Step one to getting anyone to believe and trust what you’re saying is to prove your credibility. The same rules apply when PPC managers reach out to other departments to sync up on how to best work together. Depending on your organization, justifying your expertise may be a challenge. Compile some of your best case studies to share at the initial meeting, so your colleagues have a clear understanding of how you’re impacting the company’s success .

You may also want to pull a few relevant and recent articles about the power of PPC to give some context to how other companies (especially competitors) are using PPC to their advantage. From there, building alignment with sales, email marketing, product marketing, creative, and other teams should feel like a natural partnership for everyone.

Find a Common Language

CPA, CPC, CPM, CTR. Even the term “PPC” might intimidate teams who don’t play in this world. You know the ins, outs, and industry acronyms of what you do every day, but for those who don’t, a barrage of unfamiliar lingo can be a frustrating turn-off. Use terms everyone can understand, or offer a simple explanation for more complicated but necessary terms or concepts. Include helpful term definitions when sharing PPC reports via email to make sure the recipient fully understands the data and doesn’t have to go looking for help elsewhere.

In any language, visuals speak volumes. PPC reporting tools can help distill intricate information into digestible data. A complicated cross-channel campaign summary of PPC metrics becomes a clear bar graph everyone can understand.

Understand Shared KPIs and Show Overlaps

In a healthy, streamlined company, colleagues work side by side toward the same goals, performing different tasks and carrying out various projects, depending on their job function. But some companies suffer from siloing, when departments work independently, rarely sharing information or resources with other teams.

At this year’s Advertising Week, Google’s Americas president, Allan Thygesen, encouraged marketers to push for a single KPI across all their teams. While maybe overly ambitious for some organizations, his point is that every department in the business should be on the same page, and actively working together to hit shared numbers.

Where goals overlap, PPC managers and leads in other departments should work together on strategies and ideas to help each other be successful. One area where PPC teams can be especially effective and helpful is quick and cheap testing. For example, if the email team is debating a few subject lines, PPCers could throw the lines into a simple AdWords campaign and report back on which performed best.

Where goals overlap, PPC managers and leads in other departments should work together on strategies and ideas to help each other be successful.

Deliver Helpful and Useful Information

It’s one thing to share information with other teams; it’s another to offer suggestions on how to apply it. Let’s say a campaign revealed that ads mentioning a certain product attribute outperformed any other messaging. Instead of sharing a report that shows Ad #3 yielded the lowest CPC, call out to each team the qualitative findings and how they might be applied to that team’s work.

Because PPC reporting tools make drafting reports quick and easy, consider tailoring reports and conversations to various teams so they can best understand how PPC efforts and results can help their own work. For example, when working with the copywriting and search teams, pull a report that shows keyword results specifically. PPC can help deliver useful info on what’s working and what’s not, much faster than wider SEO site changes.

Accept and Utilize Other Teams’ Data

Don’t reinvent the wheel when someone else has done the work! Just as you’re sharing your findings with other teams, no doubt they have vital data to share as well. PPC managers should listen to what other teams have already discovered and see how they can incorporate it into their own work whether as a way to bypass double work or to help refine and excel what’s already been accomplished. Not only does information sharing save time, it gives PPC managers and other department heads the opportunity to have equal conversations where both sides are as invested and involved as the other. Which leads us to…

Communicate Constantly

Put a (non-annoying) bug in everyone’s ear so they’re aware of what you’re up and can better identify opportunities to partner up. Hold casual lunch and learns to keep everyone up to speed on what you and your team are working on. As we know, the PPC world is changing quickly, and there’s always an interesting topic or trend to bring to the table that is relevant to everyone in the organization.

Again, simple info sharing like what’s available through Adstage’s Report capabilities make it easy to deliver relevant information in little bites. Send out a brief weekly/bi-weekly/monthly recap and schedule short recaps with the teams you think could most benefit from the information in the reports.

PPC is awesome. We all know that, and by showing your colleagues how powerful this form of advertising can be, hopefully, they’ll soon share the same feelings.