Managing PPC Campaigns Like a Musician

Whether or not they ask it, there is one question that comes to mind whenever people talk to me about PPC advertising: does playing in a band have anything to do with this? The simple answer is: yes.

First, much like music, advertising in general — and online advertising specifically — is a combination of art and science. Statistics and mathematics definitely play a part, because analyzing the staggering volume of data that online marketing generates is where the rubber meets the road.

Yet creativity is also key. Analytics may give you the numbers, but interpreting them in the light of human behavior often takes an intuitive leap. Like playing with other musicians, or writing a song, you are working within a structure while finding ways to be new and unique in the confines of that existing format.

Also akin to the practice of songwriting is the way you must strive to have keywords and ad copy working together. Much like the verses of the song must inevitably lead to the chorus.

Working together with “band mates”

Almost all successful marketing efforts involve not a single player, but a cohesive team. Managing PPC campaigns is no different. The PPC expert will find him or herself working with a website designer, a dev team (the programmers that actually code the pages), and likely an SEO guru. (The PPC and SEO portions may be done by the same person, but often they are separate people, or even teams.)

And finding keywords that convert — meaning the specific search phrases that actually lead people to do something positive on your site — requires that everyone on the team work together. Not only sharing information, but also brainstorming effective campaign changes.

Climbing the charts

How rare is it that a new song shoots straight to the number one position on the charts? Extremely. In the same way, virtually no online marketing program immediately dominates the search engines.

Instead, an effective campaign involves a certain amount of intuition, a bit of trial and error, and an awful lot of analysis, hard work, and constant improvement. Sure, there are lots of theories about the best way to build a PPC powerhouse, but in the end, there is no substitute for time and effort.

DYI: A recipe for failure

I’ve heard a lot of analogies attempting to describe ways to manage PPC campaigns. Though each may have some small benefit, it is difficult to reduce such a complex process to a soundbite. And this is why managing your own Google Ads account is almost never a good idea.

Sure, anyone can set one up. Yes, people at Google are extremely helpful in showing you how to spend large sums of money, and maybe even generate substantial traffic. But in nearly every case we’ve seen, none of those things leads to the results business people want: increased sales and improved profit margins.

To achieve those results, you need to turn to the experts. As a long time San Diego PPC Agency, we have rescued more than one client from drowning in a campaign combining high dollars with low payback.