The Ultimate Checklist of What To Do in The First Month of Your AdWords Optimization

The Ultimate Checklist of What To Do in the First Month of Your AdWords Optimization When you initially activate a new AdWords campaign, there are plenty of things to take into account. While the key objective in AdWords is profits, the first month differs a little bit. Especially if you're working with a new account or domain, then the immediate goal should be to optimize for Quality Score. Focus on getting your AdWords campaign off to the right start rather than immediate profits. Know Your KPIS (Key Performance Indicators) The most common KPIS are: In order to optimize your AdWords campaign you need to know your KPIS. Not knowing your KPIS and the therefore lack of campaign goals are one of the main traps for PPC managers. Number of Conversions Cost-per-Conversion Discovering your campaign goals will give you an entirely new outlook on how to achieve these goals. Number Conversion Rate of Clicks (although not always reliable) Clickthrough-rate CHECKLIST Step-by-Step Tips for your First Month with your AdWords Campaign Before Activating Your Campaign FRIDAY Never Activate New Campaigns on Fridays • Letting new AdWords campaigns run for longer than 24 hours without reacting can be a total waste of money. • Search volume and conversions are notoriously low on weekends for most commercial searches. • You will not get a clear view of how your campaign is performing until Monday anyway. Save yourself the heartache and stress and start your campaigns Monday through Thursday! It's crucial to review your account after 24 hours of being activated. There will, in most cases, be ads and keywords that are severely underperforming. The 24-Hour Review Pausing these in the early stages of your campaign's run, can help you succeed. Review Bidding for Too High Bids Review Your Bids At The End Of Day 1 If your budget has already been reached before the first day is over, then you need to reduce your bidding. MISSED IMPRESSIONS BUDGET LIMIT REACHED Go to your AdWords account and see the stats for Today. If your cost are equal to your budget you've reached your budget. 9 A.M 12 A.M 3P.M 6 P.M 7-12 P.M You should lower your bidding for either: a) All keywords (equally throughout) b) Your top-spenders Bid Review for Too Few Clicks I If your budget wasn't close to being met on the first I day you should review your keywords and bidding: - Make sure no ads have a Below-First Page bid Ads below a 5-7 position will receive few clicks 20% 40% Consider increasing bids on situations like these with 20-40% if it makes sense. Continue Until You Hit the Desired Level 10% Keep performing the bid review daily until you hit the desired level Always plan for 10% of your budget being left over each day. Are All Your Keywords and Ads Active? A quick review of whether or not your ads and keywords are active is mandatory. Check for the following: Keywords below first-page bid amounts Disapproved ads Disapproved keywords (although this is rare) Conflicting negative keywords DAY This is the first day that you can really start optimizing. Unless something is completely wrong, then 7 days is the accepted date range most PPC managers work with when optimizing AdWords campaigns. If you didn't receive many clicks the first 3 days due to low bidding, then just wait 7 days from the date your campaign started getting the desired amount of clicks. Quick Campaign Optimizations 8. Check Ad Position (1) Top 3 positions Keep the same bidding unless > You're exceeding your budget > You're exceeding your conversion goals 1st position Lower your biddings by 25% Below the 5th position Increase bidding by 25% > Only if you have room in your budget Want to Start Out Slow? Want to Get Ahead Fast? Not Reaching Budget? ! If you have a small budget I or little experience with I AdWords, then position 1 I is not the best place to be. If you have a big budget, plenty of time and want to experience the big- gest bang for the buck, then the top 3 ad posi- tions are the best places to be. If you're not reaching your AdWords budget and your ads are in a position below 6, then increasing your bids Lower your bidding to a 4-6 position. will result'in more clicks. Check If Your Budget is Exceeded on a Daily Basis You've probably kept an eye on your new campaign (we're all guilty of what equals to stalking at the beginning), but it's healthy to take a "big picture" stance with your new campaign. BUDGET LIMIT $30 DANGER Set the date range to the Last 7 Days and observe the graph for cost. If your budget is consistently met every day, then I MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT SUN it's time to reduce either your bidding or active keywords. An exceeded budget is one of the biggest SMB AdWords account killers. Check your Click Volumes for Desired Amounts If you