Many strategies for managing Pay-per-click or PPC accounts translate across all sizes of PPC accounts. Keeping your ad text fresh, not over using broad match and other tips can be easily implemented across accounts of any size. But any PPC manager who has managed an account that spends a couple hundred thousand dollars a month can tell you it’s quite different than managing an account that spends a few thousand a month.
When managing a smaller PPC campaign, you may have to stay away from certain strategies because your budget is limited. With larger clients, due to the increased budget, you have the opportunity to employ many strategies in order to drive leads. The client may not care how they get the leads, as long as they’re getting them at an acceptable cost per acquisition or a positive ROI on the campaign. Whether it’s branded keywords, competitor brand names, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re driving leads. If you’re currently managing a campaign of this size or are looking to get a job at a large agency, the following tips can help you succeed.
Make Friends with Adwords Editor:
With large accounts that house hundreds if not thousands of keywords, using Adwords Editor is essential. Adwords Editor enables you to easily create and alter parts of your campaign in Excel. Editor is extremely helpful when you’re in the midst of creating a campaign or making major changes to the structure of your campaign. Using Excel functions such as concatenate, lens, sub and others can also help you become more time efficient.
Know Where You’re Spending Your Money:
With thousands of keywords and ads, and many campaigns and ad groups, knowing where you’re spending your budget isn’t always easy. While smaller campaigns may have a few campaigns, if you have a client who offers many products and services you could end up with a significant amount of campaigns. Creating saved filters within Adwords or your PPC management tool is an easy way to see where you budget is going and how it’s performing. By creating a performance based filter that filters your keywords by things such as spend, clicks or conversion, you can easily log in and see how keywords are performing.
Break Out Account Structure:
This tactic can be employed to take advantage of how your account is performing. It also can be combined with how off line factors affect your conversion performance. For example – if you tend to convert in certain states better than others due to factors with state laws, taxes or other factors, breaking out your campaign through geo-targeting will allow you to alter your strategy for certain states or locations. You’ll be able to bid up or bid down your keywords based on performance and it will also allow you to create state or location specific ad copy to attract potential customers.
Ad Text Testing:
Testing ad text across a large account isn’t easy. The time it takes to check how ad copy is performing in each of the ad groups you’ve created can be daunting. In order to combat this, you can easily implement a standard ad testing procedure that’s effective and doesn’t take up ridiculous amounts of hours. To start the test, create 3 ads per ad group. One branded, one keyword specific and additional ads that uses both. By usually similar wording through the three different types of ads, you can use filtering options to lump statistics together to get an idea of how ads are performing. This tactic can be employed when you have a very granular structure, and you may not have a large amount of impressions per ad.
Streamline Reporting for Client:
Create the report your client wants. Work with your client to establish your KPI’s (Key performance indicators). Chances are if you’re running a campaign that spends millions of dollars over the course of a year, the higher ups within your client’s organization may not want granular reporting. They’ll most likely want number related to conversion volume, cost, cost per conversion and how these fluctuate week over week.
Create Reports to Help You Manage:
While you may be taking a few hours each week to create reports for your client, don’t forget to create reports that help you manage the account. Taking advantage of the ability to export data from Adwords with multiple segments enabled can help you create reports that in turn, help you manage the account better. More granular reporting can also help inform your client if they want to dig deeper into why performance shifted from previous weeks.
