This Checklist Reveals How You Can Save Money in Your PPC Account

I found this checklist in one infographics from word stream. The checklist is quite valuable and a recommend for anyone looking to stretch their PPC budget a little further. These tips will require a little more hard work than the average, but it’ll be well worth it when you see how much you’ve saved!

Here is the checklist of activities in that infographics:

• Add Negative Keywords [weekly]

Analyze your search query reports to identify terms that are triggering your ads, but are not truly relevant to your business. You can set these terms as negative keywords on an ad group, campaign or account-level basis.

• Add Long-Tail Keywords [weekly]

Longer, more specific keyword terms are typically less competitive & less costly than more generic terms. You can use keyword research tools to generate new, long-tail ideas.

• Review Keyword Match Types [weekly]

Broad match keywords generally bring a great amount of traffic that is not relevant quite often. Apply more restrictive match types like modified broad, phrase and exact. This way you can show your ads to more relevant users resulting in more clicks, conversions and high Quality Scores.

• Adjust Keyword Bids [weekly]

Analyze the performance of your keyword bids. If a keyword has a high CPA, consider reducing your bids. It may drop the ranking slightly, but your CPAs will also decrease considerably. If the term is in a low position with a high CPA, you’re likely overpaying for its poor performance. So lower down your bids and focus on improving Quality Score for that particular term.

• Pause Poorly-Performing Keywords [weekly]

It makes no sense to pay for keywords that produce poor results. Identify terms with high CPAs that produce few (or no) conversions. If you can’t fix them, nix them.

• Declare A/B Test Winners [monthly]

Revisit your A/B tests regularly to see whether you have sufficient data to declare statistical significance. When you do, remove the crappy version and give your winner more visibility.

• Break Out New Ad Groups [monthly]

As you add more and more keywords to your existing ad groups, the topics included become more varied and you’re forced to run more generic ads. Break them out into more specific, granular groupings and create highly-customized ad copy for each.

• Revise Landing Pages [monthly]

If you’re seeing low conversion rates, chances are that your landing pages need a refresh. Regularly QA landing pages to ensure they’re highly relevant to the keywords and ads that they’re associated with. If users can’t find what they need easily, they won’t convert.

• Review Device/Location/Time of Day Performance [monthly]

Drive into your campaign settings to segment your performance by device, location and time of day. You can then take action accordingly—by adjusting bids and budgets, copy and extensions.

• Create a Branded Campaign [one-time setup]

Branded terms often produce great performance; they’re cheap because competition is low and the associated traffic is highly-qualified because they know your brand already.

• Run a Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) Campaign [one-time setup]

With RLSA, you can create campaigns with ads that will only be triggered if a user is on your remarketing list and is searching with keywords that you are bidding on. Because these users are already aware of your brand, so these campaigns often produce high click-through and conversion rates, resulting in excellent Quality Scores and low CPAs.