What is a good daily & weekly routine for PPC management?

[krisgosser]

Would anyone like to share some insight regarding what daily and weekly activities a manager of several PPC campaigns would do?

Specifically, I'm curious what what you look for every morning, and what assessments you do once a week.

There is a lot of talk—blog posts on the web, Q&A in here, tutorials on dozens of sites—about strategies for creating SEM PPC campaigns. But I haven't found any good resources what type of cadence a manager should have an what activities they should be doing on a daily/weekly basis.

I find it really interesting that the long-term success of PPC campaigns is the continual, iterative steps one takes to constantly optimize and understand. Yet, there isn't much discussion or knowledge sharing about it.

Thanks for any input!

[john4math]

First, I work in-house managing our PPC accounts, and it's only part of my job.  We have a fairly sizable account in terms of spend, campaigns, and keywords, so I imagine it's similar to auditing several smaller accounts.

I usually check every morning to see how everything went the day before.  Nothing too in depth.  If I have new campaigns or ad groups, I check in on them every day for a month or so to see how they're converting, and if I need to make any tweaks or adjustments to any bids or settings.  Basically, I make sure that things are running smoothly!  Some things that can make this easier (in Adwords) are automated rules and labels.

On Mondays, I like to go in and see how everything went the week before.  Pretty much the same thing as my daily spot check, but over a week long duration.  I'll also check things like last 30 days for smaller spending campaigns to make sure we're seeing some conversion activity.

I run lots of reports monthly.  It takes me more than a day to get through all of them.

[krisgosser]

Thanks for the reply, Jordan!

Follow up question: when you say you want to "make sure that things are running smoothly!" — what specifically are you referring to? Could you expand any more on specific activities you do that tie to that statement?

[john4math]

Sure!  The #1 thing I'm on the hunt for is spend without conversions.  If this is a new campaign or ad group, I'll adjust the max CPC.  If I suspect something else is a foot, I might check to see if a particular keyword is not converting or needs a CPC adjustment, or check the search query report (or placement report for display network campaigns) for negative keywords that might be causing the issue.  If I can't find anything, and changing the CPC didn't help, I may have to accept that the idea didn't pan out and delete it.

If I happen to notice a CTR looks low as compared to other ad groups in a campaign, I might try testing new ad copy for it.  A lot of times that can help bring up the CTR.

For new campaigns, I'll tweak the campaign settings when appropriate.  One example of this was testing Google's in-app ad targeting that they recently released.  I picked a few types of apps that are relevant to our site, and started running ads.  My site isn't super mobile-friendly, but works well on tablets, so when it started to spend a bit and wasn't converting, I stopped targeting mobile devices and focused only on tablets.  When that continued to spend and not convert well enough, I changed it to target only tablets on wifi, since our site has a lot of back and forth between the browser and our server, and 3G can be slow sometimes.

Other times if I'm geotargeting the US, and the campaign is doing awesome, I'll give it a few more countries, like Canada and the UK, and continue adding countries as they convert well.

Hope that helps!  Diagnosing issues is one of the many fun parts of PPC.

[EugeneF]

Daily tasks:

1)  Looking for things that are broken.

2)  Making sure changes made the day before are functioning as expected.

Most other tasks are weekly tasks.  This is because it takes a certain amount of data to make decisions.

1. negative keyword review from broad match searches

2. split test ad review

3. new exact match keywords from broad match clicks.

Other days can be used to create new add groups.  This can be based on new products/services and splitting ad groups up that have become larger than needed.

This list is just the basics.