With so much uncertainty in recent times due to the coronavirus many of us have paused our PPC activity. If this applies to you, then whether you are a brand, an agency or someone maintaining an account in the interim, we recommend giving your PPC account a spring clean to ensure its fresh and ready for when market interest, and competition ramp up again.
With that in mind we have put together a list of our top things to look at to ensure you are ready to hit the ground running when you restart your activity!
- Account structure
- Do you have more than 10 keywords in any adgroup?
- Is the account labelled clearly for easy navigation?
- Are your keywords broken out by match types?
- Are your adgroups grouped into campaigns by theme or performance?
- Are your ads appearing for the right keywords?
- Review your search terms, are they all relevant?
- Do you have full control of your Google account through an effective negative keyword strategy?
Select the keyword and click search terms to view the search terms from the selected keyword.
- Are you missing out on valuable impression share?
- Are you missing a valuable share of the market due to your budget or adrank?
- Save money by increasing your quality score
- Do you have a high proportion of your account with a quality score of 6 or less?
- What bid strategies are being used across the account?
- Are these focussing on front end metrics to get people to site, or are they focussed on driving conversions or value?
- What audience segments are you using for optimisation?
- Are you capitalising on the opportunity with in-market and affinity audiences to filter to only your audience profiles and lifestyles?
- Are you using your onsite behaviour and key pages?
- Are you using your customer data to re-engage, exclude or lookalike?
Select audiences relevant to your clients as observation to learn about who interact best with your ads.
- Could your ads be improved?
- If you search your keywords how do your ads compare to your competitors, do they stand out?
- Do you have 3 ads in each adgroup?
- Are you using responsive ads?
- Are your landing pages relevant and ready to convert?
- Are you directing all keywords to the best page?
- If it’s a very generic search term does your landing page signpost users to other options or are you driving them back to Google to re-search?
- Are your calls to action obvious and frictionless?
- Are you measuring and optimising to the best conversions?
- Are there additional conversions you are not tracking, or different conversion points further down the customer journey that denote higher intent or value?
Multiple conversions can be tracked and viewed as custom columns in the interface
- What attribution model is your account using?
- Does your attribution match up to the overall strategy of your account?
- Are you using the standard last click model when data driven is available?
Check the attribution tab for insights into customers behaviour and compare attribution models.
Reviewing and developing these factors should give you a solid foundation for your PPC activity, but of course this is only just scratching the surface, and there are many other factors you could consider.
However, if you optimise for the above you will establish a good foundation to build upon. Our next step would be to analyse the account performance once the above have been implemented. Follow the data and you will attack the quick wins first and start seeing big improvements fast.
For any help or advice in navigating your account or on any of the factors we have mentioned here, please head to our paid search page to learn more about our approach or get in touch and we would be happy to help guide you to a higher performing campaign.