were initially counting on 20 clicks a day, but are seeing only 5 clicks a day while still reaching your daily budget, then appropriate action needs to be taken: (CTR Reduce the CPC bid for high-costing keywords Research new keywords to add that are cheaper than those you currently have/use Reduce your CPCS and work to increase your CTR account-wide Pause high CPC keywords Initial Conversion Estimates If you're experienced with PPC or online marketing, then you might already be seeing a decent amount of conversions. You can already start focusing on pausing keywords or lowering the bids on keywords that aren't generating conversions. This can help you streamline your account's performance and will allow you to better focus on your initially-profitable keywords. Hint:I suggest that you label the keywords you pause in the early stages of your campaign. These ideally, should be the first ones you review once it's time to expand your campaign. Review Ads for Clear Losers Unless you get 100 clicks a day for your ad groups, then 7 days will most likely be too early to make any major adjustments to your ads. LOSER But you can however, already see trends. If one ad has a CTR of 10% and the other 1%, then you can obviously pause the 1% CTR ad. Delete Low Search Volume Keywords Low Search Volume Keywords are keywords that have the status Low Search Volume. If your keywords have the label "Low Search i Volume", then I advise you to delete them i now (unless theyre receiving clicks). Make sure your that the keyword isn't labeled Low Search Volume simply due to misspellings or wrong word-order if you're using phrase/exact match. LOW SEARCH VOLUME delete Pause Keywords with Very Low CTR i My recommendation will always be to focus on Quality I Score at the beginning. Having a high Clickthrough-rate ! is very important for your Quality Score. I therefore ! routinely pause and label these keywords as a best practice. CTR 0.3%( II I I don't want to experiment with these keywords at the ! beginning stages when my campaign is very sensitive. I'd rather focus on the keywords that have shown high CTR already. Reactivate these keywords after two months when you have more time and less risk by optimizing them. Add Obvious Negative Keywords This is partly in relation to the subject discussed above. After 7 days running, you should be able to generate a decent Search Query Report. You can then use this data from the report to exclude search terms with negative keywords. Know that you can almost never find too many negative keywords and you starting extra early can be key to your ultimate AdWords success. DAY 14 The goal from this point on is to build your Quality Score while still building a profitable campaign. The First Real Optimization Takes Place Look for Keywords and Ads with Low CTRS Pause all keywords or ads with a low CTR (below 1%). Again, our goal at this point in time isn't to maximize completely, but instead to build our Quality Score, as well as profits. campaign potential our QUALITY SCORE Optimize Ads for Your Goal Optimize your ads so that the ads that are performing best, according to your KPIS, are the active ads in your account. Pause any underperforming ads at this time. Consider pausing all ads if none in an ad group are performing at the require level. After 14 days, it's time to start paying more attention to your ads. This is the most important part of your campaign at this point in time. Create New Ads In addition to pausing, an important aspect of the optimization process is to continuously do A/B i split-testing. You can never be sure that you have created the truly i best-performing ad from the get-go. I Start Fresh When Your Ads Aren't Performing NEW If you're way behind on your KPI projections, then I suggest creating brand new ads for yourself. Most of the time, only a complete rewrite of your ads can create big returns. Make Minor Ad Adjustments to Successful Ads Create brand new ads If you on the other hand, only are trailing by a little bit or if you're even a little bit ahead of your projections, then minor adjustments to your ads are preferred. i Minor adjustments include changing minor words, but not the I entire ad text: • Change Buy to Order • Change Pricing from $10 to Pricing from $20 • Change Low Cost to Cheap Minor adjustments to current ads Even though the minor adjustments you make might seem arbitrary, then I've personally seen big conversion rate gains by simply changing one word in the ad copy. Even if you only see slight improvement, the small performance boosts will result in big gains for you in the long run. Review Bidding for Exceeding Budgets Revising your bidding to make sure that you're not exceeding your budget is key to long-term success. Even though we did this meticulously during the first 7 days, it's still crucial to review if your budget is being exceeded