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Something we talk to new clients about a lot is watchful PPC management and account activity.
There’s a myth floating around out there that 90% of the work with PPC is done in the first month – set it and forget it.
Today Jessica is going to show you just a couple of reasons why that’s wrong.
Video Transcript
quality score & relevance score
One of the biggest and most important metrics in paid traffic is Quality Score on AdWords and Relevance Score on Facebook. Both of these can make or break an account. While sometimes you get lucky, hit the jackpot, and instantly get a great score, most of the times you need to do lots of testing to get it right.
The biggest influence on it is engagement – represented by CTR, Interaction Rate, Engagement Rate (on Facebook).
As you test different ad copy or images, your CTR goes up and AdWords and Facebook will reward you with a high Quality or Relevance Score, which gives you a massive discount.
We’ve worked on campaigns for months to crack the code, but once you get it, your CPC drops and your traffic increases. But again, it takes a lot of time to allow for testing to get it right.
Wasted Ad Spend
Another big area where watchful PPC management is very important is Wasted Ad Spend.
We all know the concept of Keyword Testing – launch 10 keywords, some will convert right away, some need to be optimized and some will never convert. We talked about Keyword Testing in the previous PPC Myths vs. Reality article, go check it out.
If you were to just launch your keywords and let them ride over time, even if you’re looking at it once a month, in the course of that month, you could potentially waste hundreds or thousands of dollars on these terms. Keywords can nickel and dime you – each one might cost only 10 or 20 dollars, but combined, that really adds up.
Here’s a case with $3,700! in wasted ad spend
PPC ACCOUNT ACTIVITY
Wordstream analyzed 10s of 1000s of AdWords accounts and found that out of all the metrics out there, PPC account activity is the most important for maintaining a healthy account.
Simply opening up the account and looking at it, asking yourself what you can do to push it forward, testing new ad copy and keywords, doing more bid optimization, makes for better paid traffic management. You catch things faster, you think about improvement more often.
This is an example of our project management board for a client. It’s a great way to keep track of what’s happening inside an account on a daily basis.
At Search Scientists, we’re creating a Periodic Table of PPC, our encyclopedia of how great PPC is done.
When we add an element, we always include what day of the month it should be done, whether it should be done more than once per month, how long it should take.
There’s hundreds of things you can do inside an account, and we want to be sure we’re hitting the biggest metrics first and frequently. If you want more info on our Periodic Table of PPC, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below.
I hope this dispels the PPC myth that you can set it and forget it with your ads, because you absolutely cannot. Quality Score, Relevance Score will never go up without lots of ad testing, and your wasted spend will chew away at your profitability if you don’t keep a watchful eye on your account.
We hope you guys join us soon for the next PPC Myths vs. Reality video. And don't forget to subscribe to the Search Scientists YouTube channel.
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