By Sarah Abbey
There are so many new and exciting things that make Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing a great avenue for marketing your small business online. Within the past year there have been an increase in new ads types and features rolled out to multiple different search platforms. Given these innovations, not utilizing PPC could actually put your business at a disadvantage.
In order to take advantage of these features and all that PPC has to offer, it is important to keep up with your account’s activity. Creating new ads and using new features is always a good way to work towards keeping people interested in your content, but one of the most important things that will keep your ads running smoothly is regularly optimizing your account.
Optimizing for Conversions
Optimizing an account does not always have a set of straight forward instructions. Each account is different and there are certain areas that may need more focus than others depending on pain points you are seeing. Sometimes the focus is to get more conversions for an account during a certain month. There are a few ways to be sure you are getting as many conversions as possible. If you take a look at your keyword bids, it is imperative to make sure all the keywords that have converted within the last few months have a cost-per-click high enough to be on the first page of search results. There tend to be certain keywords with each account that perform better than others, so keeping those at a higher cost-per-click helps lead to better results.
Account Overspending
If an account is spending its monthly budget quicker than hoped, there are a few different ways to combat this. Lowering the daily budgets per campaign can help slow things down and make sure the account can run as much of the month as possible. Another way to help keep spending down is by bidding less on keywords that are not converting. Sometimes there are different keyword trends that are noticeable in accounts. If a keyword is spending a large amount of the budget and is not converting it is a good idea to bid down on it so it spends less. This way the budget can be used on the keywords that get conversions. Spending the monthly budget on keywords that convert is very important to a successfully run account.
Account Underspending
If an account is having trouble spending its monthly budget, there are a few ways to help get it going. Doing the opposite of what was previously discussed and bidding up on campaign’s daily budgets can help the account spend more per day leading to more spent per month. Along with that, bidding up extra high on keywords that convert can help get as many clicks as possible on the best keywords that lead to more conversions. Lastly, going into the settings and changing the delivery method of the best running campaigns to “accelerated” can help any campaign spend more than before.
Keeping an account up to date on everything up and coming on all PPC platforms is incredibly helpful, but just as important is taking care of the smaller weekly tasks to be sure every client is spending their money in the best way possible. Account spending should be done strategically and should always focus on keywords that have the best chance of converting as shown through previous data. Things are constantly changing so checking in about once a week is always a smart way to see if you are having any sort of conversion trouble. Attempting to optimize more often than that will not give the account enough time test out the previous changes made. Just be patient and you will get your account running wonderfully in no time! Good luck PPCers!
About the Author
Sarah Abbey is a PPC Specialist for ChoiceLocal who specializes in Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Facebook advertising. Sarah helps clients by running their PPC campaigns on different platforms. When she’s away from the marketing world she enjoys concerts, watching sports, and spending times with family, friends and her dogs.
