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5 compelling questions for mandatory professional management

If you are running your own small business then you are familiar with multi-tasking, being responsible for everything from running the logistics of your business, to being your own secretary, account manager, sales person and marketer. It is a tough grind, every small business owner will tell you this, so the question is whether Pay-per-Click management should also be a part of your repertoire?

Answer each of the five questions that follow and then decide whether you should take off the Pay-per-Click hat and allow professionals to manage it for you. (Ah-hem, the PPC professionals being namely us at October 17 Media of course!)

1. When was the last time you checked your PPC account?
Was it a week ago, a month ago, a few months ago? How often do you actually make quality adjustments to your PPC campaigns such as split testing ad variations, researching negative keywords, monitoring your bidding strategy?

If running your PPC account means setting it up and never looking at it again or it simply becomes a check point on your to-do-list that you never seem to get to, then it is time for you to seriously investigate professional management. You are giving the search engines free money if you are not actively monitoring your PPC campaign.

2. How are your conversions? What’s your current conversion rate?
Not knowing this answer is like not knowing what your business profit margin was last month. As soon as you are spending money, but you can no longer measure the return on that cost, you are potentially wasting that money.

If you have not set up conversion tracking, yet have some type of form you wish searchers to fill out or have some action on your website that can be tracked, this is a warning sign that your PPC account needs some help!

3. Is this the best use of your time?
This is an important question – could you be adding more value to your business by doing something else? Your time is precious, so are there other ways that you could be bringing in revenue or growing your business? Opportunity cost is a very important consideration – think about what you are not able to get to because you are spending time on the PPC campaign.

4. When did you last learn something new regarding PPC?
The only constant in the online marketing industry is change and every niche from PPC to SEO (search engine optimization) to SMM (social media marketing) are so rich in new information and methodologies that it is a full time job alone staying on top of these changes. Are you still implementing the same things, in the same way that you first did when you set up your PPC campaign for the very first time?

5. Running into problems, how’s your Quality Score?
Have you experienced a sudden rise in your minimum allowable cost-per-click bid? Has it jumped suddenly by 100%? If this is the case you may have been hit with a poor quality score. But even if you haven’t, do you have a good quality score but see minimal impact on your return on advertising spend? Most advertisers overbid for keywords, which means that they are paying more than they have to for those same positions and clicks.

If you think the way that you answered the above questions is a worrying sign for your PPC campaign, give us a call at October 17 Media – we would be pleased to professionally manage your paid search account.