With everyone jumping into pay-per-click campaigns, it’s easy to forget the basics. If you get sloppy, you could end up spending a ton of money with little to show for it. Here are 15 things to remember when planning your campaign.
- Do you have your campaign settings set appropriately for your business? This includes daily budget, language, country, region, and ad distribution options.
- Is your campaign well labeled and organized logically?
- Have you figured out how to measure success? Sales? Leads?
- Where sales are infrequent, can you measure activities such as whether people requested more information, or whether they arrived at a certain page on your site?
- Do you have a plan for systematically testing ad copy?
- Are you following the editorial rules and other terms of service from Google, Yahoo, MSN, or others? Do you take a passive or active approach to disapprovals and other hurdles?
- Are your bids too high or too low?
- Do you have a reason for bidding high or low?
- Have you a plan for ongoing keyword discovery?
- If keywords are being persistently disabled, are you doing something to rectify the problem?
- Are you tracking ROI not just on your campaign in general, but on specific ad groups or keywords?
- Are you adjusting your campaign based on the ROI data you collect?
- Do you know how aggressive you want to be? Are you all about growth, all about profitability, or somewhere in between?
- Do you keep a consistent message from your listing through to the desired action on your website, in order to reinforce your brand?
- Is the path smooth, from clickthrough to the user leaving your site, so as not to annoy, confuse, or distract users from the main goal of your site?
When campaigns are managed in-house, they generally perform at a rate two to three times lower than when managed by outside consultants. I think this is simply due to the increased focus and experience of a paid marketing professional.
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