The right paid search management services can deliver amazing results for businesses looking to improve PPC marketing outcomes, scale successfully, and ensure search engine visibility.
There are over 8.5 billion searches on Google every day, and paid search ads are what help you get in front of people making those searches. Social media may reach many people, but it doesn’t boast the high conversion rates and high intent of Google Search.
HawkSEM’s strategic paid search management will ensure that your ads target prospects who are most likely to convert. Wherever they happen to be, and whatever terms they are searching for, our ad strategy will get you in front of them.
Not only is the targeting laser-focused, but our management ensures ads have persuasive copy and incredible landing page design to create an excellent ad experience. Let’s dig into the ins and outs of all things paid search management.
What Is Paid Search Management?
Paid search management is the creation, management, optimization, and analysis of campaigns on the Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising networks.
Paid search ads (also known as pay-per-click or PPC management) refer to an advertising model where brands only pay when a person clicks on their ads. These ads are displayed at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) on platforms like Google and Bing, above the organic results. Bidding on keywords and other factors determines which ads are displayed.
PPC advertising involves research, strategy, analysis, and testing. This is why many businesses choose to consult a marketing agency and have them manage their paid search marketing.
Paid search ads aren’t free, of course, and whether or not a good strategy is in place can make the difference between huge returns and lots of wasted ad spend
Paid search management allows an expert to handle your business’s ads on your behalf. And this goes beyond simply running campaigns. Proper search engine marketing (SEM) management is essential to increase leads and sales while keeping customer acquisition costs low.
Power Up Your Paid Search Management
You deserve a paid search partner who can deliver results like these:
What Are the Benefits of Paid Search?
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1. Greater visibility
Effective paid search advertising puts you in the top spots immediately. Both small startups and large enterprises can see instant results and use paid search ads to quickly get their business in front of quality prospects with high-intent searches. It makes a great complement for search engine optimization (SEO), which will help you to rank for your most important keywords over time. This strategy will allow you to appear in multiple locations in the SERPs and increase your visibility.
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2. More website traffic
PPC campaigns bring traffic to your site from the get-go. You’ll see a spike in traffic to your company website when paid ads are being used. This will usually happen within a few days of starting your campaign. This is especially beneficial for startups and newer companies that need to quickly get their name out there and generate leads and revenue.
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3. Quality prospects
More traffic is great, but it’s only really valuable if some of it converts. Paid search ads serve based on the keywords you choose. Searchers then type these keywords into the search bar, which means you’ll only show ads to a relevant, targeted audience. The people who see your ads at the top of the SERPs are already looking for a product, service, or solution that your company offers. This gives them a higher chance of converting than random web traffic.
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4. Detailed analytics
Search engines have mind-blowing analytics. You can get down to the nitty-gritty details of your ads’ performance with free real-time data. Insights from that data can then be used to improve your campaigns, convert more prospects, and see exactly where your paid search dollars are going.
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5. Control over the target audience
Unlike content marketing and SEO, you can target specific people. This can be done through keywords, in-market audiences, affinity audiences, and custom segments. That means you can target people looking to buy, who have shown a love for your product or service or have even visited a competitor’s website.
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6. Formats and networks to match your objectives
PPC offers a variety of ad formats and networks to maximize visibility based on your marketing campaign's objective. On the Google Search Network, your text ads will appear above the SERPs. Boost your brand awareness with ads on the Display Network.
Or, if you’re an ecommerce business, you can use shopping ads to reach potential customers on the Shopping Tab, Google Search, Google Images, Google Partner websites, and Maps. Retargeting ads on Display and Search ensure you can reengage website visitors, cart abandoners, and past purchasers. There are even app install campaigns if you work with apps.
Why Should You Use Paid Search?
Paid search is not the only marketing channel out there, though we’d argue it’s one of the best. With so many options for spending your digital marketing budget, how do you know when paid search management is right one?
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1.
You need traffic fast
This might be because you are a new business or launching a new product or service. If you don’t have an established online reputation for your service or company, PPC ads can be the way to generate traffic quickly while you wait for organic traffic to grow.
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2.
High customer lifetime values
If you run a business that has a high customer lifetime value (CLTV), you can spend a fair chunk of change on acquiring new leads. Some examples of businesses with a CLTV include dentists, utility providers, and educational facilities.
