PPC is a crazy industry, and also a great one to be in! There is always a lot of fun stuff going on day to day, and there are many new topics coming out all the time. There are also some basic rules that we always seem to see get shoved to the back seat when we are more worried about the “new” fancy stuff and the competition’s new ideas. I think we need to be able to follow market trends, as well as be adaptive in what we are doing. One of the ways we can keep the basics in mind, is to set some automated reports in your accounts that you will not have to worry about all the time. That way, you can stay on top of the basic stuff, all the time paying attention to all the new flashy things you like.
1. Placement Performance Reports
This is definitely one that should be looked at and kept track of on a regular basis. This report is easy as if you run it, you can go to the reports section of your user interface and schedule it for whatever time you think works best! Typically, this looks like about a month or so time period, but again, you can customize as needed.
2. Search Term Performance Report
This report is going to show up under different views for you guys, based basically on the way Adwords determines their reporting. If you have an MCC, or you can access your reports on the reports tab inside your AdWords interface to see the same thing, it will likely be under the client reporting tab. Then you can run the report once on your keyword tab and schedule it on the reports tab. Just be sure to keep in mind that you will need to add addresses that you want to receive the emails on the account.
3. Ad Group Performance in 90 Days
Adwords will not be possible to do this, as they just go back 30 days. Fortunately, you can create a rule that will report this data to you. That way, you can pause the bad, and keep up the good, and hopefully you will see the results right away. Basically, you want to avoid long term poor performance of bad ads. Sometimes there will be a problem that is an easy fix, but its good to see the long term trends.
I hope these tips can help you in the future to focus more on the basics, and spend more time with the new fun stuff as well.
