Top Tips For PPC Management

PPC management can be a daunting task; there are so many things to think about! I’m going to take you through one of my biggest tips for making your day to day management easier, and faster. Setting up your AdWords account is just the beginning, once it is live and running, maintenance is extremely important for making it work and increasing your return on investment.

Let’s look today at one of the most important tasks I carry out on a weekly basis – analysing the exact keywords that I’ve been paying for in my AdWords account. To do this, we need to look closely at the search term reports. In order to run a search term report, first you need to open your account in AdWords. If this is the first time you have looked through the search term reports; then change the date range to all time in the top right hand corner of the account. Now go to the keywords tab, once in here a number of other tabs open, click on ‘see search terms’ and select all. This will show you all of the search terms that your ads were ever matched against. Export this data to Excel by clicking on ‘download’ and then ‘create’. When you have this data we can now analyse it to make adjustments to the account. I look through these reports on a weekly basis; I suggest that you look through these on a weekly basis too. Remember to change the date range to the last 7 days in the top right of AdWords if you are doing the same.

You should now have the search term report exported to Excel. You can analyse the data within AdWords itself but I find it easier to look at it within an Excel spreadsheet. Most of the time, when I have exported the search terms to a spreadsheet; I sort the data by the highest number of impressions. This makes it easier to see the search terms that are the most active. The most active search terms are costing you the most money- so look at them closely! You can also sort the data by the highest cost, number of clicks or number of conversions. Take a look through the search terms to see where your ads have been matched against words that you wish you didn’t pay for. You can then go back and add those matches as negative keywords in your account. This will prevent your ads from being matched in the future for those search terms. Negative keywords are extremely important to increase your return on investment by preventing unnecessary clicks.

Now focus on looking at search terms you have been matched against by AdWords. If you see a new search term that has caused a conversion then add it in. Then you can create an ad matched towards that new keyword which will increase the chances of further conversions for that keyword. Furthermore, getting the exact keyword will increase the money you are making on them as you are rewarded by Google for being relevant.

Good luck – once you’ve run some reports come back and let us know how you’re getting on!

Daniel Blinman is writing on behalf of Marketing by Web, an SEO, Social Media and PPC Management company.