Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a great way of getting visits to your website — and new clients for your accounting business— while managing your advertising budget.

Back in the day, you’d buy an ad in a local newspaper or a spot on local radio. But you’d have no idea how many people would really pay attention to your ad or whether it was driving any of them to inquire about your services. Sure, you might hear an occasional anecdote that would give you a sense that the ad worked, but attributing your success to these ads was not exactly scientific.

But now we’re in a completely different digital landscape. Not only can you track how many people click on your ads, but you can follow through and see how many of them took the next steps (like completing a contact form or clicking on various pages of your website.) This means PPC for accountants is a powerful tool for reaching new prospective clients to grow your accounting firm.

What is pay-per-click or PPC advertising?

Pay-per-click advertising is a form of CPA (cost per action) advertising, where the action taken is to click on the ad or link. This means you (the advertiser) only pay when people actually interact and click on your ad (versus advertising where you pay for every “impression” or view.)

PPC advertising means you only pay when your ad truly reaches an engaged audience member. After all, most of us ignore ads that are irrelevant to us. We also ignore ads that are boring, but we’ll get onto that later.

Popular forms of PPC for accountants include Google search ads and Google remarketing ads.

Google search ads

The top results on any Google search engine results pages (SERP) receive about 40% of all clicks. Think about your own search habits, and you’ll likely realize this is true. 

But look closely: Above the ‘organic’ results, there are often Google Ads. These Google Ads spots are purchased by people who are paying to be featured for that search result.

Try typing “Tax accountant in [your city],” and you’ll likely see Google Ads in action. Note: The top 3 results have small text indicating the results are ads.

You can buy spots like this for a variety of “keywords” or popular search queries. The CPC will be set by Google depending on how competitive those keywords are. “Accountant [city]” might be obvious and expensive as a search query, but “Tax preparation services [city]” might be less popular and, therefore, a less expensive keyword to bid on.

Keyword research, therefore, is an important step in determining what to advertise against. And it’s important always to align the intent of a search with your services. For example, it might be easy to bid for “Estate planning,” but if your firm doesn’t offer that service, you probably won’t convert the people who click on your result. After all, it’s estate planning they want.

Google remarketing ads

Most of us go on a bit of a journey when we’re buying something. We will shop around, procrastinate, talk to friends, search a few times, visit a few different websites, etc. Remarketing ads will serve your ad to people who have already visited your site, so they don’t visit once and forget all about you.

You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon yourself. You look at a pair of shoes or a piece of equipment on a retailer's site only to see that item “follow” you around the internet, showing up on ads when you’re reading a newspaper article or scrolling through your social media feeds. These are remarketing ads.

At worst, they can feel a little creepy and persistent. But, at best, they keep that thing you wanted to buy top of mind. Eventually, when you’re ready, you remember!

Is it working? Measuring a PPC campaign

The cost per click (CPC) or a PPC campaign is calculated by diving the total cost of the campaign (the advertiser usually sets a cap on how much they want to spend) by the number of clicks the campaign drove.

For example, if you set a campaign budget of $150 and the ad drove 2500 clicks, your CPC was 6 cents per click. 

Now, of course, not every click will become a paying customer:

• Some will land on your site and immediately leave (we call this “bounce”)
• Some might click around a bit but never follow-through
• Some might reach out to you but ultimately decide to go with a competitor
• Some will become customers (convert)

To understand if your CPC is good, it’s important to follow through and track your website conversions as well. After all, you don’t make money from site visits - you make money when people actually hire you to become their accountant.

Back to the example: Of those 2500 clicks, say only 5 become customers. Then you have a conversion rate of 0.2%.

As you track various campaigns, you might find that an ad that drives fewer clicks can drive better conversion. So it’s important to track both metrics of success and remember that conversion is the ultimate goal!

The benefits of PPC for your accounting firm

Determining whether PPC is right for you might start with gaining an understanding of how people in your town or city are likely to find an accountant. If it’s mostly word of mouth, pay-per-click may not be right for you (but you might want to set up a referral program where your current clients get a bonus or perk for referring new customers.) 

But if prospective clients looking for accounting firms in your location are likely to hit up search engines to find an accountant, PPC could be a great way of growing your clientele and your practice! The benefits of pay-per-click for a practice in the accounting industry include:

1. You only pay for clicks

Advertising can be expensive. And with traditional media (print, radio, TV), it was often unclear how effective your ads were at driving actual business. But with pay-per-click, you only pay for actual clicks on your ads, which means you’re only paying when people pause and interact with your ad—not for every lazy impression that barely glances at it.

2. You can control your ad spend

With pay-per-click advertising, you can set a campaign limit, which means you can stay within your advertising budget. This means you won’t wake up to find thousands of people have clicked on your ad, and you owe Google hundreds of dollars. Google will basically serve your ad until it drives enough clicks to use up all your budget, and then it will stop serving your ad until you top up your budget and extend your campaign.

