PPC Management FAQs

My fee is broken in two parts – an initial onboarding/setup fee and then a monthly account management fee.

My onboarding fee is determined by the scale of your accounts and what work needs to be done. Activities include setting up the correct conversion tracking, creating the different campaign types, generating keyword and audience lists, suggesting landing page changes, optimising your shopping feed (if relevant) and designing or retrieving assets for ad creation. I will determine the work needed at the account review stage and will detail it in my proposal. Onboarding work is charged at an hourly rate of £75. As an estimation, a typical individual PPC channel account takes between 7 – 10 hours to setup from new, however, e-commerce businesses with shopping feed requirements can take substantially longer.

After setup, I charge a monthly management fee that equals 15% of your total account spend. 

My minimum monthly account spend per client is £5000 (amount spent on actual ads). This is an average monthly amount spent over one year.

In some circumstances I may work with accounts smaller than my monthly budget threshold. However, because I work as a sole consultant (without account managers) I prefer to dedicate my time to optimising and growing larger accounts.

This is entirely dependant on your market, budgets and objectives. It is something we can discuss together during our initial consultation.

My fee is determined as a percentage (15%) of your total advertising spend. However, for one-off consultancy and setup work on your account I charge £75/hour.

This is dependant on variables such as the nature of your market, auction competitiveness, your typical prospect buying cycle, product or service demand in your market and available budget. Some PPC channel accounts can start delivering the results you would like immediately whilst others may take a number of months.

As a rule of thumb, I recommend to judge the performance of a PPC account after a minimum of 3 months. This gives me enough time to properly structure the campaigns, find the best converting keywords, audiences and product sets and suss out what the competition is doing.

The ongoing optimisation of a PPC account revolves around several activities such as:

• Adding new valuable keywords to campaigns
• Bid adjustments for high converting keywords
• Adding negative keywords to campaigns
• Bid optimisation for relevant audience and demographic signals
• Split testing, reviewing and adding new ads
• Adding and refreshing timely Ad Extensions
• Recommending and making landing page alterations
• Implementing seasonal promotions and price changes
• Maintaining a detailed and well optimised product feed
• Initiating automated bidding strategies at the right time
• Monitoring campaign auctions and set budgets

All optimisation work is carried out with the objective of reaching, maintaining and exceeding your defined KPIs over time. Whether that is a target return on ad spend (ROAS), cost per acquisition (CPA) or other core conversion goal you would like to achieve.

Again, this is dependant on a number of variables including your competitive market place, your website experience, brand position and your product or service offer. Every market and strategy adopted is different. Many brands treat PPC as a loss generating exercise i.e. they are prepared to lose money generating the first sale but make their return through repeat customer purchases. Others want to make good profit margins on their first sale as their business doesn’t serve well for repeat custom. The answer is that it really ‘depends’, and I can’t give an accurate answer until I have analysed the PPC landscape in your market.

I don’t have a minimum contract length and work on a month-to-month management arrangement. All I ask is for one months notice if you wish to discontinue our arrangement. I also request that grace is given during the initial 3 month period after launching or taking charge of your account to start delivering results.

In certain situations I can offer PPC training to you or an in-house team. This is charged at a rate of £75/hour.

Once a month I provide an overview breakdown of the top level campaigns we are running and their key performance metrics such as total spend, impressions, clicks, average costs per click (CPC), leads/sales generated and cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS).

I deliver this report in an email to you and we can setup a call or video chat to go over the results together on a regular basis that suits. If you would like to ask questions at any other time, I can be reached via phone, email or through a dedicated Slack channel that I will set up for us upon agreed to manage your PPC accounts.

The best thing is to ask me. There is a certain amount of seasonality in many accounts I manage, so I may have more availability at different times of the year. Just drop me a message.

Over the years I have worked and managed PPC accounts in many different types of industry including fashion, consumer goods, cloud services, photography, film production, software development, professional services and many, many more.

Even if I haven’t work in your market before, the dynamics of the most appropriate PPC strategy will become clear through my research – whether it is a Shopping, Search, Display or Video-led account structure.

You can reach me via telephone, email or our own dedicated Slack channel.

In certain circumstances I can provide technical level SEO consultancy for business websites, however I do not offer ongoing SEO services. For technical consultancy I charge £75/hour.

I work with all website CMS platforms.

In addition to my PPC management service, I offer strategic marketing consultancy for small to medium sized businesses in need of a digital or comprehensive marketing plan. More information on this can be found here – www.getburton.com

In certain circumstances yes. Please contact me to discuss.

There are a number of reasons why working with me may be more beneficial to you than working with a traditional PPC ‘agency’.

Firstly, I only work with a limited number of clients at a time. This means I can get under the hood of your account and competitive marketplace myself. You benefit from having a dedicated PPC specialist with 15+ years experience working directly on your digital strategy – and not a junior account executive. Many PPC agencies simply take on as many accounts as they can and split up account management responsibilities amongst managers with little experience. Also, if you have ever come across marketing agencies who offer PPC management as one of their ‘other services’, it is very likely that they don’t have the required specialism in-house to drive excellent results.

Secondly, because I have a background in marketing strategy and consultancy, I truly understand PPC’s role in the wider context of the overall marketing mix. I know how this piece of the puzzle fits in your broader advertising activity. It also means I can see where improvements are to be made in terms of your positioning, messaging and user experiences – and I will make recommendations where I see fit.

Thirdly, flexibility. I won’t hold you to a long term contract that is impossible to get out off and where incentive for the Ads manager disappears as soon as the ink is dry. I am motivated to deliver long term results and will be invested in your own business growth and success. Equally, I also understand that business circumstances change regularly e.g. mergers and acquisitions, company sales, restructuring etc and work flexibly around whatever opportunity appears.

It is my preference to run a closed PPC management service focused on a delivering exceptional results for a small selection of clients over the long term. I get actualisation from playing a key part in my clients’ business growth and enjoy being close to the implementation of devised strategies. I feel that having account managers would create distance and negatively impact account performance. To deliver exceptional value, I believe I need to be close enough to understand your market almost as well as you do.