Navigating PPC Waters: Effective Strategy and Planning – All Things PPC Podcast Ep4

What we did with the client and which made the biggest difference actually was to set what we call.

Hello. I am here with Siobhan, who is one of our senior client managers. How are you doing today, Siobhan? I’m good. Thank you. How are you? I am good. So today we’re going to be talking about strategy and planning when it comes to PPC. Something we are very passionate about here at PPC Geeks. So I’m going to start with a bit of a difficult question for you Siobhan.

What does strategy and planning mean to you? When we’re working with a client, when we’re starting. Sure, it’s a really good question. Uh, so for me, strategy and planning means, um, working with our clients very early on to establish what their targets are, their goals, their key objectives. Um, it’s very important that we know this early on so that we can plan a strategy accordingly.

Um, Google ads, nothing is a kind of quick fix and nothing happens overnight. And therefore the more aligned that we are with what the client’s looking for, the more that we understand their goals and targets, the more we can educate the Google ads algorithms around what exactly it is that we want to achieve.

Yeah. I always liken it to when, when you’ve got a problem, not just in PPC with with marketing campaigns, it’s too easy. Human nature is just to jump in and try and fix things, start clicking about, finding issues. But often we have to take that step back, don’t we? And begin with what are we actually trying to achieve here?

What, what ends are we trying to, to get to? So what kind of questions do we ask clients to tease that out? Because sometimes they might understand that conceptually, but it’s not how they operate. Yeah, it’s um, to come back on your point there, just before I answer your question, it’s um, it’s probably one of the biggest frustrations maybe that some of our clients have when they come to sex shift in mindset because everyone wants, you know, a quick fix and they want a performance change now, um, and that’s understandable, uh, but again, I mean, we find that making constant changes all that does is it makes performance kind of drags out any performance improvement.

We might see. So, in terms of questions that we ask our clients are things, for example, what are your objectives? What do you want to achieve? And it can actually. It can be quite an in depth conversation because sometimes the clients themselves aren’t very sure exactly what they want. For example, some clients might say, well, they want an increase in sales.

Well, actually, is that they want an uplift in their revenue? Do they want to improve their return on ad spend? Uh, do they want a more Or an increased volume of transactions that go on, so it’s very important to pinpoint the specifics. And again, some of our clients have to almost go back to the drawing board a little to work out internally within their business, what exactly is it that they want to achieve?

Yeah, um, and I think some of those, some of those goals don’t always go hand in hand, do they? They’re kind of being, can be counter counter to each other. So we could get a really high ROAS target, but only sell one unit. And that wouldn’t wash for the volume that they might need to do to get, you know, get the, the, you know, keep their workers in a warehouse busy, for example.

So it’s about. We always start, don’t we, with getting back to those business objectives themselves and what the business is trying to achieve, not just the marketing department and not just the layer below that, which is the PPC and looking at it holistically. So, when we’re doing that, there’s certain things we need to know, aren’t there?

So, margins that they might have for the products, past performance, expectations, seasonality, what kind of, What kind of analysis would you do at the start of a campaign or start of an engagement with the client to get, get more idea on those kind of things? Yeah, that’s a very good point. Um, what we do is, uh, we will look at.

For example, past performance, past history of the account. For example, if it’s seasonal, we can see what the seasonal trends have been. That enables us to prepare to either ramp up or ramp down, depending if we’re entering into a high peak or low peak. It also means that we can have a more balanced strategy throughout the year.

So, for example, it may be that we have one strategy for Clients peak season and another strategy for their low season and often, for example, in peak season, there’s an increase in demand. We want to increase budget and we want to be able to ramp up and up down from that and a successful way in a very measured way.

And then equally for low season, it could be that we just want to keep things ticking along with a kind of business as usual approach and just keep client afloat during that period. So it very much depends, as you say, on what their goals are, what their kind of seasonality is, and we’ll also look at past performance in terms of what’s aided the account in the past or what’s been tried and has failed, or perhaps even things that have been tried and failed, but not really due to.

that perhaps failed due to a previous setup not being quite correct. So there might be things that we retrial. So when it comes to having an actual strategy, the first step is defining those objectives, asking the right questions to make sure we know what the client’s trying to achieve. We know what their objectives are and we know the key results that they want to.

