By Shawn Hanak

It’s the New Year, and with every New Year we make resolutions (and try to keep them for more than two weeks) to try and better ourselves. We should also make these resolutions for our Paid Search accounts. With the coming of 2017 comes a fresh, clean start and since resolutions are never easy, I’ve compiled a few to help better our accounts.

I Promise I Will Not “Set It and Forget It”
Paid Search accounts need lots of attention from us or we will likely see a drop in performance. We all know it is terrible to set up the accounts then not check back for a few months, but a lot of us do it anyways because our focus gets drawn elsewhere. If you are not looking in on your account often you’re missing out on some key optimizations. When going into an account, go to the “View Change History” to see the changes that have been made and make sure you were in their recently.

Another way to make a habit of checking in on your accounts more is to always be testing new ideas and strategies. Set up a series of tests to implement at different times of the year. This will help you try new things and refine your strategies for ad copy and keywords. You will also need focus on setting up the tests and comparing the results.

I Vow To Not Only Focus On AdWords
Contrary to popular belief, AdWords is not the only paid search platform. (I know, mind-blowing right?) If you only focus on AdWords you can be missing out on leads from other engines like Bing and Facebook. Bing is still growing and made great strides this year to be more user friendly by adding expanded text ads and creating Bing editor for Macs. One in five people today use Bing as their primary search engine and that number is growing. Facebook is the largest social media platform with over 1 billion monthly users. You can tell by the numbers that you’re missing out on potential leads by not broadening your paid search portfolio.

I Declare I Will Audit My Accounts
Account audits can be long and tedious because there’s so much to look at. I personally like to create a checklist that I run through when checking each account. These are some of the most important items you should be checking:

Make sure your ads are relevant to the ad groups selected and make sure the landing page is relevant to your ad copy.
Use all ad extensions that you can. As I stated in my last blog, ad extensions are helpful and both Google and Bing added several more this year.
Check to make sure all your codes are properly implemented (Conversion code, remarketing, Google tag manager, etc.)
Look into search query reports to find new keywords, negative keywords, and ad groups
Review bid modifiers and adjust accordingly.

Summary
These three points are a good start to making PPC resolutions, but you can always add more (another one of mine is to cut back on Taco Bell!) Resolutions help make sure you keep on top of tasks and show what should be improving. Keeping on top of your tasks at the beginning of the year is a good way to make sure the rest of it is a great one.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

About the Author

Shawn Hanak is a PPC specialist for ChoiceLocal who specializes in Adwords, Bing Ads, and Facebook advertising. Shawn helps clients by reaching out to new customers and new employees alike. When he’s away from the marketing world he enjoys being overly competitive at recreational sports and video games.