Paid search is one of the most effective ways to increase revenue online, but proper management of PPC campaigns can be very consuming time. Our team at JBi decided to publish our three part series on paid search automation to help make your campaign management job easier.
Understand that the Manual Process is Not Going to Last Long
Most digital agencies today manage their paid search campaigns manually. The process of keyword research, keyword expansion, campaign tracking and auditing can take a lot of time, especially when you have campaigns using thousands of keywords. Instead, use this time to look for new product offerings and avenues for marketing.
Create a To Do Checklist
When you only have one campaign, you can spend all your time managing that campaign. But with multiple campaigns, you need to plan your work properly. Plan your to-do lists by day, week and month. For example, bid management needs to be done daily, but changing ad copy is something which can be done weekly. Organise your list campaign wise by using an excel sheet to track all of the tasks.
Set your email calendar to work for you. When you’re organised and know what deadlines are approaching in your calendar, they’re easier to automate. Create a list of deadlines, meetings, tasks or to-do’s set as reminders for the beginning of each month. This makes monitoring them easier as you’ll receive alerts that they need to be completed.
Manage your Keywords
Excel is a very powerful tool for generating keywords relevant to your products or services. Load one column with the basic keywords and the second with supplementary words. Then you just need to use the CONCATENATE function to generate all the possible keyword combinations. This function allows you to join two or more strings together. The image below indicates how this works.
There are also several keyword tools available apart from the Google Keyword Tool which you can use to manage your keywords.
Got ad copy? Write to character limits
Most of the search engines have limitations on the character limit for ad copy. Once again, Excel can come to your rescue. You can create a template in Excel using a character count formula which follows each line of text which needs to be written. Applying a filter to the top column of the chart allows you to see the word count and character limits for each one.
There are several automated bidding and reporting tools also available. One such set of tools is offered by Google which we will cover in our next article.
Once you start with automation, going from a largely manual paid search process to a software-driven automated approach, you will be able to see some impressive results.
If you still feel the need for a professional then you should contact a digital agency for managing your paid digital marketing campaigns. In part two, we’ll show you the next steps you need to know in the process of automating your Google Adwords campaign.
