PPC project management: Phases, tools, and best practices

What makes PPC project management unique? 

PPC projects differ from other marketing projects and campaigns in several key areas: 

• PPC projects are more time sensitive. Whereas marketing projects can run for weeks and months, with some flexibility in their timelines, PPC projects need continual monitoring and optimization to make the most of the project budget. 
• PPC projects are adjusted regularly, with ongoing A/B testing and changes, rather than a long-term strategic plan. 
• PPC budgets are tied to daily spend, so they need tight, ongoing oversight. This is in contrast to many traditional marketing strategies, which allocate budgets on a monthly or quarterly basis. 
• PPC teams rely on granular data like impressions, clicks, and conversions, rather than market research. The same is true for measuring results, with ROI, ROAS, CPA, and conversion volume being concrete and objective results compared to more subjective marketing metrics like awareness, engagement, and brand perception.   

All of this means PPC teams can’t necessarily use generic project management software for their projects. 

Just think about the way you track your projects as they progress. 

A social media team in a marketing department can probably use a Kanban board to track the content they’re developing for a product launch through one workflow. Most of the time, they can even use this method to visualize every piece of campaign content on one screen. 

Compare this to the PPC team working on the same product launch. The PPC team has to work iteratively and manage so many variations and adjustments to their ads that they can’t keep their entire workload in view with basic tools. They need more flexible workflows, more powerful project monitoring dashboards, and real-time reporting to achieve the best results. 

The best way to understand what this means for PPC projects — and how to manage them well — is to look at projects like this phase by phase. 

In the next part of this post, I’ll show you how to apply project management best practices through the lifecycle of a PPC project. 

How to manage PPC projects: Phase-by-phase guide

Let me start by saying that when your goal is to optimize a PPC project, one of the most important tasks is choosing the right project management tools. That decision can be the difference between a successful project and one filled with constant miscommunication, missed opportunities, and poor results.

For example, when you use software like Wrike, you can centralize project information that would otherwise be siloed in spreadsheets and analytics tools. This lets you surface the most important insights and take a massive step forward in terms of both project management and strategic planning. 

With this in mind, I’ll now look at best practices in PPC project management, from initiation to project delivery. For each of the five project phases covered, I’ll show: 

• The key tasks that need to be completed 
• The role of the project manager
• How Wrike helps optimize each phase

Phase 1: PPC project initiation 

During project initiation, PPC teams usually have to prove the value of a potential project and secure approval from the main stakeholders. 

Imagine a technology company promoting a new line of laptops. As part of the marketing campaign, the company wants to explore a PPC search campaign to increase its visibility and capture new buyers. 

During the initiation phase, a PPC expert (or dedicated project manager) acts as the strategic lead and main point of contact as the company lays the foundation for the PPC campaign. 

The main stakeholders in the team discuss project goals and outline the project scope — essentially defining what they want to achieve and what’s feasible within the budget and timeline. They use information from different sources (e.g., client consultations, competitor research, etc.) to inform the choices they make at this stage.

Besides gaining clarity on the market and the PPC strategy, the project team uses this phase to decide on the KPIs they’ll use to track their project. 

For example, a PPC team might use:

• Cost per lead and return on ad spend to evaluate project success
• Click-through rates to compare individual ad performance
• Online sales over the course of the campaign to show its impact, especially if increasing sales was one of the project goals 

Naturally, they’ll also choose analytics and tracking tools to monitor these KPIs in relation to their baseline and their goals. As an aside, many of these tools can be easily integrated with Wrike to support your project monitoring and reporting.

All this information helps the team create a set of documents at the end of the initiation phase, including:  

• The business case for the project, and why a PPC campaign is a necessary part of the strategy 
• The project charter, a formal document that officially kicks off the project with a description of the goals, scope, key tasks, and project ownership 
• A list of the project’s key stakeholders to bring accountability to the next stages 

Once the manager has made sure the team is aligned and approves these documents, the next phase can begin. 

