Quality customer support for PPC optimization platforms is becoming increasingly important. Consider the impact of paid search programs on your revenue stream and the role bidding optimization tools play as key middlemen. Large amounts of money are relying on the flawless execution of PPC marketing, but we all know technology isn’t always perfect on its own.

Paid search has high stakes - and huge potential - for constant incremental improvement, particularly at scale. SEM is not your average marketing function: it’s a healthy mix of advertising expertise, copywriting, selecting business goals, statistics and analytics, big data, and the customer journey. It’s at the intersection of creative and technical skills. The keywords matter, the data matters, the integrations matter, and the budget matters. With the complexities that exist in the space, paid search technology needs a Customer Success partnership model – not simply a reactive support model. Advertisers need to be closely aligned with their PPC support team.

Two Levels of Benefits

There is more to purchasing PPC bid management software than just the technology; it also benefits the advertiser to invest in a partnership. This works at two levels: the benefits of urgent problem solving when issues arise, plus strategic planning and execution based on knowledge of your business and goals. One is about quality customer service for PPC; the other about strategic alignment and insight. With these advantages, advertisers find much more success running at-scale programs in SEM.

The first level is all about the actual dollar costs. In an instant, on any day, you may open Google Ads to suddenly find a huge PPC performance drop. It could be your competition, it could be landing page or URL changes, it could be a broken data integration, or something else entirely unknown. Whatever the cause may be, paid search teams are familiar with this feeling, and the frantic auditing that follows. The costs associated with SEM performance drops like this can be substantial. Overspending can lead to paying thousands without understanding why. A drop in volume can cut your forecasted revenue by 10, 20, or 30%.

If that sounds bad, imagine introducing a third party PPC bidding technology into the mix; one that may introduce new power and data, but with additional complexity. When auditing, you need to be able to reach the vendor’s support team immediately to help troubleshoot. With the added complications involved, you may not be able to figure out what the problem is for an extended period of time, if at all. At that point, the dollar costs can really get painful. You need a relationship based on alignment around business goals and metrics, data integrity, and technical transparency. Not only do you need a support rep, but your dedicated PPC support rep – your Customer Success Manager.

The second level of importance lives in the opportunity cost. When you partner with an organization, you share goals; you understand the in’s and out’s of the data; you’re aligned on the tactical execution as well as the strategic planning; you’re mutually benefiting from one another’s experience and expertise. What is the potential opportunity cost of running a program without a partnership with experts?

Partners take risks for you, provide recommendations that address your business needs, and put in effort to transform those recommendations into action and results. They work alongside you, digging deep and caring as much about your business as you do. This is the kind of relationship you should have with your PPC optimization vendor. Weekly meetings and close alignment creates a proactive engagement that catches, or prevents entirely, the problems we’ve already discussed. It determines changes in strategy ahead of time with a team who knows the software, the data, and your business. It creates a platform to bounce ideas around with like-minded professionals.

A Focus on People

Ask yourself a question: if you called up your provider now and asked them to explain your business to you, could they do it? Could they explain what business issues keep you up at night? Do they understand your personal goals?

As a company focused on big data and artificial intelligence, stereotypes would position QuanticMind as wanting to remove people from the equation. In reality, we’re working to get the best out of people and machines working together. AI and Machine Learning are powerful tools, but they need to be fed the right information and pointed in the right direction. That means partnering with subject matter experts to understand your business model, key goals and metrics, data structure and relevance, and the priorities of individual team members.

We discuss this topic further in the fourth installment of our Enterprise Paid Search Series: Is Poor Customer Support Undermining Your PPC Success? This download can help you learn what quality partnerships around SEM look like, and remind you of past engagements that had some pains or weren’t so successful. It pays dividends to invest in a strategic partnership with your PPC optimization vendor.

As a digital marketer, you might find yourself wishing your PPC bid optimization strategy could always maximize profit margins. Not so you can kick up your feet and watch the money flow in, but because you’ve considered it a potentially meaningful strategy—similar to why you would set revenue maximizing goals with a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) efficiency constraint. The only way you can know is by constantly testing what’s possible.

Paid search bidding optimization is best done by bidding using your conversions or revenue data to inform the model. Obviously this leads you—or your algorithmic decision engine—to make bid choices that are directly informed by the results you want. But which one is best: revenue or conversions? Well, it depends on your targets and goals, what data is available, and what type of business you run. However, revenue-based goals tend to be the most powerful in driving business results if the data is there. And they are especially powerful (and necessary) if you want to focus on profits primarily in your paid search strategy.

PPC optimization tools have already done a lot to evolve paid search as a marketing channel, and one of the next steps will be to automatically optimize bids against a goal of driving maximum profit from each individual keyword. The availability of this strategy is not seen in many tools, but it’s a very powerful way to transform your SEM program into one that consistently drives peak performance. The bidding strategy is enabled because of value estimation, modeling, and calculation all executed on each individual keyword.

That said, you also need good revenue data. The more accurate your revenue data applied to your keywords, the greater the possibility of getting the best margin results from your SEM program. How? You’ll need clean, organized data and thorough integrations—even to your offline revenue, latent conversions, or LTV stored in CRM or third party database. That revenue data is imperative to driving profit focused PPC optimization.

As the ancient Greek adage goes, “change is the only constant,” and that especially applies to the digital landscape for marketers today. The only way to keep up in this fast-paced and rapidly evolving industry is by continually testing and constant iteration. Adopting a new strategy or technology might seem like a risk, but these steps are often required to become more profitable and take your SEM program to the next level.