Bulding your campaign according to best practices starts the following snowball I effect that affects your budget: Best Practices Higher Quality Score Higher Ad Positions More Clicks High CTR High CTR Revise Bidding According to your Goals On day 14, you will hopefully have generated two weeks' worth of conversion data. Which means that you're finally ready to start bidding more in alignment with your campaign goals. LAST 14 DAYS Check your stats for the last 14 days: Too high cost per conversion Lower CPC CPC CPC Cost per conversion lower than expected Bid higher if below average position 3 Pause All Keywords That Don't Align - Be Wary of Bad Ads in Ad Groups That Affect your Results If you have keywords that don't perform anywhere near your projections, then it's time to pause them. There is no need in the beginning to work heavily on keywords that aren't performing well enough. Focus on keywords that are already performing well, in your campaign. This will help you increase the i overall quality of your campaign and set yourself up I for greater long-term success. Don't work hard on keywords that might never i become profitable for you. Focus on the ones that are. I Again, I will advise you to label these keywords for use at a later point in time. Go for Big Negative Keyword Reviews from your See Search Terms Report i The groundwork that comes with adding I negative keywords and new keywords from your See Search Terms Report is crucial for AdWords success. Review for Low Quality Score and See What Can Be Improved Upon If some of your keywords have a low Quality Score, then it's time to figure out how you can improve this for long-term benefit. There are several ways to improve low Quality Score keywords and I won't go into all of them here. The most efficient way to improve Quality Score is working on ad relevance. AD LANDING PAGE Making sure that the relevance between search term, keyword, ad and landing page is high all the way through. is one of the secrets to ensuring high Quality Score. Minor or Major Optimizations Based on Your Traffic Stats DAY 21 When you reach day 21, you're most likely close to a successful campaign in terms of stability. Depending on your traffic levels, it's time to either redo all of the optimizations from day 14, or only optimize for those keywords with low search volume. Be Wary of Keywords and Ads with Not Enough Clicks/Impressions Redo Optimizations from Day 14, for Low Search Volume Keywords (use the labels for easy identification) Remember how we've previously labeled keywords, ads and ad groups with a low search volume that we decided we couldn't optimize just yet? LOW SEARCH VOLUME On day 21, it's time to review these again and see if they have enough impressions/clicks/conversions to start being optimized. Perform the same optimizations from day 14 if you can now. Minor Adjustments to Ads That Have Proved Successful If your search volume allows, then you should continue with optimizing your ads with minor adjustments. It's amazing how significant gains you can achieve from just doing minor ad adjustments, so I always try to do as many of them as I can. DAY 28 Day 28 and Beyond... Schedule Your Optimizations According to The Amount of Clicks and Conversions In Your Campaigns - Optimize everything at once if your account is below 30 ad groups Once you complete your fourth week, it's time to commence a regular optimization schedule. Optimize Different Areas On Different Days with Bigger AdWords Accounts If you have a bigger AdWords account, then breaking up your optimizations is crucial for success. If you try to do everything at once, you will i start skipping tasks that really count. I Ive seen several campaign managers start cutting I their tasks short because they've just grown tired of I working in an account for so long. Break up your tasks so that you tackle one aspect, per day of the week. This will keep your outlook fresh for each task. Core Components of Most AdWords Optimization Schedules Bid Keyword optimization Negative keyword Keyword expansion optimization research Ad Settings: Ad scheduling, Ad Extensions Ad Campaign optimization structure optimization Start Optimizing! O Optimizing your AdWords campaigns regularly is fundamental to success. Too many accounts just lay around inactive week after week. This is the case even when minor adjustments could easily help increase returns on your ad spend. Even if you can't do it all, at least try to do some of the work so your campaign is not floating still over water. White Shark Media Offers Specialized Search Engine Marketing for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses to Achieve the Highest Return on Investment. Get more insights from White Shark Media on Twitter at @WhiteSharkMedia or by visiting our AdWords blog: whitesharkmedia.com/blog/ WHITE SHARK MEDIA IMPRESSIONS 8o0°0