This article first appeared on agencyside as A Day in the Life of a PPC Manager where Mike Swan, Director of Search Marketing Strategy at Liberty Interactive Marketing is a guest columnist as well as a panel speaker on topics for search marketing strategies.

Often when asked how I spend my day I answer “living the dream”. While I sometimes get a chuckle from those who are also fans of the movie “Wedding Crashers”, I usually get a look of bewilderment. While I get much satisfaction from this, sometimes there is an unlucky soul that asks me to elaborate on what dream I am living. It is those people who actually enjoy the “geek speak” to whom I am dedicating this post.

Professional PPC management has two facets; it is one quarter creativity and 3 quarters creatively analyzing data. Those with no aptitude for numbers need not apply; there is little chance for success without a highly analytical mind. Efficiency and processes are of paramount importance, especially as the number and complexity of the accounts increases.

Here are 5 things that must be attended to on a regular basis. How regularly depends on 1) traffic of the account and 2) industry.

1) Are All Systems Go – Rule number one, know what campaigns should be running and which should not. Realizing that a credit card was declined or the account balance has been depleted a week after it happens is never a glorious moment. Avoid it. I review two types of reports every morning. Both are Account Reports that contain the results for all clients. The first is the month to date. This gives me an overview of how the accounts are performing, what my budget utilization is and serves as my quick reference guide for broad inquiries on the health of the account either to the client or a team member. The other is the Yesterday report. This tells me what happened the day before, so if I see any weird results, like no traffic, it allows me to identify a possible issue within 6 hours or so of it happening. This can be a lifesaver.

2) Watch your Positioning – Know where your sweet spot is and manage to it. I also make sure the account average is in a narrow band. If it starts dropping, is it one aspect of the account or is it account-wide? This can help you identify competitive trends or Quality Score shifts before the account train wrecks.

3) Utilize Search Query Data – I like to keep a lot of broad match terms in my accounts to keep a good pipeline of search query data. This gives you a look at search volume, it helps you identify terms that you may want to go after. It also can show you some glaring holes in your campaign in both the opportunity sense and the negative sense. Negative keywords that is. This report will save your client many thousands of dollars of wasted traffic when you see some of the undesirable terms you are showing for. This is also a liability protector. The last thing you want is your client stumbling upon their own ad showing for an unsavory search. (Not to say clients ever search for unsavory things).

4) Budget Utilization – Due to the nature of PPC, there is no precise guarantee that you will spend your exact budget; in fact the guarantee is you won’t. What many don’t realize is that when you make a campaign budget change in Google, it is not a sophisticated system. It was explained to me by our Google rep (Do you like how I passed the buck on this one?) that when you make a budget change the system assumes it was made in the middle of the day, so the system will try to spend 50% of the newly set daily budget. What does that mean? Basically, if you make the change early in the day, you will spend less than you expect to, and if you make the change late in the day you can potentially spend quite a bit more than you expected. While over an extended timeframe it all evens out, if you are trying to make a significant end of month adjustment you could get burned. Moral of the story, watch your budget allocation.

5) Landing Pages – Is Conversion Code Tracking? – Often times we don’t have access to our clients’ web hosting server and more often server protocol is not in place, therefore leaving you vulnerable to getting tracking code overwritten, removed, deleted or your landing page throwing a Page Not Found error. Enter mayhem and dollars lost. Daily, check that your landing pages are up and running and that your conversion code is tracking (and still present on the page). If you don’t, this will hurt your bottom line, your credibility and your Quality Score.

This list is far from exhaustive, and does not address how to manage and improve PPC campaigns, just some of the things that you need to stay on top of.

We provide professional Pay Per Click Management Services, contact us today.

photo credit: fanginhoon

We wrote a similar article a few years ago on Why Aren’t My Ads Showing, and most recently we were asked to write a similar article for agencyside to help other agencies set client expectations for paid search. We’ve tweaked the original article a bit for our customers to provide a bit of insight and understanding into the workings of paid search from our perspective.

We often are asked “Why Aren’t My Ads Showing?”, so we are here today to provide a bit of insight into that question. There are several main factors that influence ad delivery. This list is not exhaustive, but it will provide you with knowledge to understanding the answer to the question.

1) Campaign structure – Remember you are paying per click, and generally have some sort of budget limitation. For example, let’s say you have a keyword with an average cost per click of $1 and a daily account budget of $100. This means you will receive 100 clicks per day on average. Because the paid search venues must stay within a narrow range of your budget your ad frequency will be directly related to your click through rate. If you have an average click through rate of 10% it will take 1,000 impressions to exhaust your budget. So if there is search volume of 5,000 per day for your keyword, your ad will show 20% of the time. Now consider if you have 50 to 100 keywords in your campaign all sharing the same $100 budget.

