The Complete 12-Step Morning Routine of a Successful PPC Manager
If you want to stay top of your PPC game, the best place to start is with a morning check in to start the day as you want to continue – organised.
Why Have The Morning Routine?
Any successful PPC manager wants their team to have the right grasp on what’s happening with their paid search accounts each and every day. To do that, they need you to get the right information to make informed decisions.
You definitely want to know what’s happened to your accounts over the last 24 hours – find out what your wins and losses are and make changes (if necessary) to keep your ROI.
React to any changes – lots can happen in a day, so a check in early in the morning helps you stay on top of critical decisions – especially if you’ve just launched a new campaign.
The 12-Step Morning Routine
1. Watch Anything That’s Brand New
The initial few days or hours of a campaign are often the most critical, especially for ad groups and keywords. Watch these carefully so you can respond swiftly if there are any issues.
2. Add Negatives Constantly
When you’re working with big clients who have clicks in the hundreds of pounds range, you can’t afford to let poor keywords slip through. Daily negations are critical to keeping the keywords relevant – without them, you’re simply wasting money.
3. Identify Fluctuations
Often things can happen within a company that you’re not aware of as a PPC manager – so if you see large fluctuations in ad spend from what the data tells you should be happening, it can indicate something is wrong internally with the client/company.
One way to get to the bottom of it quickly is by reaching out to the client or other team members if you’re in-house and finding out what the issue is. For example, if a client has suffered a PR crisis, then there would be a big fluctuation in branded terms. If this isn’t done daily, then you just wouldn’t know and therefore couldn’t react.
4. Check Ad Spend
This one may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how few do this. You have to ensure the budget is on track each day in order to hit the monthly target, do this in the morning each day and you can adjust as you need to without having any worrying surprises.
5. Read AdWords Errors
AdWords account alerts/errors are easy to ignore, especially when it sends you silly ones – but within these alerts can be nuggets of useful information that could cause your campaign to grind to a halt.
If you negated keywords that are impeding traffic, you might never know unless you read the alerts – so at least try and briefly skim them each day.
6. Track Your Leads
Start your morning off with a win! If you’ve pulled in any new leads from the day before, this is something you can check on a daily basis and then follow up with the client to make sure your numbers match up.
7. Follow the Performance of Your Channels
Find out how your PPC channel is performing in comparison to the other channels you’ve got (Organic, Social, Referral etc.). To do this, go to Google Analytics, head to Conversions = Goals = Overview and select ‘Source/Medium’. Doing this is a great morning motivator for competitive teams and will give you an early indication of how good your PPC campaign is so far.
8. Check Outliers
To ensure everything is normal, go into your AdWords dashboard and under the Campaigns tab sort by highest or lowest total campaign spend to see if there are any outliers. If the spend is usually quite high on a given campaign, check the search query report to see if it was a busy day or if you need to start negating keywords (check number 3 for more ideas).
9. Lose the Non-Performers
When a campaign, ad group or keyword isn’t working for a campaign and not producing any sales or leads, this is usually an indication that there’s something wrong. Notably, this happens at the start of a campaign but can happen in other situations too.
The rule is this – once the campaign, ad group or keyword is nearing the non-performance threshold (the edge of where you’re comfortable spending money on it) then we dig into Google Analytics to see if there are any assisted conversions. If not, then we pause that.
10. Get An Hawk’s Eye View
Go to your AdWords dashboard = campaigns = dimensions tab to view a longer time frame of your campaign performance. You can see here where conversions dropped off due to a problem with the website or tracking tag.
11. Verify Ad Positions
Are you ads being shown in a position in the search engine results page that you expect? Check the campaigns tab in the AdWords dashboard to find out – everyone has a different target, but I typically don’t like to go below position 2. If you want more information on how Google’s changes affected the SERP, please check out this Marketing Must Know blog post.
12. Exclude irrelevant Google Display Network Sites
Another basic step is to monitor and exclude any web pages that are not relevant to what you’re targeting on the Google Display Network. This will stop your ads from appearing where you don’t want them to.
Implementation
No two PPC accounts are the same, so when you need to put together your own routine be aware that you many need to add some extra steps based on your own preferences.
But complete this routine every day and you’ll be more organised and feel a sense of accomplishment throughout the day.