What to Do When You Inherit a PPC Campaign - with Kevin Lee

Since PPC has been around more than 10 years, it is increasingly likely that the person currently assigned to a PPC campaign wan't the person who set it up originally. Typically, in campaigns that have been around a while, nobody has done any clean-up lately.

As a campaign evolves, the campaign structure and keyword structure becomes less than optimal. People just continue to add on without changing the original structure. Often a new keyword doesn't get added to an existing group, but becomes a new ad group or new campaign. Nobody's looking at the whole picture.

The Google AdWords Editor can be a very useful tool in getting a company's PPC campaigns integrated and organized. It dumps everything into a tool on your desktop where you can see things much more clearly. You can move things around with a drag-and-drop approach. Now you can combine keyword groups as well as singulars and plurals easily. Once you've finished reorganizing, you can upload everything back into the web interface.

Benefits of reorganized ad groups include ease of campaign maintenance, removal of duplicate keywords with different bids. It's easier to monitor what's going on and improve your Quality Score with more relevant ads in your ad groups.

While you're reorganizing, check to make sure your ad copy is releavnt to the keyword. A Better Quality Score saves you money in lower bid prices.

Also be looking for appropriate match types. Often older campaigns were set up the default Broad Match, which is less than ideal. With Broad Match sometimes Google may show your ad again for a different search that may not be really relevant.

While you're reviewing, you might want to run multiple ad copy tests to see what ad copy works the best. This might change over time.

Checklists are available to outline the things to look for to optimize your PPC campaigns.

Kevin Lee is the CEO of Didit, a pioneering search marketing firm that manages PPC search, auction-based display ads, for clients that range from $20,000 in ad spend per month and up. This interview was recorded on August 16, 2011 at the SES Conference in San Francisco.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Kevin Lee
• Didit
• PPC
• Paid Search
• AdWords
• adCenter
• clean-up
• structure
• campaign
• keywords
• ad groups
• AdWords Editor
• maintenance
• Web Marketing
• Ralph Wilson
• Quality Score
• Broad Match
• ad copy
• testing
• checklists