Put in place out of those, if they’re the initial steps, what’s, what’s the next thing we need to do to form a strategy if we’ve got the information of what, what they’re trying to achieve, what are the next steps we need to do to form a strategy? And then we’ll go on to how we might plan to implement that.

Um, yeah, well, coming back to what you were saying earlier, it’s normally, there’s normally a few different objectives that we have to meet. So, for example, as you mentioned earlier, it could be that one of the strategy is to, or one of the goals is to improve ROAS, but also the goal is to spend X amount of budget.

Often it can be easy to achieve a good ROAS if you don’t spend very much. And the sweet spot and the balance that we have to achieve, which takes meticulous planning to do, is how can we achieve high ROAS at a high ad spend. So normally what we do is when we get these goals back from our clients is to have a look at the historical performance in the account.

We see where they’re at now. In terms of those metrics and what we need to do to get them to where they want to be. And normally that will take place over X amount of months. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no quick fix. Really, our skill lies in training the algorithms to go after. Um, user profiles or searches target audiences that are more likely to meet the client’s objectives to make sure that we’re spending efficiently and that the client’s getting a good return on that spend.

So, what’s very important for us to do is to set out a road map with interim goals that we want to achieve along the way. And that helps us also keep a close eye on monitoring how things are going, making sure that we are. Uh, on track to meet the objectives. Sometimes something external can happen, like a new competitor comes into the marketplace and starts bidding aggressively.

And we have to react to that fairly quickly. So again, it’s good for us to have a roadmap in place. Both for us and the clients to understand it may take time to achieve this goal and this is how we’re going to do it, but also to allow us to react in the moment if we have to, if there’s some kind of fluctuation that’s come from an external influence that we have to be on top of.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. Just because we have an objective and put in place a strategy, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be rigid. It’s important to be adaptable. There’s that, that’s, um, there’s that saying about planning, isn’t there? Failing to plan is planning to fail, but then there’s also as soon as you’ve done a plan, it’s out of date, but the difference is you have to have a plan, but whether you’re, you know, you’re going to get there using that plan exactly is another thing, but we need to put these steps out and often we’ll actually think in longer time periods, won’t we Siobhan, we’ll look over a 90, 180 day time period because it does take Time to get those results in PPC, you are paying per click, and if you aren’t getting enough clicks because you’re either not spending enough money or you have thousands of products, and it’s going to take time to get those things through.

So how do we, how, what kind of review points would you recommend to put in place to reassess the strategy and the KPIs and whether they’re appropriate? What kind of time spans do you look at? Yeah, really good question. So, uh, in terms of that strategy, we tend to set strategies every quarter. So we’ve got a three month time frame.

Now within that, we’ll do a sort of mini strategy review every month. And so at the end of each month, we’ll have a look at the data now. And saying that, that makes it sound as though we don’t do anything for a whole month, which isn’t true. We optimize on a weekly basis. We make a lot of, well, it’s going to say changes.

We don’t always make changes, but we monitor it and we analyze it. And if a change is required, then we’ll make it. Now we do that on a week by week basis. Now, normally those weekly changes are that weekly analysis is more just little tweaks and adjustments. To make sure that we’re on track. For example, little things like budgets might fluctuate one way or another.

We might find there’s just sort of some CPA tweaks here and there required. So these are sort of small tweaks and optimizations. We generally don’t make large strategy decisions based on week by week data. Because it’s not enough time, we find weekly fluctuations where performance can go up or down in any given week.

We need at least four weeks worth of data to make more of a consistent decision as to whether we need to make some kind of change or a kind of bigger change than those weekly ones. Now, again, that can be, for example, if there’s some kind of external fluctuation, there could be that we see something.

Impact performance that week, but then it clears again the next week for saying something impact performance over 2 or 3 weeks. That’s when we need to start looking at making a change to mitigate that. So, um, and answer to your question, we would do large strategy. Roadmaps, reviews, plan for the next quarter, every three months.

Within that, we’ll make a monthly review, whereby if we need to react to something in the external marketplace, we will do. And within that, we make weekly tweaks and adjustments to make sure that we’re staying on track. Yeah, and it’s important, isn’t it, to always Heart back to those objectives that are trying to be achieved.