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3.
High margins
Another reason you can splash some cash on PPC ads is that your services deliver high margins. While customers might not have a high “lifetime value,” they can bring high margins on a single purchase. This typically refers to big-ticket items such as lawsuits, home appliances, cars, etc.
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4.
Seasonal or event-based products and services
If you see a spike in sales during a particular season of the year or because of specific life events, PPC is a great choice for your business. For example, florists love PPC because people rarely send flowers. But when it’s a wedding, funeral, or valentines day, everyone needs a florist.
Results are Everything
HawkSEM in 90 seconds
Paid Search vs. Organic Search: What’s the Difference?
PPC and SEO are both valuable marketing channels that can generate traffic to your website. We’ve talked a bit about how SEO can take longer to show results, but don’t let that fool you into thinking we don’t appreciate its value.
When it comes to SEO vs. paid search, it’s not a simple apples-to-apples comparison. In fact, it’s more like apples to oranges. Each has its time and place, so which should you invest in?
SEO is an attractive choice for many businesses because the clicks you get to your website are free. But it takes a lot of work to appear on the coveted top positions on the first page of the SERP and requires a lot of patience and know-how.
From keyword research to link building and technical SEO, there are a plethora of ways to optimize your site for organic search. And with more and more businesses seeing the value in search engine traffic, competition for the top spot is tough, and even if you get there, you have to maintain it.
SEO also has incredible long-term value. Your investment in SEO might not yield results at first, but over time the organic traffic you generated will be of great value to your business.
Paid search, similarly, requires a lot of know-how and words. However, if you can configure a campaign well, you can immediately jump to the top of the SERPs. You benefit from fast results, and paid search tools allow for simple testing and data collection. Because of this, insights from paid search are often used to make updates that will also benefit SEO.
So, which should you choose: SEO or PPC? They are both useful and work best in tandem, but one might be more useful for your specific business in certain circumstances.
Why You Need Paid Search Management
So we’ve gone on and on about all the great things paid search offers. So you can just start running campaigns yourself, right? Or should you reach out to an expert and invest in paid search management?
Some businesses might balk at the added cost of hiring a paid search management service (and we’ll get into exactly what those costs are in a bit). But in many cases, the service pays for itself by optimizing campaigns, increasing efficiencies, and freeing up your in-house staff.
Some businesses that would be good candidates for using a paid search management company include:
- Any business new to paid online advertising
- Companies without an in-house advertising team
- Small firms who don’t have the manpower to manage paid search along with their other channels
- Small firms who don’t have the manpower to manage paid search along with their other channels
- Companies who do not want to invest in the sometimes-expensive database and software systems that assist with optimal paid search strategy
Specialist paid search management agencies have a high level of expertise that you can tap into. In addition, they can make use of industry contacts and established connections with advertising platforms to further improve your ad campaign results.
Ecommerce media brand ThriftBooks was searching for an agency to help them boost return on ad spend (ROAS), align campaign initiatives, and grow revenue. That search led them to HawkSEM. Through our partnership, Thriftbooks was able to garner a 50% higher average order value (AOV) and increase year-over-year search clickthrough rates (CTR) by 35% while maintaining an internal target ROAS.
What Does a Paid Search Management Specialist Typically Do?
Paid search marketing will deliver targeted traffic to your business’s website. But it’s a complex marketing channel and takes technical know-how to do well. An expert in paid search management will review every corner of your paid search account and continuously find areas to improve upon that will generate more leads and sales.
Paid search management experts can come in many forms — from in-house staff to freelancers and consultants to agencies and everything in between. But no matter which type of expert you use, they should be able to deliver the same important things.
Effective paid search management is built on several interconnected foundations:
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Keywords
Researching the specific keywords and search terms that qualified leads enter into search consoles is key to paid search success.
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Placement strategy
Paid search management covers multiple channels such as Google Ads (FKA AdWords) and Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads). A good management service will find placements on channels where your audience spends time.
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Monitoring
Keeping an eye on search term reports makes it easy to discover which keywords are most often used and generate the most revenue.
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Return on investment (ROI)
Regular reporting on ROI allows you to use it as a metric to guide and dictate bidding strategy and the scope of PPC buys.
