PPC Marketing Project Management

This blog has been focusing mainly on many techniques and tips regarding running highly competitive paid search marketing campaigns. However, once you have sufficient experience in PPC marketing, sooner or later you will be involved in managing other aspects of PPC on a slightly higher level.

As your paid search marketing business grows, you may have no time to personally manage the PPC campaigns of your clients. You may have to shift your focus to manage the relationship of your clients or the multiple projects that your PPC campaign team is running. Some really good leaders on paid search marketing are able to manage both efficiently and effectively.

In my last couple of years of either personally managing PPC campaigns or managing multiple PPC projects by outsourcing to PPC team members, I discovered that below are the key points that you should focus on, whether it is to manage a client relationship or to manage multiple projects involving a PPC team:

Setting the Goals

Goals (or targets) must be pre-defined and agreed upon by both parties (your client and your business) before any PPC campaign should be launched. A goal must be set to within an achievable level. Not every client will let you know what his online sales figures are, but you can set some reasonable targets such as:

  • Improve the conversion rate by 30 percent in 3 months.
  • Increase sales figures by 10 percent each month for the next 6 months.
  • Increase the number of leads by 50 percent.
  • Decrease the campaign marketing cost by 20 percent in the next 4 months, but maintain sales volume.

Certainly, you do not want to over-sell to your client a target that you may not necessarily be able to meet. If you do that, you risk your reputation as it will create a false impression to your client that your business does not have competent skills on PPC management.

Managing Marketing Budgets

As a project manager yourself, you are often given a marketing budget by your clients. You will have to communicate with your PPC team on how this budget should be spent. For example, it may take 6 weeks for your team members to grow a campaign to a relatively large size (in terms of number of keywords). This is one of those reasons you may want to include in your budget estimation.

Also, you want to spend the client’s marketing budget so that it can achieve the maximum effect for the campaign. For instance, you want to have your team pre-defined the keywords that will make the most out the campaign in terms of sales. In this way, every click sent to your client’s website will not be wasted.

Communicating with Your Clients

In reality, no matter how good you are with PPC management, occasionally you and your team do not necessarily meet some of the goals. The reasons can often be short of resources, lack of time, or even lack of understanding of the industries of your clients. Constantly communicating with your clients is very important and will allow you to grow your knowledge in your client’s business.

Maintaining Business Ethics

Integrity is vital in building a great relationship with any client. Be honest to your client with everything you do to whether it is to add 10,000 keywords that will allow the PPC marketing campaign to spend an extra $2,000 per month, or it is that you may have some human resource constraints to meet certain targets on time.

Also you should not want to disclose highly confidential information of one of your clients without permission, even it may enable you to improve the relationship to another client with potential.

Final Words

As PPC is becoming more competitive in 2007, it is not sufficient when you and your team have great knowledge and experience in PPC marketing and management. It is when you can manage your paid search marketing projects in terms of setting achievable targets, managing the budgets, communicating with your clients, and maintaining business ethics, you will become highly competitive.

Comments

One Response to “PPC Marketing Project Management”

  1. On the Hunt for Good PPC Resources to Share » msdanielle - just another ego blog site » Blog Archive on July 26th, 2007 8:21 pm

    [...] Gordon Choi’s PPC blog. Examples of the quality of his writing appear in his articles about Effectively Managing Multiple PPC Projects and the Importance of Versatile PPC Platforms. I appreciate his earnest writing style and frank [...]

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