A pay-per-click (PPC) agency can provide immense value through their exclusive focus on paid search optimization. However, to maximize your agency relationship, view them as more than just tacticians. Here are tips for evolving your PPC agency into a strategic partner integral to your marketing team’s success:
Bring Them Into Your Planning Process
Include your agency early on when developing marketing plans and initiatives. Get their input on how paid search can support your goals across channels. This enables them to align PPC strategy tightly to your overall objectives versus operating in a silo.
Solicit Idea Sharing and Brainstorming
Move beyond just campaign execution by regularly brainstorming and ideating with your agency. Their breadth of experience brings fresh perspectives on reaching your audience and promoting your brand through PPC.
Request Optimization Recommendations
Empower your agency to audit your accounts and make recommendations for optimization. Give them leeway to apply their expertise, question assumptions, and suggest improvements to underperforming areas.
Seek Cross-Channel Coordination
Your agency likely has experience beyond just paid search. Engage them to coordinate initiatives across search, display, social, and more for alignment. Eliminate channel-specific silos.
Pick Their Brain on Business Growth
Because they manage campaigns in your vertical across clients, your agency has unique market insights. Discuss wider business goals and get their thoughts on PPC’s role in supporting growth.
Establish Two-Way Mentorship
Set up reciprocal mentorship exchanges where your team trains agency staff on your company’s business, products and customers while the agency educates your team on technical PPC skills.
Take Advantage of Testing Capabilities
Leverage your agency’s ability to test new ad formats, bidding strategies, landing pages and more across accounts. Testing yields data to refine strategy.
Summon Their Analytical Acumen
Your agency employs analysts and advanced analytics tools. Leaning on their data analysis expertise can reveal key performance drivers and opportunities.
Unity Around Your Brand and Goals
At its core, an ideal agency relationship has a shared vision, priorities, and metrics for success. You are partners invested in the same outcomes. Fostering unity maximizes collaboration.
PPC Advertising Management
For brands investing significantly in PPC, a full-service ppc agency provides more robust advertising management including:
- Ongoing campaign optimization based on deep analytics
- Constant testing of new keywords, ad copy, landing pages, bidding, and targeting
- Talent specialization with dedicated analysts, technologists, creatives, and bid managers
- Unified cross-channel coordination between search, display, social, and more
- Experience setting up and managing complex automation and workflows
- Ability to scale campaign management as spending and volumes grow
The focused resources and expertise of an agency allow them to execute core ppc advertising management at a high level on your behalf.
PPC Management Beyond just advertising, effective PPC management encompasses:
- Developing an optimal account structure and architecture
- Implementing processes for campaign monitoring, reporting, and analysis
- Setting up conversion tracking to accurately measure ROI
- Keeping campaigns aligned to the latest platform features and best practices
- Managing campaign budgets, targets, and performance dashboards
- Overseeing campaign workflows across multiple managers and specialists
Savvy agencies have project management processes and oversight in place to handle the full spectrum of PPC management responsibilities at scale.
Evolving a PPC Agency into a Strategic Asset – Case Study
Background:
Acme Corp is a B2B technology company selling cloud-based software. They originally hired Cloud Marketing, a PPC agency, just to execute and optimize their existing search campaigns.
Approach: Over time, Acme took steps to evolve Cloud Marketing from a tactical partner to a strategic asset:
- Invited Cloud Marketing to planning meetings to align PPC with broader initiatives
- Sought ideas from Cloud Marketing on engaging highly technical buyers through paid search
- Tasked the agency with auditing campaign data and presenting optimization recommendations
- Had Cloud Marketing expand management to include display advertising
- Leveraged the agency’s testing capabilities for new ad formats
- Relied on Cloud Marketing’s analysts to uncover performance insights and trends
- Developed a mentorship program for skill-sharing between teams
Results: By integrating Cloud Marketing into more aspects of their marketing efforts, Acme achieved the following:
- 15% increase in lead conversion rate from smarter cross-channel coordination
- Higher campaign performance through new strategies proposed by the agency
- Tighter alignment between PPC and website content based on agency feedback
- More accurate performance data by utilizing the agency’s analytics expertise
- Expanded PPC success into new areas like YouTube ads through the agency’s management
- Improved relationship between Acme’s marketing team and the agency
By evolving Cloud Marketing from an exceptional vendor to a strategic partner, Acme was able to unlock much greater value from the relationship and improve its PPC outcomes significantly.
This case study demonstrates how brands can move beyond purely tactical agency engagement by involving them in planning, testing, analysis, and idea-sharing. This enables an agency to have a greater positive impact on overall marketing performance.
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