How to Find PPC Rip-off Companies and Manage Your Low Cost PPC Campaign?

AdWords is a highly targeted digital advertising platform that can be customized for best returns at every step. It however comes with a warning:

Don’t spend any money on PPC if you don’t have the desired expertise.

Over the past few years, FATbit has seen many examples of bad PPC campaign management. Business owners frequently approach us with messed-up ad accounts that lost thousands of dollars and generated little benefit. Even if you hired the best PPC management company for your project, you still need to make sure that your hard earned money is being spent the right way. This becomes critical if you’re running a low cost PPC campaign.

FATbit AdWords consultants are here with 5-step guide that will help you generate maximum returns from your budget sensitive PPC investment. But before listing the points, let’s discover whether your present PPC management company is doing bad or good PPC.

Indicators that your low budget PPC management company is actually a PPC Rip-Off

There is a fair chance that your affordable PPC management agency is not generating instant business benefits for you.  If you can relate your present team of PPC experts with following points, then, they are a total rip-off:

• Your ‘professional PPC management team’ takes no keyword and business related inputs from you
• They guarantee top positions for  vast range of keywords on Google
• Your low cost PPC management company keeps nagging you for higher budget
• You receive no PPC performance reports
• Your PPC management specialists never bother about conversions, Cost per Acquisition, ROI etc.
• They neither give you straight answers nor explain PPC process.

If your present PPC management company does all this, then, it is time to fire the looters. 

Maybe your friend or colleague told you about them. Or they were the only ones that were ready to work on your small PPC budget. Whatever may be the reason, you need to get rid of them.

If you too are stuck with a company that is just wasting your PPC budget, it is time to take a second opinion.
Talk to AdWords Consultants

If you are still double minded about firing your current PPC management company, then, here are some parameters on which you can judge your campaign and avoid wasting money on PPC;

Step 1: Check performance of generated traffic

If you do not want to drain PPC budget, you need to figure out where you AdWords management group has been spending your money. Discover how AdWords traffic behaved on your website. AdWords and Google Analytics account will give you all the data.

Things you need to look out for:

• Bounce Rate
• Average Visit Duration for all keywords
• Average number of pages visited
• Conversions

If your accounts are not synced, you have every right to fire your PPC management company. (To learn how to do it yourself, read this post)

Step 2: Get your campaign analyzed from another expert

Third party perspective is very important to know what is wrong with your company’s low cost PPC account management technique.

Instead of using automated tools for analysis of your AdWords account, hire a PPC expert team to manually check your account and figure out where you had been wasting money with PPC. An experienced team would ask for the following details before analyzing your AdWords account:

1. Goal of AdWords campaigns
2. Access to Google AdWords account (Synced with Google Analytics)
3. Products/ Services to be promoted
4. Keywords relevant to your industry
5. Target geographical location

This report can give you a clear idea how your small budget PPC management company was actually ripping you off. True PPC professionals will also not hesitate to share suggestions about how you can stop wasting money with PPC.

Also Read: How to choose a good PPC management company

Step 3: Make sure you generate highly targeted traffic

To save money with PPC marketing, check every detail of your existing account to make sure that you pay only for relevant traffic. Following points can help;

1. Review your target keywords. These keywords will decide who sees your PPC advertisement. If you are a gynecologist, then your target keywords must not be phrases synonymous to gynecology. To bring down spending on PPC, target keywords like “Hysterectomy Surgery”, “Fibroids treatment”, ”high risk pregnancy”, etc.
2. Make sure that your PPC campaign managers regularly update the list of negative keywords to weed out irrelevant search queries.
3. Your ad should target selected target locations. If you are a local business, your target must be your city & specific neighborhoods. If you serve globally, you still need to target areas where it will be profitable to market through paid ads.
4. Adjust your bid to your target location, device and time.
5. Use an ad copy that best explains your value proposition. Testing multiple ads to see which one gets you the maximum conversions is a great way to optimize an AdWords campaign.

Irrelevant traffic means users that don’t matter to you. They will click on your ad, visit your website and leave without studying what you have to offer. However, you end up paying for the click. So, you lose. Make sure your PPC management firm is only attracting highly targeted traffic.

Also Read: How to make your website visitors stay longer

Hire a team of experts who will drive free and paid traffic to your website at an affordable cost
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Step 4: Use highly targeted landing pages

A professional PPC management company will ask your permission to optimize service pages to be targeted through AdWords campaign. Some might also custom design high conversion assured landing pages. Impressive landing pages are important because;

• They will decide your traffic’s onsite behavior.
• They will determine the quality score of your targeted keywords which influences your cost per click.
• They will decide if your visitor decides to buy from you or not.

Using your homepage or generic service page as an AdWords landing page does not make sense. That’s why it pays to partner with low budget PPC experts that can handle landing page issues as well.

Step 5: Setting boundaries for your PPC management team

To reduce your monthly PPC expenditure and keep your AdWords marketing group in control, you must set some targets and guidelines. Work with your PPC management team to fix:

• An upper limit for Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
• Expected monthly conversions from relevant traffic.

If you are marketing a product that has limited margin and is a one-time purchase, it is necessary to keep the cost per acquisition of a new customer low. You surely don’t want to spend huge money acquiring a new customer that will purchase just once and generate small profit.

To keep CPA low and conversion rate high, it is important to use very tightly bound keywords [long tail phrase match or exact match type] that do not have a very high CPC. To increase the possibility of conversion, use targeted and conversion optimized landing pages.

So should I start managing my PPC account myself?

Small businesses and startups usually start AdWords campaign, lose money and shut down AdWords account, assured PPC is not for them.

Some are motivated to manage their PPC on their own by trusting Google words – ‘it’s so simple’. If you do that, profits will come but only if you will invest time and money in the learning process.

Here is an exhaustive guide prepared by FATbit AdWords consultants to help you manage a low budget campaign yourself. We have however learnt these techniques after spending more than $40,000.

Our advice: Don’t jump out of the frying pan into the fire!

Hire someone who can manage AdWords for you but this time do your homework before outsourcing PPC management. If you want a more affordable option of generating traffic for your business website, it is advisable to invest in both SEO and PPC. Though usually seen as rival services, these can actually be complimentary.

Hire a firm that has expertise in both SEO and PPC management. This way, you will have a more balanced approach for both. We recommended the same to Travelerrr.com (a turnkey travel solutions startup), and generated instant traffic & long term benefits on a small marketing budget.

In case you plan to manage your PPC campaign on your own, make sure you spend some time in studying keyword research, campaign management, budget allocation, and other technicalities. You will lose some bucks but don’t lose hope if you want to master PPC.