The Importance of Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns: How To Do It Correctly

 Leaving your PPC campaigns on automatic optimization is just what most PPC platforms suggest. But is that recommended? Are your ad spends begin best utilized by the automatic/smart campaigns? Do you trust the automatic campaigns enough? I bet these are questions that show up every now and then in your thought patterns about your PPC campaigns. As professional PPC managers, our agency manages multiple accounts and we never let it run unsupervised on automatic mode. The results we get to support our choice to intervene and take as much control as possible whenever the data recommends it.

The Importance of Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns

So, what are the advantages of having automated campaigns, and, even if you have, should you be switching them off? Better conversion: Let’s say, you’ve optimized your e-commerce site as per your budget, the best way to sell your products would be to focus on conversions on each e-commerce listing page: an advert in one, a banner in the other. These two ads convert approximately 80% of your user’s clicking. Have you ever thought why? While one ad and banner convert 60% and above, the second ad, which you believe is more valuable to the user, only converts 20-25% of the users. Because of this, the user that has clicked on the advert that shows in the 1st position, loses interest, almost totally, with the second advertisement.

The Advantages of Manual Optimization

To get even more control over the account we always have to intervene manually. We usually do it by linking it to an account that runs very similar to the account we want to manage. With a click of a button, we can validate the data, or modify the campaigns. We can even tweak the parameters so that it's very, very precise. Using auto-optimization is so harmful because there are no checks and balances. You are working with an unknown tool that blindly runs without seeing where the ad spend is being misused. I know from personal experience that using smart algorithms has helped us avoid overspending and prevent issues, but a ton of the issue is just because we didn't follow all the rules and didn't exercise some of the variables to make the automated system more accurate.

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaigns Manually

Usually, we take control of a campaign on a 1:1 basis. That is the best way to manage your PPC campaigns. This will help us to make improvements to campaign performance and make them more efficient. By analyzing the data provided by these campaigns, we can make focused optimization interventions that will improve your campaigns in all dimensions. Optimizing PPC Campaigns “By The Book” In order to take full control of your PPC campaigns, you have to understand the basic principles of optimization and execute them correctly. Each optimization step has a specific purpose and all of them should be taken seriously. If you don’t do all of the below points, you may end up making a mess of your campaign(s) and getting unwanted or undesired results.

Conclusion

I still don't recommend leaving it on automatic. I haven't figured it out and I wouldn't dare think so, but there are some reasons why it's better to leave it on manual mode. When optimizing your campaigns, follow the seven rules below. 1. You are running unsupervised campaigns If you look into it, in most situations you don't have visibility to a campaign's success. You have no idea how it's doing. You don't have access to the monitoring features offered by most platforms which are required in order to make decisions about that. This is the main problem and your biggest chance for missing a reason why your ads were ineffective and what to do about it.