When you’re starting out with paid search, it can be overwhelming to manage all the details. For example, do you have time to create bidding strategies and experiment with keyword targeting? How will you keep track of performance metrics and understand KPIs? Will your campaign need to adapt quickly to new circumstances? If so, you’ll want to hire a virtual assistant (VA). An experienced VA will make your life easier by handling administrative tasks related to PPC campaigns. Since VAs are independent contractors rather than employees, they won’t take away from your time or take up office space. Instead, they can save you hours every week by taking on menial tasks that aren’t worth your attention if you also have other challenging work at hand. Let’s see how a virtual assistant can improve your PPC account and reduce the stress of managing it.
Helping You Manage Accounts
As your campaign grows, you’ll want to expand your account into multiple campaigns with multiple ad groups. Because you’re likely to have more than one campaign, the best VAs will help you organize your account and set up the initial structure for new campaigns. That way you won’t have to spend time organizing your campaigns, and you can stay focused on making strategic decisions about your account as a whole. Some VAs can also help manage ad extensions like sitelink and pathfinder. If you have an account with many ad groups, it’s easy to forget which ones to extend. A good VA can prevent these mistakes and help you get the most out of your ad extensions. If you plan to use the same ad group structure for multiple campaigns, it’s even easier to set up new campaigns with existing ad groups.
Helping You Manage Keywords
One of the biggest challenges in PPC is selecting the right keywords. Choosing the wrong ones can hurt your campaign’s performance, and choosing the right ones can take hours each week. Because your ads are triggered by keywords, you must select keywords that will bring targeted traffic to your campaign. At the same time, you want to avoid keywords that will trigger ads that aren’t relevant to your business. When you use VAs to manage keywords for your paid search campaigns, you can focus on choosing the right keywords without wasting hours each week. If you’re just starting to create your PPC campaigns, your VAs can help you research keywords and select those that will drive the most targeted traffic to your website. If you’re managing mature campaigns with thousands of keywords, your VAs can make sure your keywords stay relevant. If a keyword stops driving useful traffic, your VA can remove it from your account.
Helping You Manage Bidding Strategies
Another important aspect of PPC campaigns is setting the right bid for keywords. While you can do this manually, it’s a slow and error-prone process. Bid strategies help you set automatic bids for keywords to make your life easier. You can create bid strategies based on factors like how much profit you want to make per keyword, how much you’re willing to pay per click, and your average position. Some VAs can manage your bid strategies, but if yours doesn’t, you can set it up quickly. It’s a relatively simple process that doesn’t take much time. Once you set up your bid strategies, you can let your computer handle the manual bidding process. You won’t have to worry about adjusting bids each day, and you can focus on other aspects of managing your PPC campaigns.
Helping You Manage Performance Metrics
As you work to set up profitable PPC campaigns, you also need to track performance metrics. Your VAs can help you set up performance metrics and track them for each keyword and ad group. Whether you use Google Analytics or a paid tool like SEMrush, you need to track key metrics such as average position, click-through rate, and cost per click. Without the right metrics, you can’t optimize your campaigns, and you may end up spending money on keywords that aren’t worth the investment. Your VAs can help you track and record these metrics so you can use the data to make adjustments to your campaigns. This is especially important when you’re running multiple campaigns. Without metrics for each campaign, you may make adjustments that affect your entire account instead of just one campaign.
Helping You Understand KPIs
Finally, you need to have a basic understanding of KPIs to manage your PPC campaigns. Your campaign KPIs include things like your average position and the average cost per click. You don’t need to understand the math behind these metrics, but you should be able to understand the results. KPIs give you an overview of how your campaigns are performing. They let you know whether your campaigns are meeting your goals. For example, if your average position is below 10 and you want to be in the top three results, you know that your campaigns aren’t where they should be. Your VAs can help you understand your KPIs so you can take the necessary actions to improve your campaigns.
PPC campaigns can be challenging to set up and manage, but they’re worth it. Pay-per-click advertising can be more effective than other marketing channels, and it’s usually more affordable for businesses of all sizes. Depending on your experience with PPC, though, hiring a VA to help you manage campaigns can be a huge help. They can make sure your campaigns are set up correctly, and they can keep them running smoothly by tracking important metrics and adjusting bids. In addition, VAs can make sure you’re using your campaigns to their full potential by helping you understand KPIs. Hiring a VA isn’t cheap, but it can be a worthwhile investment if you’re serious about growing your PPC campaigns.
