Over the last few years, pay per click campaigns has been a staple in online advertising for businesses.

But with recent economic changes, brands and businesses alike find themselves having to cut PPC expenditure whether by bringing it in-house, cutting their PPC agency or cutting their marketing team and shifting PPC responsibilities to other team members.

Whatever the case your business is going through, here are a few dos and don’ts to look like a seasoned Google Ads pro.

1. Cut it down

First time handling PPC or relearning it? The first step is to find ways to manage your ad accounts efficiently.

Here are a few ways you manage your ad accounts easier:

Tighten ad schedules

Have ads that are still running? Maybe think about tightening the schedule until your confident enough to manage them.

For example, you may want to run an ad across the weekend and stop it during weekdays because they are less profitable.

Turn off broad match keywords

You may want to think about how you can reduce the costs involved. Turning off broad match or limiting it to tighten your ad spend can help lessen the pressure until your confident to manage them.

Tighten location targeting

Again, right now should be thinking about tightening your ad spend, keep things simple and only focus on the best revenue-producing campaigns until you can get a handle on things.

2. Don’t slow down

While you may think slowing down is your best bet, your ad account can experience ups and downs daily. So, make sure you are continuously checking on your ad spend daily- even if it’s for 5 minutes. We all know how unpredictable Google’s algorithm can be!

If the constant changes to your daily ad spend makes you nervous, consider lowering your daily ad budget. You can read how Google Ads changed its rules in 2017 for daily campaign budgets here.

3. Assume you’ll run into trouble

You’re either relearning or handling PPC for the first. Don’t panic, assume you’re going to run into roadblocks. If it’s overwhelming, consider contacting your former PPC agency for help.

Do some research into your problem, for example, a sudden spike in daily ad spend could simply need an adjustment of your daily budget limit. Research your questions and look at the data before making any decisions.

4. Don’t assume the previous PPC manager had things optimized

There are plenty of ways to plan Google Ads strategically. But don’t just assume the previous PPC manager had everything worked out. Consider auditing your Google Ads account to understand the account settings and structure before configuring your processes and strategy.

You may never know; you could find a setting or configuration that works for you but didn’t previously.

5. Customize settings for your needs

Don’t assume Google Ads has formatted their settings for your needs. Google Ads has a one-size-fits-all model for all new Google Ads accounts.

An example of customizing your settings is targeting the country or region your in. Google doesn’t do this for you automatically, so make sure you’ve configured the setup correctly so your targeting people in the area you want.

6. Don’t skip competitor research and monitoring

No matter if you’re just starting out or not, you need to know what your competitors are doing.

As a Ask yourself these three questions when conducting your competitor research:

  • How much your competitors are spending
  • What ads are they putting out
  • Which keywords they’re targeting

With the research you’ve done, you can adjust your PPC campaign strategy to move in a different direction or follow what your competitors are doing. Over the years I have worked with many inbound marketing agencies and professionals. What I have found interesting is competitor research is one the most common and effective strategies. Even if you don’t have any competitors which is very unusual, you can still get valuable insights from ppc campaigns of similar businesses from other cities or countries.

7. Conduct regular audits

You may have conducted an initial audit to understand the configurations, account and settings of your Google Ads when you first took over but performing regular checks can identify any hidden issues that need to be addressed.

A comprehensive audit should:

  • Identify what you want to review
  • Review the status of each campaign
  • Make notes of issues that need to be addressed in the action plan

Once you’ve conducted your audit, you can work on improving the performance of your account and adjust the action plan to reflect those changes.

Final thoughts

Understandably, things look pretty bad right now. Hopefully, once we’re all back to work and find some normalcy, you will have had a strong head start and understanding of Google Ads to push forward. These dos and don’ts will help you look like a seasoned Google Ads expert in the meantime.

 

Image via

Comments are closed.