Yesterday’s Heroview featured Amanda West-Bookwalter (Amanda_Westbook), where we discussed PPC Budget tips for the holiday season.
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PPC Hero: We are super excited to have you with us today Amanda! Thanks for joining us!
Amanda: Thanks for having me! I’m excited!
PPC Hero: Let’s start with you giving us a little more info about your background auditing PPC accounts.
Amanda: Well, I’ve headed up several paid account audits here @HanapinMarketing and been managing accounts for 1.5 years.
PPC Hero: Do you think budget allocation is any different during the holidays than the rest of the year?
Amanda: For sure! For both ecomm and lead gen, different products and services will be affected by the season. Give more budget to campaigns affected positively and less to negatively. Also, front load spend if your budget is capped for ecomm!
PPC Hero: Do you have a favorite method for identifying the best places to spend your money?
Amanda: Not really, just do a review of account history & current market research to combine historical data & predictions.
PPC Hero: Do you only do budget allocation based on current campaigns, or do you do restuctures to better allocate?
Amanda: Oh, good question! It depends how current structure is set up & what’s being affected by the season. If a few keywords are brining in most of the $ or negatively impacted stuff is in with positively impacted stuff, restructure to allow all the best stuff to get the most budget possible! Keep in mind that can affect quality scores, though, so be careful!
PPC Hero: Have you ever had just one keyword in one campaign so you could insure 100% impression share for it?
Amanda: I haven’t gone that far! I’ve done 1/ ad group. It makes sense if you have just a few keywords that have crazy ROAS & vol.
PPC Hero: How frequently do you look at your budget settings and strategies?
Amanda: Frequently! From Black Friday to right before Xmas can be a HUGE portion of ecomm annual revenue. Just half a day of mismanaging budget can affect the bottom line. That being said, your over arching strategy should be thought out and discussed with the all parties well ahead of time. You don’t want any last minute disagreements!
PPC Hero: How do you allocate budget on a yearly basis? Do you set your budget expectations that far out?
Amanda: I’ve never had budgets on an annual basis, but reviewing historical data in any account and search trends should help
PPC Hero: Why might you abandon a budget strategy? i.e. revert back to what you were doing.
Amanda: Results! We all plan based on the best data conclusions & predicitions, but real results can dictate change.
PPC Hero: Do you purposely pull spend back on specific days to keep money for better converting days?
Amanda: Great strategy if you know specific days will be bad, the problem comes with knowing. Review historical data!
PPC Hero: Where do you find out which days may be good and which may not?
Amanda: Like I said, any historical data from past seasons can be reviewed as well as search trend predictions.
PPC Hero: Are there any automated rules you use to do budget allocation?
Amanda: I prefer to do things manually, but you could use a rule that increases or decreases campaign budgets based on CPA!
PPC Hero: How do you determine when to cut things that are only kind of working to spend on what converts well?
Amanda: No question: if a campaign converts well above ROAS goal & is being limited & another campaign converts at a lower ROAS cut spend from the lower ROAS and expand that high ROAS budget!
PPC Hero: Do you plan to pull back budgets for lead generation clients for the last half of December?
Amanda: That really depends on the performance. Not all lead gen suffers, but if it does, cut down to what works the very best!
PPC Hero: Last question: How has this holiday season been compared to last?
Amanda: Better! This is across the board, really. More people online, a better economy, and new stuff like PLAs = more $$!!
PPC Hero: Well, that’s all from us. Do you have anything else you’d like to add, or does anyone have any questions?
Amanda: I hope all of you had a super successful holiday season, & either way: take LOTS of notes about what worked/ didn’t work or just what you wish you’d done differently. Then store those notes away for next year!
Thanks for joining us Amanda! We really appreciate you taking the time to drop some PPC knowledge on the Twitter-verse!
