Bid Management Tools

Now that you have your paid search account up, running, and are able to pull basic reports, it’s time to start setting up your schedule for handling all of the various tasks required to truly steward a successful SEM program. The amount of work you’ll be putting in will mainly be dictated by the scope of work you and your advertiser (or boss) settled on before the account was launched. If this PPC account is supposed to be a big part of your job description, you’ll most likely be spending a lot of time working in it to ensure success. However, if you have several accounts under your stewardship, it may require less of your time.

Usually, budget is a big determiner in how much time is actually going to be needed—if it’s a big investment, then it makes sense to dedicate a portion of that budget to make sure it’s effective as possible. Here are some common PPC tasks and how you might want to handle them based on a daily, weekly or monthly basis for a medium sized account.

Performance and reporting

• Daily: As a best practice, many search engine marketers opt to perform a daily idiot check to make sure that nothing incredibly negative has affected the account such as the budget running out, flight dates ending, etc. Simply put, it’s a basic top level, two-minute check to make sure the accounts are spending correctly and the major key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversions, average positions, cost per click, etc are not spiking or dipping too much.
• Weekly: Most advertisers are going to expect some kind of weekly reporting. Usually, this will consist of the week-over-week performance of the KPIs along with some data visualizations such as charts and graphs to make it easy to interpret the results. Depending on the size/importance of the account, these results could be at the campaign level or even deeper at the ad group or keyword level. Some analysis of the ads will be expected such as which offers/messages are performing better than others.
• Monthly: Monthly reporting is usually a summary of the past month’s results along with some deeper level dives and visualizations. Many of the people seeing this report will not have any expertise in PPC, so detailed, written explanations including a well-executed summary page will help better explain what’s going on as this document gets passed through the advertiser’s organization. Don’t expect them to completely understand what they’re looking at—especially whether it’s reporting good or bad results. A listed “drop in CPCs by 20%” might be amazing in your eyes but people without search marketing expertise may have no idea what the benchmark for success should be.

Optimizations and testing

• Daily: During the daily idiot check, you may want to tweak certain bids here and there, especially if they’re high volume terms and constitute a good portion of your budget. For many PPC accounts, the Pareto Principle (i.e. the 80/20 rule) applies wherein a small percentage of your terms will most likely be the most important to your account. Usually, these are brand and product terms or very high level general terms. Because they spend so much, even small adjustments to their costs and quality scores could end up being very powerful optimizations. Tip: try bringing down the max bids on your top terms by one cent every day while closely watching your clicks, average positions and conversion rates until they start to drop. You might be able to shave a $1.00 bid down to $.90 and still achieve the same performance. That may not be a lot, but you’ve just saved 10% which can now be reinvested into the campaign.
• Weekly: Weekly optimizations are going to be much more involved. You really need a good week (or two) to begin to see even the immediate impact of changes. So, small tests done at seven day intervals will be helpful from week to week. We’ll get into more of how to perform tests (and what kinds of tests you can try) in later posts.
• Monthly: Major optimizations and testing can be done at the monthly level. After four weeks, you’ll have a very good idea on how those tweaks and changes really have impacted the account. Creative changes, for example, might take this long to have an effect, especially if they’re not receiving a lot of daily impressions.

Advertiser communication and meetings

• Daily: Unless you’re working on a huge account or the PPC represents a bulk of the marketing budget, you probably won’t need to check in with the advertiser daily. However, for some larger accounts, a daily meeting might be invaluable to getting the crucial feedback you need from the advertiser’s key contact to course correct every day. This may sound like overkill, but if this account is spending millions annually or literally the only marketing that this company is engaged with, then you really can’t wait a week between talking to the main decision maker.
• Weekly: Weekly meetings could be brief and simply a time to check in and review the weekly report. The advertiser can also ask any questions they have and can get clarification on any outstanding issues. They can communicate any new campaigns or ad groups that need to be built for new products or marketing initiatives. It’s also good for the advertiser to hear how your time is being spent so that you can start building good expectation levels for them on how long various PPC tasks take to complete. After awhile, they’ll be able to anticipate how long requests will take for you to finish and know that you’re on track and not wasting time.
• Monthly: Monthly reporting meetings should be very in-depth. In fact, the main advertiser contact may want to invite other members of their team (maybe even the head boss) so you can answer the questions they’re getting internally that only you can answer. Monthly meetings can also be the best place to have discussions on how well (or poorly) the account is performing as the tests and optimizations decided upon at the last monthly meeting can be reviewed and new action items can be added to the task list. This is also the right time to discuss high level account topics like budges, fees, marketing direction, etc.

