Perhaps it is important for a paid search marketing expert to know how to bid on advertisements, set up campaigns, select keywords and write effective advertisement text, but this advertising expert is not going to get very far if there is a general lack of organization standing in their way.
Indeed, the most effective way of ensuring that the perfect paid search marketing campaign can be achieved lies in basic organization, prioritization and communication.

The following 7 steps to achieving the kind of organization and communication required for paid search marketing success are highlighted below. If you can follow these steps and maintain them over a long period of time, the actual management of paid search marketing campaigns will soon become as easy as a walk in the park.

Remember, the key to paid search advertising success lies in the preparation and management of the same, not in the actual technicalities and tasks of campaign management…

1. What is my role?

Even if you are the PPC Manager of a particular campaign for a particular client, that doesn’t mean that you are going to be the only person who needs to be aware of what is going on in the land of paid search marketing.

Indeed, there should be a number of key members from the company itself who work with you, who know what you are doing, who share in your ideas and can help you achieve your paid search management goals by sharing out the information that you share with them to other members of the company as and when necessary.

Therefore, all roles in the paid search marketing campaign, not just the PPC Manager’s role, must be clearly defined. Who is responsible for keeping up to date with conversion data? Who must be there to help with the management of landing pages? Who is helping to share out reports, etc.?

All of this must be decided in order to ensure that progress is made as quickly as possible.

2. What is the paid search marketing objective?

In general, every single paid search marketing campaign must have three objectives.

More than three objectives will cause serious management problems and will also dilute the efforts of the marketing online as well, because the company will be seen to be advertising lots of different things and in lots of different ways.

The paid search campaign with too many objectives ends up promoting the image of a very confused company, which is not what any company wants from their online marketing in any industry.

However, objectives there must be and they must be very specific. For example, simply saying that you want to increase traffic to the site is no good. You must outline a clear figure and a clear time frame. An effective objective is to say that you want a 5% increase of traffic to the site by the end of the month.

Then, of course, everyone in the company who has anything to do with management or marketing strategies must be fully aware of the campaign objectives.

3. What is the right kind of budget for our paid search campaign?

One might think that having a bottomless pit for a budget is a good thing, but not necessarily. In fact, if you have to learn to be creative with your paid search marketing budget it is likely that you will end up getting more out of it for your money.

Having a budget limit is a positive aspect of paid search advertising management. It will force you to work on how many conversions you can get for money each month and it will help you to monitor how well you are doing with your marketing campaign and whether or not your budget is being used effectively enough or not.

Finding the right budget for your company is a very subtle thing and therefore it is something that you are going to have to be prepared to develop, adjust and tinker with over time. The important thing to remember is to try and work with the smallest budget possible to give you the amount of conversions that you are looking for each month.

4. Are you the only person who sees the results?

If you, the PPC Manager, happen to be the only person looking at the results of the paid search marketing campaign every month, you can be sure that you are on the wrong path.

Paid search marketing success comes from communication and this means that you need to learn how to share what you do with the people who need to see it and you need to help those people recognize the importance of looking at the information that you send them. You need to encourage your client to take an interest in his or her own paid search marketing campaign.

Make the reports that you share quick and easy to read. Indeed, the more you can share in diagram form the better, and it is always a good idea to show the past four months in the same report whenever possible to highlight progress or changes that have taken place recently.

5. What kind of optimization is the priority behind your paid search campaign?

Even if you are unable to do all the optimization tasks for your client at once, it is important to show your client that there is a bigger picture relating to optimization that you are heading towards in the near future.

For example, if your Display Network Marketing Campaign is doing better than your Paid Search Campaign, you might decide to focus all your efforts on the display campaign in order to make further improvements in this area. The following image illustrates clearly how display network campaigns can flourish whilst paid search campaigns flag, so be aware of what is working in your particular case and focus on the positives.

If you don’t share this information, which prioritizes optimization tasks in a clear and succinct manner, the client might waste time writing you an email or asking you about this in a meeting. If they are aware of your future plans for optimization and the reasons why you cannot start these ideas sooner, time is better utilized.

In addition, a priority plan for optimization reveals just how much work is involved in your job and it helps to explain to your client exactly what it is that you are doing for them as the PPC Manager, a job that few people outside of the industry rarely understand.

6. Have you created a timeline?

This is perhaps the most basic of all basic tips for paid search marketing organization and communication that exists.

If you have a timeline and all the ideas for the PPC marketing campaign outlined on a clear calendar of events and targets, everyone knows where they are, what they’re doing and when things must be completed by.

The entire team will know what they have to do for you in order for you to do your job by the stated time and the success of the work achieved in the team can be better measured and monitored at all times.

7. What will prevent you from moving forward with your work?

Finally, you need to make the whole team aware of the fact that your work depends on their work and the information that they provide too.
This is not about the PPC Manager making excuses in any way. This is not about the PPC Manager saying that he or she could not complete his or her paid search marketing task because of the fault of another.

It is, instead, about making the entire team realize the importance of the role that they play in the development and success of paid search marketing in general. Working in this way will help to generate a team-based environment too, which is excellent news for the PPC Manager who generally tends to have to work completely alone.

Including more members of the company in on what you do means that you will get the information that you need quicker and be able to do your job more effectively as a result.

 
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