Pay-per-click (PPC) management refers to organizing and running a PPC campaign for maximum return on investment (ROI).
It may sound simple, but there are many processes behind PPC management, such as keyword analysis, loading page creation, competitive analysis, channel targeting, PPC campaign monitoring, testing, etc.
If you are in doubt about whether or not a PPC campaign launching is worth your money and time, we advise you to look at the following statistics before you reach your decision.
For every $1 you spend on Google Ads, your business can make an average revenue of $2, and your brand awareness can increase by 80%. Moreover, traffic brought from PPC advertising campaigns leads to 50% more conversions than organic advertising.
We understand that PPC management can be a complex and time-consuming task. This is why many businesses opt for either resourcing it to some of the best PPC agencies or hiring a specialized PPC manager.
If you think of hiring a PPC manager, you came to the right place. In this article, we will help you understand what qualities to look for in a PPC manager and what questions to ask them before hiring. Additionally, we have prepared the top four benefits of hiring a PPC manager.
Ideally, your manager should be:
- Self-organized and reliable
- Up to date with the latest PPC trends
- Data-driven
- Communicative
- Proactive and strategic
- Curious
- Technical expert in PPC
We are going to further examine each of these PPC managers’ characteristics.
1. Self-organized and reliable
When you hire a manager for your PPC campaign, you need to trust them to be well-organized and reliable so that you always get the information you need, when you need it.
Self-organization and reliability are important personal traits for a PPC manager as he will need to juggle the following tasks:
- Result tracking for multiple campaigns
- Using gathered data to optimize the campaign
- Performing analysis of ROI, clicks, and conversions
- Cross-referencing campaigns through A/B testing and ROI growth
- Creating multiple campaigns with different goals, ad groups, and keywords
- Setting up the right PPC strategy for a business
2. Up to date with the latest PPC trends
PPC trends are constantly changing, sometimes even daily. If you want your PPC campaign to be successful, you need to make sure that your manager is up-to-date with the following trends:
- The new usages of artificial intelligence and virtual reality
- Best mobile-friendly approaches
- The potential of voice search in PPC campaigns
- First-party data and benchmarks
- Innovations in PPC automation
- Smart bidding
- SEO and PPC campaign integration
3. Data-driven
Tracking PPC data and implementing results for better ROI are some of the most important tasks your manager would have to tackle.
You need a data-oriented professional that can read through all the numbers, stats, and graphics. They should know how to incorporate the results in the current PPC campaign or the next ones to improve ultimate results.
They will need to gather and organize the data from the following performance metrics:
- Number of clicks
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Quality score
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Average cost per click
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Conversion rate
- Impression rate
- Impression share
- Budget attainment
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
- Bounce rate
- Ad cost to sale
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Keyword performance
As you can see, your PPC manager will have a lot of data handling on his plate, so it would be helpful if they are data-driven by nature.
Especially the PPC campaigns with tons of keywords, PPC manager need large number of data which needs to analyze which can be very hard to accomplish. Ad Intelligence Tools can easily help PPC manager with comprehensive keyword analysis with advance insights and reports on their performance, bidding budgets, demographic trends and ranking on various devices and regions.
4. Communicative
If you own an agency that handles clients’ PPC campaigns, your PPC manager will be their single point of contact. This is why they need excellent communication skills to be a reliable bridge in your relationship with your clients.
Excellent communication skills should help your manager to tackle the following tasks:
- Task delegation across the team;
- Campaign performance analysis with other team members;
- Collaboration with other team members in problem-solving strategies.
5. Proactive and strategic
It might seem that a PPC manager’s job is strictly technical, but they also need to be strategic and creative to develop new ideas for problem-solving.
A PPC manager should be able to take calculated risks and figure out what works and what doesn’t and redesign their strategy if needed to achieve the desired result.
A successful Google Ads campaign should never be stagnant, and your PPC manager needs to be proactive in recognizing opportunities and identifying any upcoming threats to your campaign.
They need to pay attention to SEO trends, Google’s algorithm changes, industry developments, etc. and have a B plan ready for any problems that may surface.
6. Curious
A curious manager will continually ask questions about the technical aspects of your business. They will analyze expenses in detail, reflect on top-spending ad campaigns, frequently check your ad position, and search for new and better keywords.
7. Technical expert in PPC
Your PPC manager should have extensive technical knowledge in the following:
- Google Ads platform
- Affiliate networks
- Google search and Display Networks
- Paid social media ads – Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Keyword analysis
- Monitoring tools – Google Keyword Planner, Search Terms Report, etc.
- Google Analytics
- Programming languages – HTML, JavaScript, etc.
- Campaign automation
They might not be familiar with all of these areas but they should have the desire to learn how to utilize new technologies.
Questions to ask your future PPC manager during the job interview
If you want to hire a PPC manager, you will need to know what to ask them in a job interview. Here are some questions that will get you started:
- Are you allowed to share case studies from your other clients?
- What platforms are you certified in?
- Would you know how to design a landing page for our PPC campaign?
- Have you worked with businesses similar to ours?
- What tools do you use for analytics?
- What would be your strategy for scaling a PPC campaign for our industry?
- Which platform would you use to start on?
- Can you create reports from our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?
- How often are we going to communicate?
- Are you able to expand our brand across multiple ad networks?
- Can you integrate our PPC strategy with our SEO strategy?
- What would you do if the campaign doesn’t do well?
- How would you prevent a budgeting disaster?
- What SEO techniques would you use for boosting the conversion rates?
- What features would you add to the PPC landing page?
- Would you know how to detect click fraud?
- What has been your most successful PPC campaign so far?
- How long will it take before we see the first results?
- Would you provide real-time reporting?
- How do you charge for your services?
4 Benefits of hiring a PPC manager
If you choose to hire a PPC manager, here are four benefits you can look forward to:
You will better understand your target audience
One of the benefits of working with an experienced PPC manager is that you will get insights into the best strategies for finding your target audience. With these, you will better understand their behavior.
A skilled PPC manager will target your audience and reveal specific data on their age, gender, occupation, etc.
You can then use this information and expand it to your other marketing campaigns.
You will get accurate results
Because an experienced PPC manager knows how the system works and how to use it, they can generate leads almost immediately. This will save you time, and time is money.
You will see your brand awareness increase
If creating brand awareness is as simple as paying for your Google AdWords keyword, you wouldn’t need a PPC manager. This approach can’t guarantee your PPC campaign success, but a dedicated PPC manager could.
With their extensive technical skills, they can give you that edge on the market and help you rank higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Higher rankings lead to more brand awareness.
You will have a better ROI
A skillful PPC manager will know how to build, run, and optimize your PPC campaign to drive better ROI results.
With their ability to understand and organize the campaign’s performance metrics, they can remove all the unnecessary data and focus on what brings your desired results faster.
Key takeaways
If you consider hiring a PPC manager, make sure they have the extensive technical knowledge and are up-to-date with the latest trends.
You should also look for desirable personal traits like reliability and proactiveness and opt for a data-driven PPC manager.
Be prepared to ask the right questions when interviewing the potential PPC manager for your business.
We hope that our article helped you get a better insight into what to look for in a PPC manager and understand the benefits of hiring one for your PPC campaign.