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Start The New Year With A PPC Health Check: Part 1

Rebekah Schelfhout on January 14, 2014 at 9:30 am

As Group Head at a fast growing search agency, I’ve carried out hundreds of campaign checks over the years. In my contributions here, I’ll be sharing my top tips on things to look out for when reviewing your own campaigns. Some of these things are obvious, while others might have slipped past you because you’re not up to date on recent changes or are just too close to the day-to-day running of the campaign.

It can be easy to just leave your campaign(s) running and not delve into the detail of things such as the settings of your campaign, especially if your campaign is performing well. But auditing your account on a regular basis and carrying out health checks are big keys to the success of any campaign. In the fast paced world of Google AdWords, even going on holiday for two weeks might mean you miss a big announcement of an upcoming change or new feature.

In part 1 of my PPC Health Check series, I’ll be covering structure, settings, conversion tracking, and budgets. This is laid out in a way that should be really clear and easy to follow, with step-by-step instructions on what to examine in each category.

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These questions should give you the building blocks for performing a health check on your PPC campaigns. It’s really important to try and self-assess (or have a colleague assess) your PPC campaign every few months, as there can be so many changes within the interface and settings that suggestions for improvements can always be made.

One of the main areas worth examining during your audit is your campaign budget. Being limited by your budget isn’t really a good way to start the year. Assess the results of the campaign, and if performance is good, see if you can secure more budget for your PPC campaigns this year. In order to get growth from your PPC campaigns, you’ll often need to increase the budget to remain competitive and to take advantage of new campaign features and types.

Another key subject for analysis this year are your bid multipliers; these are still often underused in many accounts. Schedule yourself some time to carry out analysis and adjust things like time-of-day, location and device.

The mobile landscape has become more competitive than ever; as an agency, we’ve seen CPCs increase since the launch of Enhanced Campaigns. With this in mind, make sure you’re not falling behind the curve and missing out on this traffic. Remember: there are only positions 1 and 2 in the banner for mobile, and if you’re not showing there, you’re unlikely to be seen!

In my next post, I’ll be covering ad copy, keywords and performance so make sure to check back for updates from me!

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Rebekah Schelfhout

Rebekah Schelfhout is Associate Head of PPC at UK based paid media agency Periscopix, a Merkle Company. In her six years at the company, she has acquired specialist knowledge across both the AdWords and Bing/Yahoo platforms. She has managed accounts across a range of sectors with specializations in retail and e-commerce and currently manages a division of search account managers. Rebekah was announced as the 30th most influential person in search in the UK in The Drum Search Top 50 2014, was nominated for Women in Search 2015, and has spoken at SMX London, SMX East & Internet World as well as being a regular contributor to the Search Engine Land blog.