So we would have a stage plan. It’s reviewing what’s happened in the last 90 days. Say what we wanted to do in the next 90 days, but that’s overlaid with seasonality. Or you might have Christmas or Black Friday coming up. I mean, we’ve got some clients who sell things like garden equipment and garden furniture.

So the time we’re recording this, we were, you know, in February, we’re starting to plan for that peak period. We have other ones that. You know, e commerce that are very backloaded to the black friday christmas time. They’re doing different strategies to growth and maintain and brand building. So it’s, it’s having, I just want to make the point that it’s always evolving what we’re trying to achieve on the strategy.

So what are some of the foundational principles when it comes to actually putting those plans in place. So, for example, we, we know with PPC, there’s learning periods. We know, and we’ve proven time and time again, that we have to have a foundation to build on. You can’t, if, if a client wants to grow, the worst thing you can do is just throw money at it because the only winner is Google.

And we know that once you’ve defined a strategy, at least stick to it for a reasonable period of time. Otherwise, if you’re changing, you know, you’re constantly. In a learning period and both literally and figuratively in in in the data, etc. And then there’s also the strategy around Different platforms to expand to.

So we might be talking about Google ads, but you can go into Facebook or to X, Reddit, Amazon, your SEO channels and things like that. So, so let’s unpack a bit how we would do some planning around those mitigating elements. How, how do we know or, or. Understand when we’ve got a good foundation in place to build on.

What will you be looking in there in the initial strategy to then put in some growth phases? Well, I would say, for example, when a client comes to us, we implement the changes during their onboarding and we come up with our first strategy and now. Again, very dependent on their goals. Now, what we do is we implement that.

As you’ve said, we may make adjustments as necessary along the way. But I’d say at least after six months, if we’re starting to see performance improvements, then we know that we’re on to a good thing. We can tell when this account is starting to stabilize and grow. And that’s actually one of the first things we didn’t touch on earlier.

We have to make sure any performance improvements we make are stable within the account. As you see, those solid foundations are there. And from then we can start to grow because we know our strategy is working in the right direction. So I would say initially we need six months at least to allow that to happen.

Some of our clients it’s taken nine or 12 months. Those are some very high spending e commerce accounts. But again, because we’ve taken a very slow and methodical approach, we haven’t just tried to do some kind of quick fix, which, as you see, only benefits Google. It doesn’t really benefit the client.

We’ve laid some really solid foundations for our clients where their accounts have really started to grow and perform, and they have met and exceeded their goal expectations. Uh, so that’s really super. But as I say, we need to make sure the account is stable, there’s signs of performance growth. And when we know that’s the case, we can suggest expanding out, for example, into other areas, as you’ve described, such as social media or Bing or other platforms.

And then of course, we can take the strategy that we know is working on Google Ads and use that as our starting point on a new platform. So that in itself is part of the strategy. It’s saying, okay, are we going to concentrate on one platform for now and then get to a certain point, put some metrics or measures or milestones in place before we expand out?

We see a lot of people don’t really come and they just feel like they need to be everywhere and maybe they’re spread too thin. So a lot of our time is guiding clients into doing strategy the right way. in terms of which steps to take at what point in time. So that’s definitely a key thing. Let’s, let’s talk about some specific examples, because I think we’re talking about this all conceptually, which is all great.

But when we’ve got, we’ve got a few specific examples, it shows how we put these principles into play. So you recently worked with a major charity, didn’t you? Now charity is, I like using this as an example, because What they’re trying to achieve can be quite different, partly because they get money from Google and Google has restrictions, but partly because they’re, they’re not just selling widgets and they just want a ROAS, they want other actions in place.

So without obviously naming who they are, could you, could you walk through briefly what kind of process you took them from objective to strategy and planning and then review points to meet their goals? Uh, yeah, so. This is a really good example whereby with a charity, as you said, their goals are very different.

It’s not that, for example, they have big sales goals to meet or revenue targets or that kind of thing. And whilst, uh, donations, uh, was part of their, one of their goals, I mean, their main goal really was to spend what’s called their Google Ads grant. So Google Ads gives charities up to 10, 000. To spend per month on their Google ads campaigns and initially this charity came to us because they weren’t spending anywhere close to their Google ads grant allowance and they wanted us to help them.

be able to spend that grant, but to spend it in such a way that still met their conversion goals, which were having people sign up for fundraising events, having people sign up, um, to take advantage of the services that the charity was offering. So sort of twofold. One was targeting people who would like to fundraise for the charity, and the other was targeting people who would like to take or sign up to the benefits, the services that the charity would provide.