How Wrike helps during PPC project initiation 

Even during the earliest phases, effective project management tools are essential. From initiation onwards, the best tools gather all the information that project managers and stakeholders need for their decision making. 

For example, many PPC teams face delays at the outset because the briefs they receive from clients are incomplete. With Wrike, you can overcome this challenge and streamline project intake with dynamic request forms. 

Picture a marketing project team fielding requests from across a company. This department could create custom request forms for creative assets, landing pages, social media campaigns, and more. For their PPC project request, the form could include custom fields to find out the client’s expectations in terms of: 

• The target audience 
• The budget range 
• The intended goals
• Product details
• Any competitor insights the team wants to share 

Once your PPC team receives a request form, they have everything they need to assess whether the project is feasible, and they can use the information in the form to plan their initial project meetings. Wrike’s request forms can be set up to automatically add items to your workspace and kick off a workflow for your team (more on this in the next section).

Phase 2: PPC project planning

During the planning phase, your PPC team turns the vision from those initial conversations into an actionable project roadmap and plans the best way to allocate the project resources. 

At this point, the team identifies the key tasks in the project, breaks them up into achievable subtasks, and plans their workflows. For example, key tasks in PPC campaigns often include: 

• Keyword research and clustering, broken down into research and planning, report creation, and approval 
• Ad copywriting, broken down into research, writing, review, and approval stages 
• Conversion tracking setup, where platforms are implemented, tested, and marked ready 

Importantly, the team will also decide who’s responsible for these tasks at each stage in the workflow, and how that will be shown. For example, in Wrike, each task or workflow stage can be assigned to a team member with a certain job role, whose name or avatar is visible whenever the task is viewed on a project dashboard or timeline. Budget allocation is another key task during this phase. 

Once the budget is approved, the team decides how it will be spent — e.g., how it will be split between Google and Bing search, or how much will be allocated to A/B testing throughout the campaign. 

The details are essential here, as PPC spend is highly susceptible to competitor movements and seasonal shifts in the market. And just as with the KPIs, you’ll also have to choose and set up the financial management tools that will show your team and your clients how the budget is being used throughout the campaign. 

At this stage in the project, the manager coordinates the work and begins to allocate tasks to team members. They’re also the one who ultimately decides whether the plan is realistic and whether it meets the client’s expectations. 

How to plan a PPC project in Wrike 

When it comes to project planning, the more your tools can centralize your work, the better. In Wrike, you have several essential planning tools in one shared location: 

• Project folders and workspaces: You can set your team up for success with a system of shared project folders for document management and a workspace where they can collaborate and view their progress. Tasks, folders, and spaces in Wrike can have custom access roles and permissions, so the right team members have access to the information they need. 
• Custom item types with automated workflows: Instead of setting up each repeatable workflow manually, your team can use a custom item type with a prebuilt workflow. Your template workflows can be automated from end to end with rule-based triggers, which keep work flowing more efficiently and are easy to set up. 
• Task blueprints to create new work items: Blueprints streamline the process of creating folders and projects with specific attributes, as well as recurring tasks. Blueprints also give you more freedom and flexibility than simply duplicating the work you’ve done in the past, which makes them perfect for kicking off campaign builds, onboarding workflows, building quality assurance workflows, or creating reporting sequences. 
• Timelines with milestones and task dependencies: PPC teams work iteratively, so they need more than a simple Gantt chart to show the flow of their work. Wrike makes it easy to convert tasks into milestones, and you can use our project planning tools to define dependencies — even across departments — with a simple drag and drop.

Together, these features help you make the most of your project resources and ensure everyone on your team has access to the tools they need before the execution phase begins. 

Phase 3: PPC project execution

During the execution phase, the campaign is put in motion, testing begins, and your team assesses the ads’ initial performance to ensure they’re making the most of the budget. 

