I really don’t like puzzles. Honestly, what’s the point? They are time-consuming and the reward (though my mother strongly disagrees) is minimal. But when looking at PPC management as one big puzzle, my attitude changes. I see little techniques and tricks to utilize that all fit together to create a bigger picture. If you can’t tell where I am going with this, I am talking about the little things you can do to encourage overall PPC account success.

Winston from New Girl - Puzzle Troubling

Labels

Organization is a key piece to the puzzle in catalyzing account success. Besides efficiently structuring your ad groups and campaigns in the first place, the best way to stay organized is to use labels. Seriously, use labels whenever you can. I wrote an entire article about some ways I use labels. They can help you organize accounts, analyze data, and schedule account changes ahead of time. I won’t dive into the specifics of how I do these things because you can hop over and read it here.

Negative Keyword Research

Conducting negative keyword research at least weekly helps your ads show for more relevant searches and cuts down on unnecessary spending. In my own experience, doing this weekly has saved hundreds of dollars in advertising spend, especially in broad match modified ad groups. Plus, regularly reviewing the search queries report can also help generate new keyword ideas for expanding the account.

To conduct keyword cleanup by negating irrelevant search queries;

  1. Go into a campaign or ad group and click on the Search Terms report.
  2. Review the search queries that received impressions and clicks.
  3. If you notice queries coming through that are not relevant to your product or service, select them and click “Add as negative keyword.”

It’s a simple task that can save tons of advertising spend and over time will improve account performance as your ads show for more relevant queries.

Run Experiments

Let me drop some PPC knowledge on you right now; in the ever-changing space of PPC, the people who excel are those who are willing to change their ways and try new things. They are willing to test fresh strategies, even the brand new sorta-scary ones. Don’t get stuck in a pattern of what you’ve always done. Doing so will set you up to be a mediocre digital marketer at best.

Now, we want to try new things, but we don’t want to fully abandon what we were doing and put all our eggs in the basket of a hot new bidding strategy. What if it flops? You’ll have some explaining to do. The best way to test new things without going for broke is by running experiments. Creating and running an experiment is relatively simple. Just follow these steps.

  1. Create a draft of the campaign you want to run the experiment on.
  2. In the draft, change what you would like to test in the campaign. This can be different ad copy, bidding rules, targeting, etc.
  3. Once you make the change, click “Apply” and then “Run as an Experiment.” IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure not to click “Apply changes to the original campaign” as doing this will overwrite your existing campaign with the draft.
  4. Run your experiment for at least a month to get real data and analyze!

I recently ran an experiment to test if a new bidding strategy would suit one of my campaigns better. I decided to try target ROAS bidding in a split experiment on a campaign that had been running Enhanced CPC. The results? The target ROAS bidding got the same amount of conversions, but the cost per conversion was 51% cheaper. Suffice it to say that bidding strategy was fully implemented in this case.

Winston from New Girl - It Looks Good to Me

There you have it! Three little things you can do to encourage account success. Are there more pieces to the puzzle? Absolutely. It is very likely I will share more with you moving forward, so stay tuned for part 2.

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