Effective PPC management demands persistence, creativity, and discipline. The following steps should help strengthen your campaigns and help to determine and meet your ROI goals (via NVI Solutions).
1. Keywords
Regularly adding new keywords to your ad groups will help you capitalize on new or missed traffic. Useful tools for this are KeywordDiscovery or the Google Keyword Tool. Google Analytics will reveal the true referring queries that trigger your ads when using broad match keywords. Balance your recent keyword additions by adding new negative match terms to eliminate potentially wasteful clicks and to keep your conversion cost in check.
2. Testing
Always run more than one ad text at once and test new ads against your control ad and eliminate the poor performers. Be sure to check the statistical significance of your data (e.g. with the split ad testing tool) before you make any decision on what to eliminate. Test your landing page with Google Website Optimizer - a tool for doing split A/B and multivariate testing of landing pages. Verify the content of both landing page and ad text to see if they match - a searcher may quickly leave your site if the landing page they hit doesn't contain information similar to what they saw in your ad.
3. Analytics
Check your web analytics software for information on bounce rates and page view times to determine the performance of each landing page. Google Analytics can also give you other helpful data like geo-localization, funnel tracking, site overlay, and what position results in the cheapest conversion for your PPC ad.
4.Tracking
Keep track of your campaign. AdWords has the Change History Tool which allows you to see changes made to your account over time, but you should still keep your own independent log, especially if you are advertising across other search publishers like Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft adCenter.
5. Competition
Closely monitor your data and take the necessary steps to adjust your ad ranking to outsmart competition. Besides increasing your bids, you should revise your ad text or add different match types or variations of these same competitive keywords to your ad groups. Keep an eye on the prices and keywords competitors are bidding on using services like AdGooroo.
6. Updates
Stay informed of advertising policy updates by subscribing to the newsletters or RSS feeds of the PPC publishers that you advertise with, like Google’s recent update to their ad text trademark policy, to be better prepared for any fluctuations in CPC or conversion rate as a result of such changes, and stay informed of releases of ad tools and services.
7. Calculate
Forecasting ROI on PPC by calculating monthly spend, conversion rate, cost per click, and average sale using a PPC ROI calculator will help you know what kind of ROI you are going to get from pay-per-click campaigns.