The project manager runs point on the operations, stays in contact with stakeholders to communicate the early results, and removes any roadblocks holding back the team. For example, if a bottleneck starts to develop in the approval process for new versions of ads, the PM will investigate the reasons for the delay and can provide more resources to help clear the backlog. 

Meanwhile, the project team is busy. During a typical PPC campaign, they’re performing daily tasks like: 

• Creating and uploading ads to target the keywords they planned in the previous stage 
• Scheduling ads for regional targeting 
• Performing quality assurance tests to ensure the ads are accurate and functional 
• Executing their testing plan for headlines, images, or CTAs
• Adjusting bids based on the early results 
• Monitoring the campaign output and performance through KPIs like CTR, conversions, and CPA

How Wrike helps execute PPC projects 

During execution, oversight is everything. Wrike helps you optimize this phase with customizable project management dashboards, accessible to everyone on your team with permission. 

Alongside the tools in your workspace, dashboards help structure the massive amount of data generated during these iterative projects. The insights you gain from them can help you keep up the momentum behind your PPC projects without compromising on quality. 

Not all dashboards are built for the high pressure faced by PPC teams, but Wrike’s dashboards update in real time, whenever one of your tasks changes status. This means you can monitor your project hour by hour and continually adjust your work to reflect the latest status.  And alongside the project dashboards you set up, you can create personal dashboards to help each team member view and prioritize their task. Plus, portfolio-level dashboards are available to help you monitor PPC campaigns as well as the rest of the work of the marketing team or agency. During project execution, you can also take advantage of Wrike’s suite of over 400 apps and integrations. This includes tools to streamline collaboration — even with other departments — like Slack and Microsoft Teams. 

For marketers, Wrike includes integrations with creative tools like the Adobe Creative Cloud. For PPC specifically, Wrike lets you integrate your project management system with web and analytics workflows, alongside tools like Tableau, Looker, and BigQuery. 

All of these integrations eliminate the channel-switching that can easily slow down PPC projects and make it harder to optimize your campaigns. 

Phase 4: PPC controlling and monitoring 

During the project control and monitoring phase, the team continually adjusts the ads. Meanwhile, the project manager ensures that the work is on scope, on budget, and on track to meet its deadlines. 

For a PPC project, even more than a classical marketing project, this phase is concerned with ongoing project reporting and adjustments to the work. 

For example, while the team might have taken the first days of a month-long campaign to gather data on the ads’ performance, they spend the rest of the project time actively adjusting the ads based on the KPIs and the results of their A/B testing. Based on the data, they might optimize the campaign by: 

• Increasing or decreasing their bids based on the ad performance 
• Shifting their budget allocation toward high-performing campaigns or regions 
• Refining their audience segments to make the ads more relevant 

In consultation with the project manager and other stakeholders, they might also decide to pause ads for certain segments or regions, especially if they see an opportunity to capture more of the potential audience in a segment that’s showing a better return. 

How Wrike supports controlling and monitoring 

Alongside the project dashboards that give you an overview of your project, Wrike includes powerful reporting software for effective control and monitoring. This includes: 

• Automated report generation, which runs your project data through custom filters to generate reports into the most relevant metrics 
• Snapshots of your project, which offer an easy way to share progress updates or key metrics with your stakeholders 
• AI risk management reports based on factors like your team’s progress, workload, and the complexity of the project, which can alert you to risks to your milestones while you still have time to course correct 

Phase 5: PPC project close

When the campaign reaches its conclusion, the project goes through a formal closing phase to evaluate the performance and record learnings that could improve future PPC campaigns. 

After the project is formally concluded (for example, after the last scheduled day of the campaign), the team compiles final reports on the campaign’s ROI. 

They can use these reports to evaluate the project from multiple angles and get a deeper understanding of what was successful and why. All of this information can help demonstrate the value of the campaign to the client and inform the decisions the team makes for their next campaign. 

In addition to this raw data, team and audience insights are extremely important during the closing phase of a project. The team should take the time to review the keywords that performed well and consider why they might have been successful in the wider context, including the audience, ad timing, and placement. 

