Originally posted in r/PPC on reddit.
Question
I was tasked a few months ago with managing quite a few ad accounts.
The status I got them in was borderline criminal. I have almost all of them now at the point of:
- Conversion tracking is accurate (lol)
- They are getting conversions (many rebuilt landing pages)
- Search query report is looking pretty clean
- I’ve been honing in my audiences
- For my accounts this past month my conversion rate was 16%
- Overall a 7% CTR
I’m contemplating where to go next to scale these cats. Intuitively, I feel like I have a healthy foundation.
As well (purely intuitively) I feel like keywords are where I should be focusing on. But I’m just kinda going with gut instinct here, e.g. if a keyword hasn’t made any conversions at all in the past 90 days, I pause it.
But, I feel like this is a somewhat amateur move (it was the first thing that came to mind). Of course I understand if you have a great method you might not want to share, but I would really be interested in some insight about this from an experienced ad person.
Not even necessarily exactly what to do but maybe even a way to think about optimizing keywords – I could be wrong but I really feel like where my accounts currently are, the gold is in figuring out how to take keyword optimization to the next level.
Thank you for reading and if you are willing to provide any insights that would be awesome.
Answer
Bread and butter of performance marketing:
- Profitability
- Volume
Everything should be dictated by profitability (unless it’s an awareness campaign!) – Google Ads & other related platforms are all money-printing machine until they’re not.
Our flowchart is very stupid because we only have one simple question we need to worry about:
Are we hitting the target?
Two possible outcomes:
1. If the answer to the question is Yes:
Is your client/boss okay with the current profit margin?
If Yes:
Work to increase the profit margin (= lower CPA)
If No:
Work to increase the volume (= more sales)
2. If the answer to the question is No:
Work to hit that target, tell them it may impact the volume of sales because you’ll be reducing bids or cutting low performing keywords.
Either outcome will help you decide what to do next.
Keyword, landing page optimisation, ad text, bids, new product — it’s all there, but you need to understand the priority for whoever you’re working for in order to move forward.
Recent example: I hit a target for my client the other day, and asked them whether they wanted to try and go lower or whether they are happy with the current situation (implying: deliver as many sales as possible within the target).
They asked me to try and go lower on CPA, we did, but the sales volume didn’t follow so we’re working back to increase volume. It doesn’t have to be a static game.
Things move, sometimes you make them move, sometimes your client wants them to move, sometimes they move by themselves. That’s what we’re here for.
Speak with your client/boss about the current situation, don’t forget to tell them you’ve done a good job and it’s now time to ask them how they would like to proceed not because you don’t know what to do, but because you could go many ways.
Good luck!
Maybe I should make a more visual version of this flowchart. I quite like how simple it is in our job to make decisions, sometimes.
Capitalism, ho!