Is There Such Thing As a 10 Minute PPC Workday?

We all have busy days where we seem to be running from the minute we get up, but as PPC managers, we can’t just ignore our campaigns for a day. There are many aspects of a campaign that have to be tweaked and worked with on a daily basis. Wouldn’t it be great if you could manage to take care of all the most important PPC tasks in 10 minutes? According to Melissa Mackey from Search Engine Watch, you can.

Of course, no good PPC manager is doing just 10 minutes of work a day, but on those days when work is piled up and you’re forced to squeeze it in, her “10-minute PPC workday” might just be able to help you keep all your basis covered.

It all starts with checking the stats on your top KPI. If conversions are your KPI, look at both your total conversions and cost per conversion. If you’re already doing this daily, you’ll be able to notice any anomalies immediately. Once you’ve spotted the outliers, you’ll spend the next nine minutes focusing on them.

The best step on fixing outliers is to pause the worse performers. Any ad group or keyword that has cost quite a bit but isn’t performing can be paused. You can re-enable it later when you have more time to focus in on the problem.

Next, you’ll want to check out your underperforming keywords. Whether they simply aren’t earning back the cost or maybe they just aren’t leading to conversions, you’ll want to see what keywords are dragging you down. The fastest method is to use in-line search query reports in Google to check the details of the keyword in question and create negative keywords directly in seconds.

Once that is over, we can move on to the positive things: top performing ad groups and keywords. Start with your best-performing ad groups (generating the most conversions at the lowest cost) and up the bids. Then, use AdWords editor to make any bulk bid increases on the best keywords. Keep it short, but tackle the most important and best few performers.

You will want to move on to quickly checking out your ad copy tests to see if you have any obvious winners, and try to replicate it by pasting it into your ad group a few times. The last couple minutes of actual work will be devoted to positive keyword research by running a quick search query report for your best performing keywords. Sort by conversions, and then add the best queries as positive keywords.

Once all is said and done, you’ll want to make notes for the next day. If you’ve kept yourself limited to 10 minutes, you’ll have noticed many issues you weren’t able to deal with at the moment, and you will probably have some questions to address. Jot down some quick notes while everything is fresh so that you’ll be able to tackle it all properly tomorrow.