Prioritize Your Plan of Action and Make the Biggest Progress at the Fastest Pace

Once you have gained a working knowledge of the historical performance of the campaign, you can prioritize your action plan.

When you inherit a PPC account, you need to prioritize the changes you are planning so that you will make the most progress at the fastest pace possible. Initially, you will want to make a series of swift adjustments that will quickly improve the account’s performance. In the following sections, we will discuss the tactics that will stop the bleeding within an account. By “stop the bleeding,” we mean removing elements of the campaign that are obviously hindering its performance.

The optimization process for each account is unique. A successful strategy should be prioritized so that you can make quick changes to improve the account’s performance fast, and we discuss these tactics in the remainder of this chapter. Then your strategy should change gears to focus on the large-scale optimization tactics, and we discuss these ongoing management tactics in chapter 3.

Your initial work needs to focus on the PPC campaign that has the highest volume. Even though each account is unique, our experience has been that Google is the main driver of traffic and conversions. This is why we have focused most of our attention on this search engine: to help you make the fastest progress possible. AdCenter and other search engines are important elements of a diversified PPC campaign, but your attention should be devoted to Google first.

Google’s AdWords interface is bar none the best pay-per-click advertising platform available. They have a plethora of tools and an interface that is designed for convenience and ease of use. AdWords is integrated with Google Analytics as well, so you can hit two birds with one stone in the interface. Their help documentation is very nice for beginners and experts alike. Oh yeah, and Google’s AdWords Editor makes it super easy to perform large-scale account operations from a desktop interface. If you ever need to do any mass copying, deleting, etc., Editor is a godsend. For these reasons, Google is the place to start and should be the primary focus of your PPC efforts.

That said, adCenter is worth looking into as well. Obviously, the ROI is smaller simply due to the smaller amount of searchers, but good results are there to be had. It’s important to keep in mind that adCenter users are very different in regards to shopping and purchasing preferences. Therefore, there may well be a niche for your clients that you can target. The only real way to find out is to try it. Plus, you won’t spend nearly as much money on an adCenter account, so there is less risk involved with those advertising platforms.

You can determine how much time to spend on each search engine platform based upon your budgets and revenue. Determine how much you spend with each, how much profit you return, and go from there. For us, we get the lion’s share of revenue from Google, so that’s where most of our time is spent. However, there are clients that make a killing in other search engines, and those are adjusted accordingly. There isn’t some magic metric to use, such as 70% Google, 20% adCenter, and 10% Facebook. You will just need to figure that out for yourself.