While Google and other platforms are placing more emphasis on automation for managing Google Ads accounts, account managers should avoid becoming overly reliant on automation tools. It's often superior to keep both hands on the wheel to prevent accounts from going downhill.
To ensure that your accounts remain in excellent condition, we've compiled a list of ‘best practices’ to complete daily, weekly and monthly as part of your account management process.
We'll now break down each category.
Check the progress of new campaign elements, such as new ads, extensions, and updated bid strategies. Even if everything was planned and executed well, ensure that everything is approved and moving in the intended direction.
Monitor budget pacing, which is also included in the weekly review. Depending on the size of the campaign, you may not need to check this daily, but you should aim for the right balance. Underspending or overspending at the end of the month or quarter is typically a bad sign. Make sure you're spending the allocated budget amount and not missing any opportunities.
Review any red flags, disapprovals, or other critical notifications. These issues can arise for a variety of reasons, but the best account managers stay on top of these problems and correct them quickly.
Dismiss irrelevant recommendations and review helpful ones before applying them. Dismissing irrelevant suggestions can improve your account and campaign optimisation score, which can help the AI algorithm provide better recommendations in the future.
Monitor your budgets, as noted in the daily review.
If you are checking this daily, it will be getting attention weekly by default anyway. Either way, hopefully, you now understand that budget pacing is critical, especially on clients’ accounts where there is a strict budget cap and is spread out across multiple campaigns.
Monitor conversions and adjust budgets or spending for campaigns with higher conversion rates or lower cost per conversion.
Check the search terms report identifying irrelevant and relevant keywords. You don't want to waste money on keywords that are irrelevant to your business, nor do you want to miss potential conversions on relevant keywords.
Monitor abnormal spikes in performance, as it's better to catch and analyse these issues rather than be caught off guard by your clients or stakeholders. On the other hand, if you are regularly monitoring spikes in performance you can catch any red flags quickly and resolve any issues sooner.
Every week, you should look to confirm where the display budget is being spent weekly and exclude low-quality or irrelevant placements which can hinder performance.
Check keywords and search terms weekly to ensure you're not wasting your budget on irrelevant terms.
This means tracking keyword performance to see if any should be removed. This is also useful for seeing search terms in real-time, which may present you with opportunities to capitalise on.
Sometimes it matters, if you or your client is a B2B supplier with a very limited budget, you may find mobile campaigns just don't convert. Or maybe they convert better. Perhaps they convert fine but the cost per conversion is unsustainable.
This is fundamental to managing a PPC campaign. Changes in performance happen and it’s your job to know why and what action to take.
In addition, it is your job to notify the client or stakeholders of the performance of the account. Even if performance isn’t positive, you can take on the task of outlining what the next steps are to get the account on the right track.
It is a great skill if you can take the complex metrics and understanding and condense them down into an easy-to-consume report for clients and stakeholders, and they will thank you for that.
Review client KPI metrics and identify key trends, making sure you are accurately serving the needs of your client’s business objectives.
Analysing YoY trends are more likely to provide a like-for-like comparison as you are looking at a similar time period. Whereas, Analysing MoM data will help you identify key turning points resulting in the YoY metrics.
An aggressive competitor with deeper pockets than you or your client can quickly change the inner workings of your PPC campaign. Knowledge is power, especially in the PPC industry.
Low scores generally mean poor-performing campaigns.
Look to improve low scores by analysing the recommendations tab (refer to ‘Weekly Account Review > Recommendations).
You can improve your score in a range of areas, including keyword match type, the use of extensions (or ‘Assets’, as they are now called), RSA headline and description variety etc.
Just be sure to double-check and manually change these areas rather than going through the recommendations tab.
Keep improving your ad copy until you can’t improve it anymore.
If you are struggling with variations of ad copy, this is where the use of AI bots such as ChatGPT can be helpful. However, we would advise once again to double-check the direction and tone of voice is applicable to the brand of the account you are managing.
From here you can drill down on what works and what doesn’t.
You must understand what's working and what isn’t. Use experiments to test your new working hypotheses.
You will generally dive into your data every month naturally when you come to do reports for clients and stakeholders, but it is always good practice if you do an even deeper one before your reporting period so you can go into more detail and lay out plans in said reports.
And that's it!
Taking prolonged periods of time away from the campaigns for too long isn’t advisable. Without proper reviews and monitoring, paid search accounts can go south pretty quickly.
By following these checklists, you can keep your PPC accounts in excellent condition.
If you are looking for a reliable agency to help manage your existing PPC accounts or want to start PPC advertising for your business, Statuo is the perfect place to start.
We are built on superb PPC management with great results for clients in all industries.
Contact us today to see what Statuo can do for you and your business.
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