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Competitive analysis
This involves checking the tactics and strategies used by your competition. A time-consuming task that yields impressive results and can guide decisions, such as whether to take them on directly by bidding on the same keywords or instead target keywords your competitors have missed.
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Negative match
Optimize your company ad spend by removing keywords and categories that have a low chance of converting. For example, a family lawyer may remove keywords about employment law, which would limit the geographic location of those who ads are displayed to.
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A/B testing
Also known as split testing, A/B testing is one of the most effective tactics for optimizing your company’s ad revenue. Ad copy, design, video, targeting, and more can be slightly altered between variants of the same ads to find the most effective one.
What Does Paid Search Management Cost?
Paid search management can cost $2,500-$10,000+ per month.
Prices vary from agency to agency based on their experience, location, expertise, and offerings. But typically, you will find pricing offered in one of three models, and you can search for an agency that has a model that best suits your business.
Percentage of Ad Spend
The agency takes a commission set at a percentage of your monthly ad budget, ranging anywhere from 10-30%
Flat Fee
A set fee you pay monthly with no surprises or added expenses – but you will often also need to pay an additional initial setup fee.
Performance-Based Fees
You only pay for the leads your ads deliver (but be careful that the agency doesn’t focus on quantity over quality).
Whichever pricing model you prefer, you should always make sure you know what you’re paying for and what your fees will get you. You don’t want to have any shocks because you have to pay for or hire additional resources or tools later on.
HawkSEM: Paid Search Specialists (& Much More)
To date, HawkSEM has managed millions of dollars in search ads.
As premier partners with both Google and Microsoft, our team has extensive knowledge of all the major search engines and access to search engine reps and beta programs other agencies don’t have. We keep a hawk’s eye – excuse the pun – on our client’s search campaigns, which is very different from the “set it and forget” approach some paid search agencies provide.
Our close monitoring of campaigns means we are able to reduce the impact of bidding on wasted search terms and quickly make adjustments when your competition changes.
A focus on the highest converting keywords helps us deliver more leads and generate more sales for your business. Years of experience will help you quickly start putting your ad budget to good use with tactics that work rather than wasting your budget experimenting.
Along with paid search management, our full-service team of digital marketing strategists can help you build and optimize additional marketing channels and tactics, including
- Paid and organic social
- SEO
- Content strategy
- Email marketing
- Remarketing and retargeting
- Landing page and conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Ecommerce shopping and feed management
- Performance display
- & more
ConversionIQ™: A Digital
Marketing Game-Changer
ConversionIQ is a unique tool from HawkSEM that all of our paid search management clients can use. It gives you the freedom and transparency to check in on your account performance and activity at any time. Mid-week, mid-month, no questions asked, no lengthy emails. You should have the autonomy to check up on your account status beyond your designated check-ins, don’t you think?
But beyond reporting, it’s worth mentioning that ongoing communication should be something you expect from your PPC partner — on your terms:
- Do you prefer email or phone calls?
- Video chats or prerecorded updates?
- How often do you want to communicate?
As your paid search management agency, it’s our responsibility to fit almost effortlessly into your existing and preferred business operations.
HawkSEM has been hand-selected as a Google Premier Partner and Microsoft Advertising Partner
We make things happen …but don’t take our word for it:
CSUN
Patch Of Land
Google Partner
Google Partner
The Bottom Line
High CPC, low quality score, rising CPA, campaign management has plenty of challenges. Paid search management services can take the pressure off of your in-house team and give you the results you need.
But not just any agency will do. You need a team of industry pros with the expertise, experience, and a proven track record of using their time-tested strategies to improve ad performance.
You want an agency that develops relationships with its clients and treats every business like their own.
As a top 3% of agencies in the country, HawkSEM has a 98% retention rate and an average 4.5X ROI for our clients.
We offer our clients a whole digital marketing team ready to plan your strategy, execute it, and then analyze, test, and iterate. From SEO to paid search to landing pages and all the digital marketing tactics in between, HawkSEM offers a cohesive, full-funnel strategy to help you achieve — then exceed — your goals.
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No BS, just results. Average clients see a 4.5x ROI
- Dramatically improve ROI
- Outperform the competition
- Increase conversion volume
- Better track ROI
- Reduce cost per acquisition
- Improve lead quality