How to Succeed With a PPC Consultant in 2024

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can provide a major competitive advantage for driving targeted traffic and conversions to your business. However, managing successful PPC campaigns requires significant expertise and oversight to maximize return on ad spend. More businesses are finding that partnering with a ppc consultant brings the skills and resources needed to unlock the full potential of PPC marketing.

As you look for an effective ppc consultant to collaborate with in 2024, what should you look for to set your campaigns up for success? This guide will walk through the key factors to consider when vetting and working with a PPC consultant like Cliffex to achieve outstanding results.

FURTHER READING

> The Ultimate Guide to PPC Consulting

Define Campaign Goals and Metrics

The first step to PPC success with a consultant starts with defining your goals and metrics for measuring performance. Be specific about what you want to accomplish through PPC to provide clear direction and evaluation criteria. Common PPC goals include:

• Generate leads or sales through website conversions
• Increase brand awareness and site traffic
• Engage target audience segments
• Improve cost per acquisition

Your ppc consultant will reference your goals to optimize campaigns, advise on realistic outcomes, and report on goal progress. Without clarity on campaign objectives and success metrics from the start, you run the risk of misaligned expectations that make it hard to determine value.

Research Consultant PPC Skills and Experience

Your consultant’s capabilities directly determine the quality of PPC management and performance. Carefully vet each agency or specialist under consideration to determine who best fits your needs. Look for these markers of expertise:

• Extensive PPC account management experience optimizing Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and other platforms
• Mastery over PPC campaign setup, keyword research, bid strategies, testing, analysis, and optimization
• Vertical industry specialization with clients similar to your business
• Strong references and examples of accounts optimized and scaled successfully
• Investments in ongoing PPC education and certifications

A seasoned ppc consultant like Cliffex brings strategic perspective from managing campaigns in your niche that translates to better results. Confirm they have the right blend of hands-on platform skills combined with high-level insight to drive your account beyond self-managed capabilities.

Collaborate Closely With Your Consultant

Managing PPC alongside an agency involves much more than just handing over your account. Plan for an integrative, collaborative partnership centered on frequent communication and transparency. Successful consultants make themselves an extension of your marketing team, keeping you looped in through:

• Weekly or monthly account performance updates
• Scheduled calls and meetings to cover reporting, planning, new campaigns, tests, or needs
• Direct access for asking questions or discussing new ideas
• Commenting capabilities within campaign dashboards

By staying actively engaged throughout the consulting partnership, you empower further PPC success through shared insights, timely feedback, and collective decisions. Maintain visibility over the account and keep your consultant in the know regarding impact on wider business operations.

Map Campaign Structure for Conversions

Developing a streamlined campaign architecture designed specifically to convert site visitors is vital to executing effective PPC with a consultant. Most consultants strategically segment paid search marketing into:

• Branded campaigns targeting your business name and trademarks
• Various non-branded campaigns aligned to products, services, regions, and other conversion factors
• Extensive negative keyword lists preventing irrelevant searchers from seeing ads

Proper campaign structure, advanced bidding tactics, landing page optimization, and ongoing performance analysis then works together to drive better conversion results across accounts. Evaluating consultant expertise in architecting campaigns specifically for generating leads and sales prevents missteps that waste budget on the wrong types of clicks.

Monitor Performance and Optimize Over Time

Even highly experienced PPC consultants like Cliffex depend on monitoring performance trends to improve accounts. Meet routinely to discuss recent campaign data and refine strategies as needed. Consistent refinement through testing expands on winning formulas while eliminating less effective elements.

Common PPC optimization techniques consultants drive include:

• Improving keyword quality scores by aligning relevance between search queries and ads
• Adding negative keywords to block irrelevant searchers not likely to convert
• A/B testing different ad copies, landing pages, offers and more to boost conversions
• Shifting budgets across better performing campaigns and keywords
• Retargeting previous site visitors through remarketing lists

An effective consultant constantly iterates and innovates over the course of partnership, applying expertise to unlock better results over time. Continually optimized PPC accounts using proven best practices lead to the highest ROIs long-term.

Leverage Automation for Major Accounts

Sophisticated PPC consultants manage extensive campaigns too complex for manual oversight alone. Automation and scripting protocols inject productivity by taking over tedious account management workflows.

Common PPC automation techniques likely utilized by consultants include:

• Rules-based algorithms automatically managing bids and budgets
• Scripts that pause poorly performing keywords saving wasted spend
• Dynamic number insertion that continually refreshes ad copy
• Bulk campaign management functions like updating bid adjustments
• AI that provides recommendations to boost performance

Discuss what types of proven automation your consultant actively uses within client accounts and how it impacts optimization abilities at scale. Intelligent technology support empowers the best consultants to maximize outcomes.

Ensure Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling

The influence of PPC on conversion paths doesn’t exist in isolation. Prospects often touch multiple channels before eventually converting. Consultants who ignore the broader picture risk PPC under-attribution and overspend compared to other lead sources.

Sophisticated consultants instead utilize attribution modeling to quantify how each channel contributed to the final conversion over time. Various models help parse out values including:

• First-click attribution giving full credit to the first channel
• Linear attribution evenly splitting credit across all channels
• Time decay attribution weighting channels clicked on nearer conversions higher

Evaluate consultant abilities to apply cross-channel intelligence in optimizing budgets, bids, and creative for PPC accounts. Multi-touch analysis and adaptation helps continually improve results as the most cost-efficient driver balanced against other marketing.

Secure Enterprise-Grade PPC Management

Large PPC accounts demand robust management platforms and protocols behind the scenes not needed at smaller scales. Enterprise-grade consultants committed to excellence invest in next-level infrastructure for maximized campaign performance including:

• Certified PPC partnership status with Google, Microsoft, and other ad platforms for deeper analytics
• Proprietary martech stacks with advanced automation, attribution, and intelligence integrations
• Teams of specialists like data analysts, click fraud investigators, and senior strategists that can be leveraged

Discuss the account management technology, teams, and partnerships backing top consultants you evaluate. Prioritizing enterprise-level infrastructure better supports long-term progress guided by experts.

The Best Consultant Aligns PPC to Business Goals

An outstanding PPC consultant not only excels at campaign execution but also strategy alignment with overarching business objectives. Having a partner that contextualizes how PPC channels into bigger decisions around budgets, support teams, technologies, and growth planning ensures coordinated success.

The search marketing space evolves at an incredible pace. Partnering with the right ppc consultant like Cliffex provides the expertise and resources needed to continually progress results. Just be diligent in your selection process and collaborative throughout the partnership to drive outstanding PPC performance in 2024 and beyond.