And now also because it was a good goal as well, as well as making sure that the ad grant was being spent. Yeah, so it’s sort of three goals all in one there. So yeah, so it’s a very interesting account to work on. Now also Google Ads grants have specific rules that we have to play by, which other Google Ads accounts don’t.

So there’s certain, um, there’s certain limits on what we can do and where exactly that ad grant can be spent. So there was a few different hoops to jump through and hurdles to come over. But in terms of setting the strategy, what we did with the client and which made the biggest difference actually was to set what we call accurate conversion tracking to make sure that with the client, they knew exactly.

What kind of contact they wanted people to make with them and how that would come about through their website, various calls to actions, filling in contact forms, etc. And by setting up accurate tracking of that method of contact, we set in place a strategy whereby we would implement conversion tracking, then.

Both our team and the Google algorithms get to see the correct target market is starting to convert, and then we can start to spend more of that Google ads grant on the target market that we wanted to attract, and that was a very successful strategy. And of course, the, uh, the client, the charity in this case was very happy with what we achieved because we had such a clear strategy.

We knew what our targets were, yeah. Our team in the background could set up a restructured campaign set up around the targets that we wanted to achieve. And of course, because we had accurate conversion tracking in place, both ourselves and the client were able to see that we met those targets. Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned conversion tracking because that’s one of the things we always say here is that.

If you don’t have the data, you know, you don’t know what works and what doesn’t. So, how, how do we build up data to analyze, use that, how do we use the data we have built up to then inform future strategy? What are we looking, looking for there? And if there is just a To throw a curveball question for you, if we have inherited a cab with bad conversion tracking, what are we looking for once the conversion tracking’s fixed to compare the data between two different periods?

And how does that inform strategy? Have you got any examples of that? Yeah, that’s another great question. Most of our clients come to us with an accurate conversion tracking. It’s one of the first things that we look at. So, as you mentioned, conversion tracking is important or accurate conversion tracking is important because, well, number one, the tracking has to track whatever the goal is.

Sometimes we find that clients come to us with a goal of, say, increasing their sales revenue. But their tracking is set up to track downloads of a specific PDF. So, in which case the algorithms optimise around people who might download a PDF, rather than people who might actually make a sale. So, conversion tracking is very important, number one, to link back to what that goal is.

It’s also very important for the client to be able to see What return they’re getting on their spend in terms of those target goals, whether it be an increase in sales revenue or downloads of certain material or certain leads that are contacting them through various contact forms. So lets the client understand exactly where their ad spend is going.

It helps our team understand how exactly the algorithms are maneuvering and how they’re working on the account. So we can make any appropriate adjustments to align all the campaigns with the goals. And we can only do that through accurate conversion tracking. And then the next aspect to this is it allows the Google algorithms to understand what kind of user profiles to target.

An example I gave earlier. If, for example, the algorithms think that they have to optimize towards people who download a form instead of people who fill in a contact lead or make a phone call or even make a purchase, then if there’s what we call inaccurate conversion tracking or conversion tracking that doesn’t match up with the client’s goals, the algorithms go off on a wild goose chase and it results in what we call wasted ad spend.

And we see that quite a lot in clients who come to us. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so having the data in place is that is definitely key. What I’d like to talk about now is to talk about an example, uh, a different example in a different industry of where the strategy that we put in place in PPC. is overlaid with a wider marketing strategy.

You might have some examples yourself, but I’ll give an example here of we work with several food companies. Now, the interesting thing I found about food companies is that they sell consumable products. So if people like the product, you’re hoping they’re going to buy it again, probably in 30 days. Or something, whereas if you, if you compare that to selling say beds, people are buying those, what you talked about about every eight to 10 years, I think.

So there’s a different metric there. Now with food companies, there’s, there’s a very strong brand element that we have to consider in, in their strategy because they might advertise. And in this case, the example I’m going to give is a diet meal company. That advertises on TV, they advertise on the underground, for example, on radio in certain targeted magazines.

