Just in case you missed the “Managing Big, Complicated PPC Campaigns,” webinar featuring David Szetela, (pronounced za-tell-uh), I have provided a quick recap of David’s tips and guidelines here.
What consists of a big and complicated PPC account you ask? You have 10,000+ keywords, dozens to thousands of ad groups, you’re managing your account on multiple search engines, you have multiple placement and keyword targeted campaigns and you’re not currently using any third party tools to help you manage your account.
Challenges of managing a large PPC account:
- When managing your large PPC campaigns do any of the following challenges ring a bell?
- Planning & Structure
- Ad group construction – keywords & ads
- Making global changes
- Tracking changes by multiple team members
- Reporting to clients
- Cross-engine campaign migration
- Bid price management
These are just a few common challenges PPC advertisers face when trying to accomplish making changes to their larger accounts.
Planning is critical:
David suggests planning is an essential part of creating a successful ‘large’ PPC account. When planning your campaigns keep the following tips in mind:
- Defining your customers and developing personas
- Grouping together different products or services your client offers
- Building keyword ‘bucket’ lists
- Assign your ad groups according to your personas and groupings of products & services
When ad group planning being very specific and targeted with your keyword groupings is extremely important. The goal, (almost) every keyword should be in your ad says David. This serves a dual purpose. The customer is more likely to click on the ad if the keyword is present and the keyword can also be bolded which can make your ad text stand out more among competitors.
He also mentions that you should be very careful with dynamic keyword insertion especially with larger ad groups. If you have too many keywords in an ad group dynamic keyword insertion can make your ad text look funny and not perform well says David.
Your keyword and ad theme should carry through to the landing page. This may be an obvious one but take another look at all of your keywords in your ad group. Do they all carry through to your landing page or do just your top 5?
Utilize Adwords Editor, it’s FREE!
Using Adwords editor is amazingly fast and easy to build out campaigns and making larger changes to your account. If you have your account campaigns and ad groups in a master spreadsheet you can easily copy and paste them into Adwords editor. If you have multiple campaigns or ad groups that are identical, but perhaps have just a few differences, you can copy and paste an entire campaign or ad group within Adwords editor and make your changes using the search and replace feature. This allows for making super fast edits within larger accounts which saves you time. I love Adwords editor mainly because it’s fast but also it gives you a great birds-eye view of your account which makes it easier to manage.
Tracking Changes and change logs:
David also mentions you should use the Adwords Change history tool which allows you to see who has made exactly what change and when. This way if multiple people are managing one large account, you can determine with each login who is making a specific change.
Reporting internally and externally:
David emphasizes using templates and macros for regular reporting. He also recommends using the graph features that Adwords and Yahoo allows you show your clients. You can have your saved reports generate on a specific day of the week, plus you can have them emailed to you or a client to save time.
Migration from search engine to search engine
This is one of David’s best tips I thought. When managing a larger PPC account it makes sense to create the master account in Google first using Adwords editor, then downloading all of your campaigns and ad groups directly into yahoo using Yahoo’s ‘Convert third party campaigns’ feature. Back in January I wrote a post on how to convert Google campaigns and upload them into Yahoo.
Bid Management tip:
David’s recommends not to use separate bids for each individual keywords, but to bid at the ad group level which makes bidding less time consuming and risky.
In conclusion, the webinar gave very specific tips and examples on how to achieve success when managing larger PPC accounts. David has posted a link to this webinar for anyone to view at any time. Thanks for the great content David!
