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30 PPC Tips to Keep You Ahead of the Competition – Part 2

Click Here if You Missed Part 1.

1. Clean Up Your Negative Keywords

The beginning of the year is a great time to check that none of your negatives (ads, campaigns or keywords) are blocking terms that could be beneficial to your account.

You can also pull a search term report for the past year and see if any search terms aren’t doing much damage week-over-week, but are taking up spend in the long run.

Add them as negatives now!

2. Get Rid of Previously Paused Poor Performers

So you have something that used to work, then it stopped working one month and you paused it. Maybe it has been through this cycle a few times and never seems to produce any positive results.

Download a report for paused keywords with the time range of the last year, segmented by month. Then run a pivot table to see how CPL changes over time.

Then you can use that data to investigate the specific periods when each keyword stopped working.

In other words, find a way to fix it or delete it altogether!

30 PPC Tips to Keep You Ahead of the Competition – Part 2

3. Finish Losing Experiments

Part of maintaining an efficient, positively optimized account is trying out new things to see what works and sometimes more importantly, what doesn’t.

A high percentage of tests don’t yield any actionable results, and when you know that something isn’t working, you should get rid of it. The start of the New Year is the perfect time to finally close the door on any experiments that you know have ended poorly.

4. Take into Account Tactics That May Have Changed

Tactics can change a lot from year to year, like accounts with complicated geographic strategies that get scrapped after deep analysis. Whether it be countries that you may no longer ship to or counties/states that you’re no longer interested in advertising to, now is the time to get rid of them.

5. Optimize Your Landing Pages

After making all of your keyword and ad copy changes, make sure all of your landing pages remain relevant and maintain good Quality Scores. You could also test different landing pages for ads as one of your new clean-up ad copy tests.

6. Check The General Campaign Settings

There are many campaign settings and some get less attention than they deserve
throughout the year. You can check:

language settings,
daily budgets,
geographic settings,
status changes.

Make sure all of your campaigns are on the right track to hit your goals and that something as simple as a general campaign setting isn’t holding them back.

7. Remove Any Duplicate Keywords from Your Account

It’s nearly impossible to maintain a PPC account that is free of duplicate keywords,
particularly if you have multiple managers working on one account, or are frequently adjusting match types and account settings.

However, it is imperative to your business (and your bank account) to check for duplicates in the account at the very least, on a monthly or quarterly basis.

In case there is confusion over exactly what duplicate keywords are, the following brief explanation should help:

Duplicates are keywords with the same match types that are within the same ad group, campaign, or differing campaigns, across your account. There are a lot of different ways to truly define a duplicate keyword but that is the most common and universal definition.

However, there is one caveat to this definition,which comes into play only with broad
match keywords. Be cognizant that broad match keywords are duplicates if they contain the same words, even in different orders.

For example, “cheap golf clubs” on broad match and “golf clubs cheap” on broad match would be considered duplicates.

30 PPC Tips to Keep You Ahead of the Competition – Part 2

8. Refresh Your Ad Copy

If you optimize your account and never look at your ads, you could be in big trouble, especially if you have been doing some restructuring of your account but you haven’t updated your ads.

It is highly important to refresh your ads at least on a monthly or quarterly basis.

You can determine a threshold of time that works best for you, but in general, every quarter is a good start. Go through your account Ad Group by Ad Group, and identify those ads that are either not showing up at all, or when they are shown, have few or no clicks.

Refreshing your ad copy is also a great way to help identify other areas in your account that may be under performing.

9. Identify Your Costly Keywords

Costly keywords are not always as they appear. Generally they are thought of as those that have a higher cost-per-click, however, they can also be the keywords that aren’t yielding any return on ad spend, or offer very poor returns.

At the first sign of something costing too much or not providing a return, your first reaction may be to pause, but take a deeper look. Sometimes taking the time to investigate could allow you to make some tweaks which may turn that costly keyword into a profit!

10. Research Low and Under Performing Keywords

Under performers are usually easy to pick out and delete, however just like your costly keywords, you may want to do a little bit of research first, before you take the necessary action, the FREE Google Keyword Planner is great for this.

The real art to optimizing your ads and keywords, and removing the duplicates, is getting into the trenches and doing the dirty work you have been putting off.

It may take some time, but the results will be worth it, and great for your account.

That’s it, keep a look out for Part 3 coming in the next few days.