Manage PPC Effectively In 5 Steps
Paid Search campaigns can be difficult to run. Very few of us actually enjoy logging into our various interfaces, neck-deep in keyword research for hours, sometimes days on end. I happen to be one of those people. More times than I care to recount, I can remember logging into my Adwords account for one very specific and small reason, something that shouldn’t take more than two minutes. Several hours later I haven’t eaten, slept, or paid any attention to my beautiful (patient) wife. On the bright, I always come away a little wiser. At least as far as PPC is concerned.
The point i’m trying (failing) to make is this: The most important thing you can do in any Paid Search campaign is learn to manage it effectively. I don’t care how you do it, but if you’re not monitoring your paid search campaigns closely and efficiently, you’re just wasting cash. Do you want to waste cash? Following are a few tips to keep it together and keepthose paid search wheels from flying off in every direction.
Keywords: Less is More
Don’t fill your adgroups with too many keywords. In fact, the less keywords you have in your adgroups, the better off you’re going to be. Why? More keywords in your adgroups means less focus on those keywords for you and for algorithms. This means lower Quality Scores, and less ability for you to keep track of everything. It’s better to keep it small and focus on the very targeted keywords you have. Ideally, every keyword should be represented in your ad group. This will work wonders for your Quality Score which will decrease your bid amounts, and it will also make things more manageable for you.
Budget Better
You have to use your budget wisely. Don’t spend $5 per click on highly competitive keywords or phrases when there are vast numbers of more highly-targeted keywords that your competitors are not bidding on. It’s a bit of a trick in some mainstream markets to find those keywords, but if you do find one, it can be as good as gold. The good news is that you’re never out of the hunt. As time marches on, search habits change and so do search terms, so keep on looking for those quality highly-focused long-tail terms and stop wasting your money.
Equal Treatment for Creative
Make sure you’re running your ads evenly rather than have the paid search interface pick the “better performing” ad. The paid search provider doesn’t wait nearly as long as it needs to before deciding which is the better performing ad, and will often-times prefer an ad that just got off to a good start, but isn’t truly the better ad. This happens a lot more than it should, and honestly I don’t understand why it hasn’t changed. You’ll get a much better idea of what works and what doesn’t in your creative if you monitor the click-through-rates yourself and make your own determinations as to the better performing ad.
Make a Good Impression
Since we’re on the topic of ad testing, make sure you show your ad enough times when you’re testing. It is always better to make a decision on whether to shelf an ad after it has shown 10,000 times than 1,000. The lowest I would suggest going is 100 impressions as long as you understand that it’s about as low a number as you can get and still have some modium of credibility. It’s not hard to get above 100 impressions for an ad in most cases, however, so this isn’t always a problem. Nonetheless, it’s important to remember.
Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About Tomorrow
Never stop testing, never stop tweaking! If you want to make the most out of the money you’re spending for the highest ROI, never stop testing, monitoring, tweaking. Conduct an ad test at least once every week. Do some keyword research on a regular basis to find those new (secret) keywords that will blast your ROI through the roof.
There are a lot of tools out there designed to automate SEO processes and that’s very nice, but the truth is that the software can’t do a better job than you can. So pay attention. If you’re not giving your paid search campaigns the attention and focus they deserve, you may as well just throw your money away. Or give it to the government!
