it has become harder to stand out from the herd. Consumers have grown used to paid adverts, making it harder for companies to impress their target audience.
2. Developing a PPC campaign is a painstaking task
There’s a reason why there are entire companies that dedicate their efforts to developing PPC campaigns. From using specialist stats with audience fragmentation data to having access to state-of-the-art graphic design tools, PPC campaigns are long, convoluted projects with many different steps.
Will you entice your target audience to click on your ad with a DIY PPC campaign? Probably not. All successful adverts have a lot of work behind them – from an initial research stage to a final optimisation phase. It’s simply too much ground to cover for a DIY job.
On average, it takes 1 to 2 weeks of hard work to design and launch a basic PPC campaign for a small or medium business. And that’s if you’re an expert. If you’re an absolute beginner with no previous PPC experience, there’s no guarantee that your campaign will ever get off the ground.
Do you value your own time? If the answer is yes, then make sure you outsource your campaign to an expert PPC ads agency.
3. You won’t be able to track and optimise your campaign
If you ask us, this is the most important reason why you should never DIY Google Ads. Since the platform was rebranded in 2018, it has offered a large arsenal of tools that allow you to track and review the results of your campaign. That way, you can recalibrate and optimise your ad if isn’t working as you thought it would. You can even scale your budget and make a bigger profit if your ad is performing better than expected.
So, what’s the catch? That this isn’t one of those cases where you can throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Optimising a Google Ads campaign is a very sensitive process and certain changes can have irreversible effects. As tempting as it is, playing around with the different settings will only backtrack your entire campaign.
In short, tracking specific PPC metrics takes the kind of experience that only years of working in digital marketing can provide. So, if you want your Google Ad to bring home the best results, you know what to do – leave it to the experts.
4. You’ll be losing money
We’ll keep this one short and well, not so sweet. DIYing a PPC campaign is not unlike flushing your marketing budget down the toilet. While it’s true that enlisting the help of a digital marketing agency requires an initial investment, it won’t take long for it to pay off. A professional PPC campaign will always be better optimised than a DIY one – in turn bringing in more revenue. On top of that, an expert digital marketer can have your ad up and running in a few days – meaning you’ll have a broader window of opportunity to turn a profit.
And there’s something else that you need to keep in mind. Even with an agency, it’s you who will be setting your own advertising budget. You’ll spend the exact amount of money that you’re willing to spend and nothing more.
Boost your sales with Google Ads
Do you want to get your brand in front of the right eyes? Then you know what to do – enlist the help of an expert PPC agency to run your Google Ads campaign for you.
As a fully-fledged digital marketing agency, Rapport Digital helps accountants and accounting firms create a PPC strategy that will change the future of your brand. If this sounds like a good idea, get in touch today at hello@rapportdigital.com to discuss your requirements with our expert PPC team.