Maintenance and competitive analysis

• Daily: You probably do not have to do much of this on the daily level.
• Weekly: When compiling weekly reports, you might be compelled to perform some basic wear-and-tear maintenance on your accounts, such as making wide-level CPC changes and completely pausing non-performing keywords. You also may want to check out your flight dates and budget caps to make sure they’re still in line with whatever account changes or advertiser directives that have been implemented recently.
• Monthly: At least once a month, you’ll want to pull some ad level reporting to make sure you’re not getting any creative wearout. Signs that your creative may have reached its peak would include lower clickthrough rates, quality scores or conversion rates. It may help to pause some old creative and add in some fresh ones to see if you can breathe some life into your accounts. Also, each month (maybe for your monthly reports), you should really check out your keyword landscape to see if any new competitors have entered the marketplace which you need to be aware of and react.

There you have it. That’s basically the life of a paid search marketer from a daily, weekly, and monthly perspective. Of course, you’ll have to take into account all of the nuances and personalities of your advertisers to really understand what they expect of you in the working relationship. Some are more hands-on than others. As well, a brand new account may need more tender loving care at first and less after the major optimizations have been implemented. If you need more time (or fees) to handle an account, talk frankly with your advertiser. Don’t simply spend too much or too little time on an account just because it was agreed upon months or years ago. Keep the lines of communication open and honest and make sure to manage the relationship as well as you manage your keywords.

source: http://searchengineland.com/your-daily-weekly-monthly-paid-search-routine-49717

Marketing process

Goals (define)

Reporting/Analysis/Measurement

Strategy

Resources to execute strategy

Execution

Measurement

Optimization

Factor’s influencing strategy:

1. Competition in PPC (higher CPC)

2. Changes with Adwords

3. Quality Score

I know all the componets, i know how to put them together to get results,

I don’t know the proper way to communicate progress, success, challenges

Before a qualified prospect even starts their search, you need to have done quite a few
things right just to get your ad shown to them. You need to have:

• Purchased the right keyword
• Set the right match type
• Earned a sufficient quality score
• Offered a high enough bid

Then, once your ad has been presented, you have to satisfy the customer up to fi ve more
times to get the conversion:

• Your text ad has to attract and persuade so they’ll click
• Your landing page has to confi rm and deliver so they’ll stay
• Your offer has to be attractive so they’ll want it
• Your purchase path has to inform so they’ll check out
• Your cart/form has to avoid frustration so they’ll convert
In paid search, it’s easy to focus the majority of our time on the steps we have to take to get
our ads shown, and very little on the things that need to be done in order to satisfy searchers.

Writing and testing better text ad copy requires substantial time and effort. Landing page
design and the rest of the post-click experience is often not the responsibility of the paid
search manager, yet it can determine or at least constrain their potential for success.
Within your organization, the resources, interests, and efforts of the pre-click team and the
post-click team must be aligned. Find and report prominently on the metrics that illustrate
the fact that you can only win by working together.
The click is only worth paying for if you can do everything it takes to get the conversion.

source

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a deep dive into tactical campaign management strategies. As such, I wanted to focus on some low level tips today that will directly impact your campaigns. Specifically, I’m going to focus on Google AdWords match types and how you can leverage broad, phrase, and exact match to their fullest potential.

Tip 1: Always Start With Exact Match For Added Control

If you watched my recent PPC Ian video about launching new AdWords accounts, you already have a preview of my first tip today. It’s really simple: Always start with exact match, period. Exact match gives you the most control out of all match types. Exact match has the highest revenue per visitor out of all match types. Exact match is straight-forward and simple.

