Spring Cleaning: Performance Improving Updates for Your Microsoft adCenter Campaigns

The sun is shining, the birds are singing and you've got that nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach again.  You know it's only a matter of time before the legions of dust bunnies that are taking up residence in the forgotten nooks and crannies of your home will start making plans to launch an offensive strike.  You've seen them peeking out from under your bed or hitching a ride on Fluffy's fur.  You've got to get them before they get you... it's time to start spring cleaning. 

The same can be said for your adCenter campaigns, though instead of dust bunnies, your enemies can range from underperforming ads and keywords to outdated bids to dead links that weren't updated after a web site revamp.  While most search engine marketing (SEM) professionals adhere to a regular campaign clean-out regimen, there are scores of small business owners and traditional marketing folks who sometimes take a set-it-and-forget-it approach to SEM once they've got their campaigns performing within the range of success metrics they're looking for.  If this sounds like you, below are some steps you can take to breathe new life into your campaigns.

Delete Poor Performing Ads and Keywords

Assuming you've already addressed notifications of editorial disapprovals, take a minute to run ad and keyword performance reports in adCenter.  This is the quickest and easiest way to get a glimpse into what's working in your account and what isn't.  After you open your report and sort by whichever headers are most valuable to you (for example, impressions for a branding campaign or clicks for a sales campaign), you'll see a clear progression from top performers down to the keywords and ads that are bogging down your performance.  Delete or pause these.

I know, I know... it's better to hang on to a keyword even if it's only brought in 2 clicks in a month, right?  Wrong.  One of the factors that helps inform how adCenter views the quality of your ads is tied in to overall campaign performance.  If you have a high ratio of poor performers in comparison to those that do well, your overall campaign performance is going to suffer, which can have a detrimental effect over time.  Keep this in mind as you review your ads and keywords and toss those poor performers out with the dust bunnies!

Keep Bids Competitive

This is one of the most common pitfalls of the set-it-and-forget-it approach.  You send your campaigns live and keep an eye on them for the first month; you're consistently securing a favorable position that's in line with your return-on-invesement (ROI) goals, so you feel confident in just letting your campaign run and walk away to focus your attention on more pressing issues.  Then you check back in a month or two later and find that you've completely dropped off the first page of results on Bing.  What happened?

You were outbid by competitors, probably several times.  To fix this, take a look at those performance reports and do a few searches for your best performing keywords... notice where they appear in relation to your competitors.  Everyone who shows up above you has put in a higher bid.  Granted, you won't know what they're bidding any more than you know what the highest bidder on Ebay put in to beat you out of the auction for that spiffy Bee Gees lunch box you've had your eye on, but at least you have an idea how many positions you need to move up to be competitive again.  Try out different bid updates until you settle on a position that's to your liking.

Check Your Links

While you'll get an editorial notification from adCenter if you submit a destination URL that doesn't go to a valid page when first setting up your campaigns, if you make updates to your web site after your campaigns have cleared the editorial review (and forget to update your destination URL links in adCenter), you could be wasting a lot of money on clicks where users are being sent to a page that doesn't exist anymore.  If there have been any changes to your web site since you sent your adCenter campaigns live, it's a good idea to double check all destination URL links to make sure you're sending potential customers to a live page that has the information you intended for them to see.

In addition to making sure there are no 404 errors waiting for clickers of your ad, you should also make sure your landing pages are as relevant to your ads and keywords as possible.  Again, if you've made any updates to your web site, make sure those changes don't affect the relevancy between what your ad says users will find on your site and what's actually there.  Always be as specific as possible to ensure the best possible chance of a click turning into a conversion.

I hope this post has been helpful for getting your spring cleaning ducks in a row, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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