3 Reasons You Need to Have A Partnership With Your PPC Specialist

You have an amazing PPC specialist at your company. Or you’ve hired an outside consultant. Or you have a whole agency of professionals working on your campaigns. They are doing everything right and yet… your account still seems to be failing.

If you have a qualified person(s) working on your online paid advertising campaigns, how can they not succeed? How is it possible to employ someone who has knowledge and experience and creates a fantastic campaign…and still not have customers knocking your door down? 

I LOVE when PPC goes right. It is my favourite feeling in the world (other than cuddling my dogs). But sometimes everything goes amazing in the PPC campaign and yet the sales don’t match. This is so hard! Let’s talk about why that can happen. 

1. PPC Cannot Drive ROI or Revenue

It is crucial for there to be a tight partnership between the PPC specialist and the rest of the business. Your PPC should reflect the rest of your brand and be on point with your larger marketing strategy. However, PPC doesn’t independently drive ROI or revenue. 

What Pay-Per-Click really excels in is identifying high intent keywords that are most likely to be searched by your target audience, ad testing, landing page testing, identifying high intent audiences, and optimizing campaigns. 

You’ll notice that nowhere in that list is converting users or closing sales. That is not what PPC is about. PPC drives the potential customer to your website, but it doesn’t make the user click BUY.

There are a number of steps and factors between clicking an ad during an internet search and purchasing a service or product. For example, I can strategize an immaculate Google Ads campaign and make sure it goes smoothly, optimize for performance, and monitor results. But if the campaign drives people to the website and links are broken, the checkout system is flawed, or the load times drive a high bounce rate, that is beyond PPC. Those are factors that absolutely affect conversions but PPC cannot fix. 

This is why it’s good to think about PPC as part of your overall marketing plan. Having a functional website that clearly navigates people to your sales page, and makes it as easy as possible for them to check out, is just as important as picking the right keywords to target. 

2. There Are Limitations When Working With Google Ads

Don’t let the all-powerful Google hear me say this….but Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) are not perfect. There are limitations that frustrate me and every other PPC specialist in the world. 

Google doesn’t control what your audience sees once they click on your website or if they call your company. It’s easy to get caught up in the digital marketer’s insistence that the Google algorithm and ads are the most important factor in sales, but there are so many other factors. If your sales team cannot respond in a timely, professional manner to phone leads, you can lose customers due to unresponsiveness.

If your sales team or other customer service representatives is rude or negative, that can not only cost you the lead but it can cost you future leads as well. In our digital world, people will review anything, especially if they had a negative experience. It doesn’t matter how many positive, warm interactions you’ve had with people in your business. If they have one negative conversation with you or your employees, be prepared to see a comment online (sometimes falsely representing you and how you handled the situation!).  

Given these limitations, I hope you can see I am not punting the responsibility to anyone else. PPC campaigns need a lot of work and knowledge to make them effective. But the best PPC campaign ever can’t hide issues with the website or personnel. 

If the account is failing, we will take a closer look to determine what the problem is, but sometimes the answer isn’t changing keywords or even overhauling digital marketing. Sometimes it’s a larger business-wide issue and changing the marketing isn’t going to change your results. 

3. There Are Several Limitations of Marketing

I just ragged on Google, and now on marketing as a whole. What am I doing?

I am sharing my knowledge gained over 10 years of working in PPC to tell you that sometimes you need to optimize and change your campaign. And sometimes it’s something institutional. 

Don’t go to a PPC specialist expecting them to fix every business problem you’ve ever had. You are going to be disappointed. As a PPC professional, I have to be realistic about the limitations of marketing, and I try to encourage that mindset in my clients as well. I know it’s tempting to consider everything “fixed” once you hand over a project to a professional, but that usually isn’t the case. As a vendor, I need the scope of work so I know what the goals are. 

When I partner with clients on PPC, I want the very best for them. I am truly a partner who wants your business’s success, which is why I give my best in my work and try to offer sound advice. I am going to do everything I can to make your PPC campaigns successful.

But I am also going to speak up when the main issue slowing production is not because of the campaign or advertising, but something completely different. 

3. We Need Your Help Getting Them To Buy

This is where partnership really comes through. We know that every PPC campaign is an opportunity to boost sales. That’s why we collaboratively to fix any issues so there’s not huge inconveniences later.

PPC specialists are focused on finding the ideal target audience and then getting the ad in front of those users. But we need some assistance getting from that point to conversion. We need to create a sales funnel to help users navigate from clicking an ad to clicking buy. 

Your website needs to direct people to sales and should have a display that excites users to purchase. While it’s possible that the PPC specialist put the wrong demographics or creative on the ad? Of course. But it’s also possible that business owners can be overly optimistic when it comes to PPC. 

For PPC to really be successful, both parties have to work together to make sure every piece is in place and ready to convert users. 

You need a partnership with your PPC specialist for your online digital advertising to be effective. Don’t you want qualified leads rolling in? A fantastic PPC agency can make designing, planning, and implementing a fantastic Pay-Per-Click strategy that sends qualified traffic and has an excellent client team that follows internal procedures and tracking. Having an internal team tracking information (like all the stats on buyers) will make data collection so much easier, thus improving your optimization and future campaigns. 

Part of having stellar PPC is the relationship between the agency and business owner where open communication and ideas flow naturally. This really lets the account shine to its fullest potential!