When Should You Optimize Your PPC Campaigns?

In a perfect world, advertisers would continually be optimizing their pay per click campaigns by tweaking their ad copy, removing underperforming keywords and add new keywords to the mix.

However, not many of us live in that perfect world and we tend to turn on an ad campaign then ignore it until we notice that conversions have dropped or the credit card charge reminds us that we should login and check things out.

And while we all know that we should be optimizing our campaigns, how frequently should we be checking and tweaking things? Once a day? Once a week? Once a month? ::Cough:: never?

Well, unless your role in the business is strictly doing pay per click, chances are good that with all the other hats that fall on a regular "SEO/SEM" webmaster, that you currently fall in the range of once a month and never... but I will give you a hint, that isn't really the right answer ;)

How often?

First off, optimizing too frequently can have just the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve. Optimizing a campaign that has only seen 5 clicks won't really give you the kind of data you need to make an educated guess on what the tweak, unless you ended up having 25,000 impressions to get those 5 clicks. And if you did, that is a good sign that you might want to consider either scrapping it and starting over or breaking it down into more manageable campaigns.

But generally, aim for at least 100 ad clicks before you start tweaking things around. That said, if you burn through 100 clicks in a half hour, you might want to look at daily totals instead and start optimizing from there. But here are some other things to also consider aside from the “every 100 clicks” rule of thumb.

Updated product or information

If you are selling products, has a new product or updated version of a popular product been released? You don't want to be left behind and your competitors getting all the clicks because it looks like you are selling an older model, while your competitors already have their ad copy updated with the latest. Likewise, if you are selling a service, you want to make sure that your ad copy is updated to be as relevant as possible in the current market conditions.

Market shift

All it takes is an Oprah mention, a popular YouTube video or something to hit the news and your keyword terms could suddenly be descended upon by hundreds of thousands of people, so you want to make sure your ad copy is targeting that new audience and tweak on the fly.

Likewise, with the current economic downturn, an ad copy that focuses on your product being a "fun and pricy toy" might need to be reworked to eliminate any references to it being categorized into the budget area that many people are cutting back on, and instead focusing the ad copy on the "must have" aspect instead. So anytime there is a shift in your market area, look at your ads from that particular market area, and see if anything needs changing in order to reach that audience successfully.

Drop in conversions

If you suddenly notice a drop in your PPC conversion rate, it is definitely time to go optimize and figure out why it is happening. Did a competitor come and bid slightly higher than you and take your carefully edited ad copy? Is someone offering a much better deal for what you are offering? Was there an influx of traffic coming in through a specific set of poorly converting keywords that skewed things? Did you lose traffic on your best converting keywords because you are getting outbid? These are all things that can be optimized through bidding, keyword removals and increasing spend on the best converting keywords.

Seasonal

If your ad campaigns are seasonal, they will definitely need some pretty defined optimization. When the season is over, you will want to either pause your campaigns until the next season, or drop those bid prices down.

And yes, plenty of people do forget to do this, so take advantage of the ad scheduling feature that allows you to include a stop date. For many seasonal campaigns, it is often better to stop ad spend completely if you think you might forget, than burn through a massive budget during a time of year when conversions are traditionally much lower. Not to mention that you may need to change ad copy to be less seasonal specific if you plan to continue running them.

Periodically checking landing pages

I know, many of you think this should be a no brainer, and in theory, it is! But when was the last time you actually checked to make sure your ad's destination URL actually served up what you are expecting it to? It just takes a short time to do some quick double checking of landing pages, especially if your site is served dynamically. You don't want to be spending money on clicks that send people to a 404 page because the dev team forgot to mention to the PPC team that they changed some URLs. And yes, while in a perfect world those old links would redirect to the new ones, in reality, that doesn't always happen! And there have been plenty of ads I have clicked on that have led me to error or 404 pages.

So next time you are thinking about your woefully neglected ad campaigns and knowing you need to start optimizing better, keep these tips in mind so you know when you should be optimizing to maximize your campaign conversions and overall revenue.

Thanks for reading!

Jen Slegg - JenSense