**30 Ways to Outsmart the Competition in PPC - Part 1
Published: Wed, 01/07/15
Hey friend,
We've got good news and bad news. First, the
bad news: We're almost positive your AdWords
account needs work.
If you're like most advertisers, you don't
spend enough time optimizing your account,
and your performance suffers as a result.
In fact, we've found that half of small businesses
don't even log in to their AdWords account once a month!
So what's the good news?
The bar is incredibly low -- and that means YOU have
the opportunity to step up, do some work, and become
the clear stand-out in your niche.
Since so many advertisers let their accounts fall
into neglect, you can beat them out with better ad
positions, more clicks, higher Quality Scores, and lower
costs -- just by doing a little clean-up work!
There's plenty you can do, but the hardest part is
figuring out where to you start.
Use this list and start checking off things one-by-one.
Here is part 1 of "30 Ways to Outsmart the Competition in PPC"
and beat off your competitors with a better-performing
PPC account.
1. Delete Display Campaigns That Aren't Working:
Sort through the Display Keywords tab in AdWords
by status. Set the date range to year to date.
Do you see a lot of keywords that haven't really
accomplished anything in the last year?
Take a deeper dive into them. Really investigate
if there is any reason to keep them around. Did
they work at some time and you want to try them
out again?
Are they seasonal keywords in an e commerce account?
If you have a good reason for keeping them around
then leave them alone for now. If not,delete them!
2. Review Poor Performing Display Targeting Methods:
Do you have placements that have had zero clicks
for the past year? Review them and check if you
could make change to help them perform.
If the placement did well at one time and you have
the ability to bid more on the placement, try
increasing the bid and giving it a new chance to
succeed. Otherwise, get rid of it.
3. Discover Non-Converting Automatic Placements:
Pull a placement report, then filter automatic
placements that haven't converted within the last year.
Anything that has spent over goal should be excluded.
It's really easy to miss placements that spend just a
little at a time, but exceed your goal over a longer
period of time; this is your chance to find them.
4. Refine Display Category Exclusions:
Review all of the categories available and
check performance by category. Some content may not
spend enough for you to worry that it isn't
converting when you review it every other week, but
in the past year it's spent way over your goal. Go
ahead and exclude it.
A huge part of the impact on your New Year clean-up
should be looking for those low-spending parts of
your account that spend here and there, so they never
show up on a weekly or even monthly report, but that
show up within longer time ranges and are just not
doing you any good.
5. Reduce Wasted Spend:
Do an audit on your account to see if/where money
is being wasted. Try looking at SQRs for negative
keywords, keywords with excessive spend, and zero
to very few clicks and conversions.
6. Adjust Ad Settings:
Looking into ad rotation and delivery method is
always a good place to start when cleaning out your
account. Make sure all the new Ad Groups and Campaigns
that you have added over the past year are running the
way that most benefits your account and that there aren't
any settings that are slipping through the cracks.
In addition, look at any day parting or ad scheduling
settings you have in place. When was the last time you
pulled this data to make sure the current settings are
the best choices?
Review and adjust as needed.
7. Test Your Ad Extensions:
This may be something you think you have kept up
on, but you might have given extensions less
attention than they deserve.
Make sure you are testing and rotating your ad
extensions just like you would your ad copy.
Make sure that when you move things around, or
update your structure, that you also update your
extensions.
Sometimes extensions change, whether you change
your website or your address.Now with Enhanced Campaigns,
you can also add them on the Ad Group levels instead of
just the Campaign level.
Now that sitelink extensions are considered
individual extensions and not just one whole extension,
you can review individual stats and determine which one
is working better than the others.
You can A/B test which extensions works better and use
the results to keep only those extensions that are performing
well. Extensions are there to help your account, whether in
the auction or by giving those searchers access to more of
your information, so use them to your advantage and add any
and all that apply to your account.
It's also beneficial to be tracking the results of the
tests to see what the added benefits are in both AdWords
and Bing.
8. Conclude Ad Copy Tests:
It can sometimes take longer than you think for your
ads to produce statistically significant data during
testing cycles.
This can cause ad copy tests to be forgotten.Make sure
you take the time NOW! to check through and conclude
any tests that have accumulated enough data.
9. Conduct New Ad Copy Tests:
After wrapping up any ad copy tests that had a
statistically significant winner, it's time to add in
a new round of copy!
Come up with creative and compelling copy to
cycle in with the previous winner. Remember - keep
ads brief, and emphasize the benefits of your product
or service to the user first.
10. Don't Forget About Bing Ads:
Sometimes Bing can get put on the backburner
because it isn't performing as well as AdWords
is for your account.
Fix that this January! Copy all of your latest
work over from AdWords to Bing Ads.
Not everything will work exactly the same, but
it makes sense to try them on both engines in
order to see what Bing can really do.
Ok that's it for Part 1 of "30 Ways to Outsmart the Competition in PPC",
stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3 coming to you over the next few days.
If you would would like some help with Adwords or some further
training on using The FREE Google Keyword Planner have a quick
look at This Blog Post. <==CLICK
Regards
-Jon
PS. I am TRULY grateful for YOU being one of my subscribers.
I don't say this enough but "Thank-You"