So a big portion of the strategy we’ve had to overlay is to when they’re doing, where their placements are in the ads, which shows they’re going to have their, you know, if they can have an advert during Coronation Street, for example, and then overlaying that with tracking the right metrics, which in their cases, brand.

metrics versus non brand metrics. And what that means is if you’re advertising everywhere your brand, then it means that you are going to get people searching just for your brand name who might be in the market for what you’re doing because they’ve seen those adverts and they see. Non PPC adverts about your brand, but ultimately the value that PPC brings you is a making sure your own brand is always at the top But bringing in new traffic new customers for that lifetime value who haven’t seen those adverts And that’s an example of how We need to consider in our strategy, the wider marketing objectives of what the company is doing.

Do you have any further examples like that from your client base of where there’s what we do isn’t just standalone. It needs to fit in with an overall marketing objective. I think that’s partly the charity client, but there might be some other ones. Yes, so often what we’ll do is we’ll ask clients in advance for their promotional calendar so that we can understand when there are other kinds of promotions or adverts being placed that are non PPC.

And we can make sure that, for example, that we’re putting more budget into their brand campaign during that period. And also what we’ll do is we’ll make sure that our messaging is the same. Often there can be special offers or promotions that we can put into the ads. So there’s that kind of consistent messaging.

On top of just the standard brand messaging. So there’s that. And also what we find is that, for example, an example is coming up whereby we find that certain channels perform better for some things than others. For example, for one of our clients, which is one of our food related clients, we find that Google ads works very well for sending them.

People who are looking to have takeout or delivery now, Google ads is very good for that. So sort of like in the moment, you search for whatever meal you want and an advert pops up and then you go on to buy it, whereas that style of advertising doesn’t work so well on meta ads and what we found is that on meta ads, because it’s not that in the moment, um, style of search and then advert pop up that, you know, Those similar campaigns don’t work as well on meta ads.

Other style of campaigns too, but not one specifically targeting an in the moment delivery service. So that’s also very interesting in terms of collecting data around what does and doesn’t work on different channels. Yeah, that I think that’s a. A really solid example of there’s that saying, if, if you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail and that’s a good example of you’ve got the intent based.

So Google search that’s, it’s, it’s almost if you, if you want to get a takeout, it’s a very quick decision, isn’t it? And it’s almost like an emergency dentist. It’s high intent. You need to do it. Whereas you want. People to be aware of your brand, and that shows you how we take the client’s objective down to the strategy.

We put in place the plans we put in place, then filter out to how are we actually going to try and achieve those objectives in the right way? Whereas if we flipped it on its head, and we just started with this client wants to do Google ads. We would, we just, everything, everything looks like a nail and we’d just be whacking it.

And that’s why it’s so important to do things methodically in the right way. I was going to say another thing we should mention while we’re touching on brand, because it’s a question that comes up quite a lot from clients is, do they need any kind of brand campaign? Because if someone’s searching for their brand, they’ll probably find the client through.

The organic listings, particularly for clients who have quite a high organic listing and what we have found is that that’s not the case when people search for a particular brand, if there’s competitors advertising against that brand name, then even if our client is number one on the organic listings, there’s still going to be three competitors advertised above them and the less than on a mobile.

That’s all you see. So, yeah. It’s there’s a great potential for competitors to poach potential customers that would be going to our clients, and that’s what’s happened. That’s what happens a lot of the time, which is why, again, as part of our strategy and planning, we’ll have a look at, well, what’s the competitor landscape like?

Are there competitors bidding on the brand name? And do we need to set aside a certain amount of budget to prevent competitors poaching potential customers from our clients? Yeah, and again, that that’s that’s an excellent example of you can have all the strategy and planning in the world, but you need to still be cognizant of what’s actually going on in the market environment, don’t you?

And be reactive, which is why your plans need to be fluid enough. Well, I think that was a that was a great tour of. How we do and think about strategy and planning and why it’s so important to PPC and it reminds me it harps back to the foundational principles that here of you need to track everything you need to have a plan, and you need to focus on the right things.

And ultimately, if you take those core principles forward, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing in marketing. They’re going to be things that we get through. So thanks for your time Siobhan and we’ll see you on another PPC Geeks podcast soon. Thank you. You’re welcome.