After starting out with exact match, you’ll have a great understanding of which keywords work and which don’t. In the cases where the keywords don’t work, you will have minimized your losses because you started with the most controlled match type. Now, it’s time to expand to phrase and later broad. As an ideal structure, I always like to see the largest number of keywords on exact, fewer on phrase, and even fewer on broad. Also, I’m a huge fan of separating the different match types into separate adgroups. Sure, this creates more adgroups, but you’ll see later that it offers even greater control for a niche strategy leveraging negative words.

While this tip may seem very basic, it’s amazing how rarely it is followed. Time and time again, I have experienced AdWords accounts over-weighted in broad match. Oftentimes, accounts are exclusively focused on broad match with very few exact match keywords. I can’t underscore it enough: The healthiest AdWords accounts are over-weighted on exact match.

Tip 2: Leverage Broad Match For Keyword Generation

I really like tip 2 because it ties into tip 1 very nicely. Once you have established your baseline of exact match keywords, it’s time to start experimenting with phrase and broad. I especially like deploying phrase and broad match variations of my top tier exact match keywords. Not only do they offer great volume expansion opportunities, but they also offer amazing keyword generation opportunities! You heard that right: I leverage phrase and broad match to generate more exact match keywords. The beauty of this tip is it keeps feeding back into tip 1 (over-weighting in exact match). As my phrase and broad match variations start generating some serious traffic, I’ll run a search query report. Those search queries that drove conversions (and are missing from my exact match keyword set) are immediately deployed as brand new exact match keywords. Why deploy them on exact? Simple: Exact match offers the greatest control in terms of traffic quality and also bidding.

Of course, it’s very important to not go overboard here. Search engine accounts need to remain manageable so it’s a judgment call whether to let phrase and broad match take care of a certain query or to deploy the query as a new exact match keyword in your account. If a query has driven a conversion, it’s important to deploy it in my opinion.

Another important point: 20 to 25 percent of Google queries are new. Because of this very fact, it’s important to have good phrase and broad match coverage. Moreover, it’s important to go far enough down the tail on phrase and broad match to help the algorithm match to all of these possible new queries. My point: Remember to keep things balanced and invest time building out phrase and broad match as well so you definitely capture those 20 to 25 percent of new, unique queries.

Tip 3: Leverage Negative Match Types To Improve Bidding Accuracy

I’d like to close out with my most advanced match type strategy. Remember under tip 1 when I said that I like to separate the different match types into different adgroups? That all comes to play with my final strategy of creating added bidding efficiencies with savvy match type execution. It’s really simple: Once I’ve separated the three match types into different adgroups, I like to leverage negative match types so the phrase and broad match versions get none of the exact match traffic and the broad match version gets none of the phrase match traffic.

Let me explain this through an example. Let’s say we deploy three keywords in three separate adgroups: [mortgage], “mortgage”, and mortgage. Let’s say we have no negative words. Let’s even say that the exact match version is bid the highest, the phrase match in the middle, and the broad match the lowest. (Side note: This should usually be the strategy.) No matter what, the phrase and broad match variations will always get some amount of exact match traffic. Moreover, the broad version will get some amount of phrase match traffic. If the user types in the exact match [mortgage], it will sometimes get mapped to “mortgage” or mortgage. Why? Google likes to test.

We know that exact match offers the best quality traffic. Pay per click is all about optimization. Now, if some of that really high quality traffic is getting attributed to the other match types, we are probably over-valuing phrase and broad and under-valuing exact. What’s my solution? Easy: I’ll add [mortgage] as a negative keyword to both the phrase and broad adgroups. I’ll add “mortgage” as a negative to the broad adgroup. That way, my traffic is always perfectly segmented by match type and I’ll bid as effectively as possible. Another option: Place your exact, phrase, and broad keywords in separate campaigns. That way, you can also use campaign level negatives if you’re not fond of adgroup level negatives. Personally, I like to place negatives on the campaign level that are just plain bad keywords. I like to place negatives under this strategy on the adgroup level. These are two unique types of negative keyword strategies and it’s easier to keep them straight if I have them stored in different places.

Remember, good data is the foundation of a solid biding strategy. Leverage this structure and match type trick to your advantage and you’ll run circles around the competition!

source: http://www.ppcian.com/ppc-match-type-strategies/