A Few Easy Steps to Optimize Your Account Quickly

Inheriting a PPC account also means inheriting someone else’s ad texts. However great your ad-writing skills may be, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Use the existing ad texts as a springboard for creating new ads that build on the best-performing themes. Doing this will give you insight into what has performed well in the past and give you a strong foundation for future split testing.

The first step of this process, of course, is pulling ad text reports per ad group, 6 months of data at the minimum. Dump this report into a spreadsheet so that you can easily manipulate the data. If you track conversions, create three blank documents where you can keep notes. If you don’t track conversions, create only two blank documents. These are for your notes on click-through rate, conversion rate, and a final master list of ideas.

First, sort your list of ad texts by CTR, highest to lowest. Carefully review the ads that have historically generated the highest CTR. What headline style has worked best? What calls-to-action worked the best? Which benefits of your product or service enticed searchers to click through? Write down the common elements of the highest CTR ads in your CTR document. Create lists for headlines, body text, and even display URL ideas.

Once you’ve completed this list, turn right around and sort your list by conversion rate. Once again, review the ads and begin jotting down what common themes you find in the ads. Create your list of ideas for headlines, body text, and display URL in your conversion rate document.

At this point you should compare your two sets of lists side by side. What headline themes are in both lists? What common calls-to-action have you found? Create a final master list of ideas for headlines, body text, and display URLs in your third blank document. This can now serve as your crib sheet for writing new ads in your inherited PPC account.