Today, we come to the last stage of our client onboarding process, which is ongoing PPC maintenance.
At this stage, we’ve worked through the previous nine steps. We’ve audited your existing PPC accounts or set up new ones. We’ve worked with your marketing team to decide on account structure, strategies and tactics. We’ve written and tested your ads. Your campaigns are up and running. Everything looks solid.
At this point, it’s tempting to step back and let things roll. But, after all this work, this isn’t the time to take your foot off the gas. Rather, now’s the time to capitalize on your efforts. And that means continuing with account maintenance and additional projects as needed.
Ongoing PPC Maintenance Allows Us to Respond to Changes
Why is continued account monitoring and maintenance so important? Because things change. Whether it’s your company or industry or account that changes (or, inevitably, all three), we can find new opportunities and avoid pitfalls.
Because account maintenance activities are often in response to changes, it’s hard to define exactly what activities we’ll perform and when. We customize these activities for clients, so they will vary from client to client, account to account and industry to industry.
But no matter what kinds of activities we perform, our goal remains the same: To maximize your ROI.
1. Changes in the PPC Account
One of the first things we look at as part of ongoing maintenance is the PPC account itself. And usually that means analyzing numbers, conducting audits and running tests.
These activities could include any or all of the following:
- Negative keyword management
- Duplicate keywords audits
- Low search volume keyword reviews
- Quality score benchmark comparisons
- Settings audits
- Keyword trend audits
- CTR audits
- Page speed tests
- Ad messaging testing
- Remarketing audits
- Ad extensions
- Shopping campaign audits.
As you can see, there’s a whole lot to look at within your PPC account. Which is why we often organize some of these activities into quarterly and six month reviews.
2. Changes in the Company
Not only does your PPC account undergo changes, but your company does too, obviously. Maybe you’re expanding your product line or developing new promotions—and you want to add these to your PPC strategy.
Or perhaps your company is ready to push into new geographic markets, which will require us to explore new geo opportunities.
Sometimes, clients are so pleased with our results that they want to assign more budget to them. A larger budget can give us the means to expand into other areas, such as display advertising and video advertising. We may also conduct a search partner review to look for new areas to explore.
3. Changes in Technology, Regulatory Environment and Marketplace
Changes in technology, regulatory settings, and the marketplace can also impact your PPC campaigns. Sometimes they bring new opportunities. Sometimes they negatively impact existing campaigns.
An obvious example of this is the growth of mobile. Ads for mobile users have special considerations and, given mobile’s growing prominence, we conduct mobile reviews to make sure we’re using mobile ads effectively.
AdWords as an advertising platform is also constantly changing. (In fact, Google announced another round of major changes to AdWords and Google Analytics at the Google Performance Summit on May 24th.) We’re always quick to jump on changes to AdWords and Google Analytics because they bring new opportunities to our PPC clients.
But these changes can also affect existing campaigns in unexpected ways if you’re not paying attention—which is another reason why we perform settings audits.
Changes in the marketplace can also include feisty new competitors or the decline of existing ones. So we conduct competitor reviews to look for opportunities and threats.
Keep Your Foot on the PPC Gas Pedal
Basically, ongoing maintenance and additional projects allow us to maximize the investment you and your marketing team have put into your PPC. Don’t waste it by taking your foot off the gas.
To read this series from the beginning, start with our introductory post on onboarding PPC clients.