At this stage, the manager will usually lead a project retrospective. Here, the team discusses what went well, acknowledges team members who were instrumental to the campaign, and talks about the unexpected challenges they faced — like bugs, areas where they lacked resources, or the quality of guidance they received from the client. By doing this, they can uncover opportunities for improvement. For example, a retrospective could show that delays during the execution phase could have been avoided if the stakeholders had used a checklist to gather more information from the client during initiation. 

How Wrike closes a project 

During the final phase of a project, Wrike users tend to return to the same features they’ve used since the beginning. This includes: 

• Request forms to gather feedback from their team 
• Project reporting to compare the final project performance to the goals laid out in the plan
• Project folders to archive the project for reference 

During project retrospectives, many teams also use the Wrike Whiteboard feature, powered by Klaxoon. 

This is a collaborative, visual tool that can be used to record ideas and make decisions. For example, teams can use the whiteboard to share their opinions on what went well, to acknowledge team members who went above and beyond, or to share ideas on how to adjust the approach to the next project. 

Like reports, Wrike’s whiteboards can be set up with restricted access, opened to the company, or shared with a link (for example, to loop in external clients). 

Wrike: All-in-one project management software for your marketing team

I’ve already demonstrated how to set up a Wrike workspace for your PPC team and the benefits this can bring to your next project. But the true beauty of Wrike is that it doesn’t just bring a subteam together; it connects your PPC specialists to the rest of your marketing team and beyond. 

When you work in Wrike, each team can have its own custom workflows, dashboards, and project folders tailored to its unique processes. But as you roll out Wrike across an organization, you can also optimize their resource management and communicate with your collaborators in other departments through a powerful system of cross-tagging and project portfolio management tools.However much you scale, Wrike takes marketing teams from ideas to impact faster with features like: 

• Proofing and approval tools to help gather, discuss, and action feedback on design assets more efficiently 
• Resource planning features, including team calendars and capacity overviews, to help plan and schedule new work 
• Marketing project management templates to set up workspaces for competitor analysis, marketing operations management, release planning, and more 
• Work Intelligence™, our groundbreaking AI for work management suite, includes features to optimize workflow automation, assess risks to projects, and draft and edit documents with your team 

Marketing teams from around the world have seen real results from implementing tools like this. 

Marketing Architects, an all-inclusive TV agency based in Minneapolis, MN, became 40% more efficient in their processes and workflows with Wrike. They’ve reduced their average response time to messages from one day to 20 minutes, and they’re completing projects 25% faster, too. 

Coma AG, a German online marketing agency, uses Wrike to apply Agile project management methods to its marketing strategies, which is well-suited to iterative PPC marketing. They’ve used custom dashboards and workflows and @mentions to keep their team aligned, reporting that “Wrike has given us enormous transparency and the ability to respond much faster to changes.” 

Moneytree, a financial services company with 80 branches, used Wrike to reduce the length of its marketing project approval process from seven days to one. Their project speed has increased by 75%, and they’ve used Wrike’s features to keep the team aligned as they scaled up their team by a factor of 3. 

InDrive, a mobility and urban services company, uses Wrike to gain insights into its business processes. The marketing team uses custom item types to manage new work and visualize all the elements they need for a project. They now work with 25 custom fields and a range of filters, which makes the company’s internal search function more powerful. They estimate that this change alone has made it easier to find content, cut out repeat tasks, and reduce their production time by 20–25%. 

From initiation to impact with Wrike

PPC is one of the most operationally intense, fast-moving functions in digital marketing, and that’s exactly why a robust, structured platform makes all the difference. 

To manage PPC projects well, you need a detailed overview and powerful reporting software. With Wrike, you have these scalable, customizable tools to bring every aspect of your project management together and connect your team. 

Find out more about how to build your ideal PPC or marketing workspace in Wrike. Contact our customer service team to book a demo.