When pay per click management stalls to a halt as your PPC account matures you need to decide what the next steps are. The best course of action is to develop an optimisation cycle. This will encourage you to continue to develop your accounts, optimising the site and your campaigns. It also makes sense to always concentrate on a selection of specific variables. Take a methodical approach to optimising your accounts and take time to analyse results.
Step one – consolidating your standard pay per click management tasks
Initially look at your PPC accounts concentrating on the elements that you are familiar with. Develop your keywords, test bids, ads and destination URLs, update your PPC campaign settings and introduce any untested technologies that are available to you. In essence you begin with those elements you should tackle already. At this point many PPC managers start to struggle looking for where to go next.
Step two – conversion optimisation
The next port of call is to come away from the PPC accounts and look at your conversions. Look at website optimisation by starting with some analytics. Gain a good picture of how your target audience interacts with the website. Look at the multi-channel picture also. You need to have a good knowledge of how these same searchers relate to your other web marketing initiatives including organic search.
One of the most important elements to this analysis is to highlight problems and then fix them. Looking at PPC traffic test various landing pages and on that basis make changes that will enhance the success of the account. Identify areas that are not working in organic search and set up PPC landing pages instead.
You can create great stability of traffic volumes this way and will start to see your account develop. It also allows you to gain a handle on the affect that these changes and tweaks make to the overall success of the campaign. Once this second phase has been completed you will find that you are back to the beginning of the cycle. You can then begin with all the step one tasks again as these will now have become relevant once more. There may be new technologies again once you reach this stage which can again be incorporated and tested. By now you will be optimising a new updated version of your website starting the whole process again.
By flowing from one step to the other and using the optimisation cycle to keep you focused on development and improvement will ensure you are constantly striving for success. Over time you will develop knowledge of what delivers top results and will find the journey on this cycle much more natural and intuitive. You may also find that you will be working at any one time at different points along the cycle for different campaigns. If you keep working on pay per click manageent and steer clear of maintenance mode your accounts will always look good.
At Click Consult we offer advice with pay per click management and all aspects of web marketing.