I’ve been running my own businesses now for over two decades during which time I spent a large proportion of my day on marketing activities, including managing my PPC accounts. Managing your own ads account can be done – it just requires a lot of perseverance, dedication and an initial learning curve. The main issue I had personally with managing my own accounts is that I thought I knew everything I needed to know after mastering the basics, when really I had just scratched the surface. The outcome was a slightly satisfactory performance for the first few months, but I was left wanting more for my budget.
These days, companies like Google make it seem like it’s easier than ever to run a successful campaign. They will auto fill a lot of your ad headlines for you and default to smart campaign mode so you don’t even have to get involved in bidding. Sounds great, right? Well, firstly it’s not that straightforward. Smart campaigns definitely have their place and when it comes to manual bidding, it can certainly outcompete it in many instances. However, what I’ve found is that a brand new campaign needs a lot more manual input before it gets to the stage where smart bidding becomes the most profitable and time saving option.
Even when you do get to the stage where you can ad automation to your PPC campaigns, it’s not the best practice to set it and leave it. Ongoing optimisation, constant A/B testing of ad copy and landing pages as well as periodic account audits are necessary to get the very best out of your campaigns. That’s without the ever growing need to adapt to the many changes thrust upon us with new privacy laws, a changing interface, a whole new analytics interface and the many tweaks to the Google Ads interface. The ads you created in 2022 are now obsolete in 2024.
It takes a lot of time and resources to stay on top of the many changes to PPC management. It can be done, although it does come at the expense at managing the various other day to day aspects of your business. In my role as a PPC Consultant, my aim is to provide significantly more value to your business than you could do by running your own ads, freeing up your time elsewhere and driving more revenue through efficiency and know how.