PPC Optimisation Challenge

Rarely does a PPC advertiser come into work for a relaxing day at the office, it just doesn’t happen. Whether you’ve got meetings up to your ears, stayed up a little too late the night before, there will accounts that will need to be optimised. Some days there will be hours to spare to have an in depth, detailed look through every account, campaign etc. but for the days you don’t, there is the PPC optimisation challenge.

With any task in PPC, it is important to make sure attention to detail is at its utmost, and while this challenge is about speed, accuracy should always come first.

So, on to the challenge

Time: 10 minutes

Difficulty: Campaign x1 = Easy,   Account x1 = Medium,   Account x2 = Hard,   Account x3 or more = Godlike

Difficulty will vary depending on sizes of campaigns and accounts

Objective: Complete the following 7 optimisation tasks from start to finish:

1) Check stats against KPIs – If you don’t know what you’re KPIs are… STOP – you shouldn’t be doing this. Go and find out what they are.

2) Pause poor performers (keywords, ad groups, campaigns, ads).

3) Negative keyword exclusion (let’s hope it wasn’t too long since this was last done, otherwise those 10 mins are as good as gone).

4) Check up on your top performers – If there is room to boost bids on top performing keywords, I suggest you do it (this will obviously depend on average positions and budgets).

5) Duplicate best ads – If you are rotating ads indefinitely, conducting any testing etc. you will need to quickly check up on ads and make changes where necessary.

6) Positive keyword addition – Another quick search query report, this time by conversions. Add any keywords you think could be valuable.

7) Make notes for tomorrow – You may want to jot down notes of any trends seen or changes made. If those 10 mins are almost up, I won’t be surprised if this step is skipped.