3. You can experiment with messaging

Unsure what’s *really* important to your prospects? Maybe they really just want to see what services you offer in your ad. Or, maybe it matters a lot to them that you’ve been in business for 10+ years. It might even matter that you’re a female-owned business. Or maybe it’s all about communicating value for money.

Good news: You can try many different messages and see which drives the most clicks. 

You can also update the messaging to speak to seasonal concerns (like tax time or quarterly filing) that might be motivating prospects to search for resources and services.

4. You can track success—right through to conversion

Getting clicks on the internet can be notoriously easy (hence the term clickbait.) And Google will definitely work hard to get people to click on your ads (after all, they only make money when you pay for those clicks!)

But clicks alone can be a vanity metric. Yes, it’s amazing when you have exponentially more people visiting your website. But if that’s all they do, it hardly keeps you in business, right?! But you can set your website up to track those visitors through various next steps, including:

• Visiting different pages on your website
• Clicking on your email address
• Completing a form to contact you
• Subscribing to a newsletter, etc.

This means that with some clever tracking in place, you’ll know exactly which pay-per-click ads are working the hardest for you and your business—beyond clicks. This will help inform how you optimize both your ads and your website for conversion.

Steps to creating Google Ads / PPC campaigns

Advertising on Google is more straightforward than it sounds. Basically, anybody can set up a basic campaign targeting some obvious keywords. Google has a lot of resources to walk you through the process and manage your campaign and, basically, it’s designed so that small, local businesses can easily get up and running without having a performance marketer on staff. High level, here are the steps involved.

1. Pinpoint the most relevant keywords for PPC advertising

First, you’ll need to decide on the keywords you want to rank for. This means literally what people will type into their Google search bar when they’re looking for an accounting practice like yours.

Think back to any recent searches you’ve done for local services (like a plumber or electrician) and how you searched. Then put yourself in the shoes of somebody looking for an accountant and think what they would type into Google. 

Try Googling a few variations (accounting firm, accounting firms, accounting services, etc.) and see where some of your local competitors have advertised. You might want to bid on the searches they appear on to try and win some of the business that’s going to them! You can also include “negative keywords” that you don’t want to rank for.

2. Write your PPC ads (Google ad development)

Once you’ve decided what keywords to bid on, you’ll need to decide what your ad should say. As previously mentioned, you can try a few different versions of messaging here.

Again, it’s a smart idea to see what people currently ranking for this search say today. Maybe they all double-down on their list of services in the search result. You might want to do the same. But you might feel like your years of service is a bigger advantage and lean into that. 

Keep paying attention, and you’ll find lots of inspiration out there that you can customize and make your own.

3. Launch and monitor campaigns

Using Google’s tools, it will be very straightforward to launch your first simple campaign. But you don’t simply launch it and walk away. You’ll want to monitor daily how it’s performing and see if it’s driving the results you hope for.

Remember: It might take a while for you to establish your baseline expectations, so go slow and set modest budgets at first. Remember that people don’t often impulse purchase new accountants, so don’t expect to immediately get flooded with a lot of new client queries. Let people go on their buying journey and track everything over time.

4. Optimize ads over time

Once you’ve collected some data about ad performance, clicks, and conversion, you’ll be able to optimize your campaigns to perform continually better over time.

Maybe you’ll find it’s a certain service page on your website that most visitors click to. You might want to make sure your ads mention that service to get even higher clicks.

Or maybe you find that despite the fact you’re proud of your firm’s 10+ years in practice that those ads don’t really get clicked on at all. Time to move on from that messaging.

You might find that there’s more advantage to sounding somewhat like the ads you’re ranking alongside. Or you might find that it’s better when you sound completely different and stand apart.

And, of course, as your practice scales and your services expand, you should update the messaging in your ads to reflect your offering too!

Should you DIY or use PPC management services?

If all these pay-per-click advertising sounds like it could become a big rabbit hole you get lost going down, well, it’s true.

While Google makes it easy for anybody (including small businesses) to get up and running with pay-per-click advertising, it can become a time-consuming obsession for many business owners. This may mean that it’s not the best use of your time (after all, you’re an accountant, not a marketer!)

While it’s really advantageous to do a little bit at the start yourself (it will help you better understand what any agency you outsource to is talking about). Ultimately, PPC is something you might decide it’s better to outsource to a firm that offers PPC services rather than doing it in-house.

The good news is there are many PPC specialists and PPC management services that offer expertise in every step of the process and work with local clients and other professional services just like your accounting practice. If you do decide to go the outsourcing route, don’t be completely hands-off. Make sure they’re providing you with regular updates on what’s working, and make sure every dollar you spend with them is working hard to grow your accounting practice!