2) Quality Score is technically Google nomenclature, but all search venues have a method for determining something similar. Intended to be the great equalizer this determines what position your ad will show and at what cost relative to the other advertisers. This is what prevents us from buying our way into top placement for more competitive terms. Higher Quality Score means higher positioning, lower cost per click, and often greater frequency – all good things. The factors that affect Quality Score are well documented, but basically if you aren’t relevant, have poor ad copy or have some technical issues with your landing page you aren’t showing.

3) Age of Campaign – New campaigns can start off slow while the search venue is getting an understanding of the click through and user behavior relative to the account. This generally takes a few days depending on the size of the account. Larger accounts will take longer since there are more variables to assess. If you have a large account with a small budget, good luck. Better to start small and expand from there as the campaign picks up steam. See #1 for reasoning on this.

If you have a mature account that is losing visibility it may be time to reconfigure, redesign, or reassess to find another approach. Hopefully, you have some sort of ongoing optimization involving testing of campaigns elements in place so this won’t happen. Always watch for loss in visibility after a miscalculated major change in landing page design, site redesign or if you see your average cost per click increase substantially. Even with an unlimited budget your ads still wouldn’t show for every search. That is just the way it is. Google offers a tool to help diagnose certain problems related to ad visibility in the impression share component of its reports. This can tell you how much visibility your campaign is missing based on budget limitations or quality score.

Every impression (every time your ad shows) that doesn’t get clicked is detrimental to the account in some way. “Googling” keywords every day to see if your ads are showing is costing money, even if you never click on a single one.

If you are interested in understanding if your campaigns are performing to their potential, let us know. We can provide an audit and consultation to help you maximize on every dollar spent. Contact us today.

This article first appeared on agencyside where Mike Swan, Director of Search Marketing Strategy at Liberty Interactive Marketing is a guest columnist as well as a panel speaker on topics for search marketing strategies.

Content Network is a Waste of Time and Money! Really, Are You Sure About That? I hear clients and Internet marketers alike make this statement as often as I hear the question “Why aren’t my ads showing?” but for now let’s discuss some best practices for advertising on the Content Network. It is not unlikely for us at Liberty Interactive Marketing to see content account conversions in the double digits, we recently managed a Gaming and Hospitality account with an average conversion rate of 11.11% on over 1,700 conversions. So we’re not shy in sharing some of our best practices with you.

Five Best Practices to Setting Up and Managing a Content Campaign:

1. Do not run Search- and Content-targeting in the same campaign. This is far and away the most important rule. When you create a campaign in AdWords it defaults to include all 3 networks (Google Search, Search Partners + Google and Content), make sure to separate them. If you are currently making this mistake, stop reading for a moment and turn off Content-targeting immediately.

2. Do not duplicate your Search campaign, run it on Content only, and call it a day. This is a reasonable place to start if you are in violation of #1 above, however, the job is not done. The key thing to remember is that while Search campaigns will give you performance metrics on a keyword basis, Content does not. You only have adgroup visibility, (an adgroup is a logical grouping of related keywords). So you don’t have a way of knowing if one or more of your keywords is making or breaking your adgroup.

3. Campaign construction is crucial to Content-network success. You want to make sure your campaign structure is as focused as possible. This means more adgroups than you would use for a Search campaign. You don’t have the same Quality Score considerations with a Content campaign so duplicates and plurals are acceptable. Also, keep the number of keywords per adgroup small. We have found the most success with 5-10 keywords per adgroup. Every campaign is different, so testing is important.

4. Content targeting algorithm matches content on the page to the keywords in the adgroup so, while “foreclosures real estate phoenix” may make a great keyword in a Search campaign, it is very hard to use in a sentence, so it is unlikely it will match to many content pages. So with that said, long tail keywords are not usually a great idea in a Content campaign. Using this example, you would be better served creating an adgroup with 3 keywords – “foreclosures”,”real estate” and “phoenix”. This combination will give the algorithm many more opportunities to match your ad to desirable content.

5. Google Keyword Tool is still recommended to find your initial keywords but it will just get you started. The Keyword Tool is primarily geared towards Search, so it merely serves as a jumping off point. If you already have a Search campaign running you can use that as a resource too. One methodology involves looking at the top performing keywords in your Search campaign (or promising ones from the Keyword Tool) and then looking at the organic results for each of these terms. Take the top 20-30 results and compare their content. Understand what phrases are commonly used and identify keyword themes. Sound like a lot of work? It is, but it is the difference between a mediocre campaign and a case study. I recommend building a tool to do this for you. We did.

These are some of the best practices to get you pointed in the right direction as you delve into the fascinating world of Content-targeting. But before you go hog-wild reconfiguring and re-launching, remember Content is not appropriate or profitable in all cases. Make sure you have a good understanding of the goals of the campaign or hire us to manage your campaigns.

Read the full unedited version here.

Image credit: Google Display Network