PPC management can move at break-neck speed. A PPC campaign can see immediate results, and you can manage your campaign at this rate. This is truly remarkable. Never has a marketing tool of this power been unleashed where you can test your messaging, get real user responses, and adjust accordingly in almost real-time. However, I’ve learned with some campaigns that I need to take my time and grow the account the steadily over time, otherwise, I may not give the roots time to catch up to the limbs.
Back in January I decided that I needed to take a slow and steady approach with one of my clients. They wanted to see continual growth in their campaign but they understood that it takes time build a solid base of traffic. With this in mind, I set out to increase my traffic by 1-3% each month.
Now that it’s July and we’re over half way through the year, I can say that my plan has been successful thus far. My campaign has grown steadily at approximately 1.5% to 2% each month. No, I’m not shattering any records. But when you look at my year-to-date progress, I’ve grown this campaign by 15% since January. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Another aspect of this steady growth is that I’ve had to keep within my monthly budget. This budget hasn’t changed at all this year. My spending has even decreased slightly over the course of these 7 months:
How have I been doing this? There a few points in my strategy that I’ve been certain to accomplish every month.
- Daily budget management: Each campaign within this account hits its daily budget in both Google and Yahoo. I’ve been adjusting my budgets so that I devote more of my spend each month to my core keywords with a low CPC. I don’t need to adjust these budgets often, but I need to constantly monitor them to make sure the campaigns with the lowest CPCs are getting the most attention.
- Continued bid adjustments: Since I hit my budget everyday, this is an indicator that there is room to grow in this campaign. When I see this, I usually begin to lower bids. This way, my bid adjustments will allow me to generate as many clicks as possible from the daily budgets I have in place. Each month I’ve been lowering my bids by only between $.01 and $.04. Saving $.01 on your clicks may not seem like a lot, but like I said, if you keep adding it up, eventually you get somewhere.
- Ad text testing: Each month I write one new ad text per ad group. This way I’m continuously testing my message, increasing my click-through rate and this in turn helps with my Quality Score – and this also helps lower my CPC.
Sure, all of these tactics are pretty basic. And if I did this for just one month, I wouldn’t have seen much progress. But with a continued, steady effort I have grown this campaign organically. Remember, growing a PPC campaign is an organic process – take your time when you can.
