Pay Per Click: Troubleshooting your PPC Accounts

December 13, 2013 By BJ Cook,

PPC can make or break your holiday season and after seeing the stats from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we all know that participating in PPC can be a great benefit. But, how do you run a successful PPC campaign and troubleshoot any potential problems before the holidays? Here are a few tips and tricks from our PPC experts.

Keep Track of performance

Get automated emails that get sent to you when big changes are made on the account. It doesn't hurt to monitor your campaigns at a high level and then a more in depth level every day. Just make sure you monitor your campaigns on the regular to make sure you are tracking the changes that may potentially need to happen in the future. Be proactive and -make the changes before you see a negative change in your account.

Use Change History to monitor accounts

If you notice a negative impact on the campaigns you can use the filter option to better hone in on the time frame that the changes were made. This is especially important if you have more than one PPC manager working on the accounts - you are able to see what changes they made and how those changes affected your campaigns.

Keyword Research

Avoid a lot of the one word keywords - Use phrases and words that would be used when you are searching for a common product online. Make sure you not only do your research on keywords, but it is also beneficial to do research and ad in a few negative keywords. This is a good way to keep your CPA down and your ROI high.

Use a third party tool

Third party tools are available to help make your life a little easier when it comes to analytics and optimization. A lot of the third party tools have reports that can be automated just like BingAds and Google

Quality Score is Queen

The higher the quality score the more likely it is for your ad to be shown. Your quality score is determined by a number of things (This is straight from Google's mouth):

Your keyword's expected clickthrough rate (CTR): The expected CTR is based in part on the keyword's past CTR, or how often that keyword led to clicks on your ad
Your display URL's past CTR: How often you received clicks with your display URL
Quality of your landing page: How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate your page is
Keyword/ad relevance: How relevant your keyword is to your ads
keyword/search relevance: How relevant your keyword is to what a customer searches for

And if all else fails - hire some PPC experts. Digital Marketing Agencies know the in's and out's of PPC - make them responsible for your money. We might know just the people to refer you to.....