Now that your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign is up and running, how are you going to monitor, tweak, adjust, update, track and adjust in order to maintain good results?
Unfortunately, if you don't have deep PPC pockets, the best - and only - way to monitor your campaigns is manually. Don't worry...at least Google will offer some suggestions and help along the way.
Monitoring "by hand" shouldn't take too much time, especially if you're not running large PPC campaigns. At the least, to start, one should log in to their PPC campaigns at least once a day. Then, when you feel more comfortable, you can switch to logging in to your PPC accounts once or twice per week.
However, do not take the "set it and forget it" approach to PPC. It will need your attention!Here are some tips on what to look for when self-monitoring PPC campaigns:
- Make sure none of your ads have been rejected by the search engine. This can happen if you violate any terms of service, copyrights, trademarks, etc.
- Monitor that all ads are active.
- Make sure all URLs are working and landing pages are working.
- Check your budget. Most search engines will make budget recommendations if you are hitting your daily budget too early each day. Google, for instance, will make budget recommendations and tell you how many impressions and clicks you're missing each day. Use caution in increasing budget. Remember, it's called a budget for a reason. Don't go crazy.
- Always look to improve ad copy. Don't be afraid to tweak ads and/or write new ads to attract potential clicks.
- Make sure you're targeted the best possible keywords for each campaign. Again, search engines will make suggestions on other keywords you should be targeting.
For larger campaigns (and bigger budgets), a PPC monitoring service will save you a ton of time.
Some suggestions include Acquiso, ClickEquations, Omniture and BidMax to name a few. Monthly fees to use these pay per click management software packages are based on your PPC expenditures.