A Holistic Approach to PPC

As a Search Engine Marketing Manager, my job is a little bit like babysitting. My accounts are the little ones I take care of and their respective ad groups are like personality traits that need to be nurtured and developed or, in some cases, discouraged and corrected. If I were a good babysitter, I wouldn’t be happy if a child simply demonstrated more positive traits than negative traits. For example, maybe little Tyler is an excellent dancer and draws very well, but his room is a disaster and he refuses to clean it. In this case, I would want to encourage him in his dancing and drawing but I would discourage him from painting all over his bedroom walls. The same goes for an account. Maybe the account has a a few ad groups that perform exceptionally well. I would want to focus on optimizing these ad groups in order to maximize their performance. But I wouldn’t want to ignore the lower performing ad groups because they have a negative impact on the overall performance of the account.

If your account has been running for many months, it might be useful to run a comprehensive report broken down by campaign and ad group. Doing this allows you to identify and pinpoint the specific ad groups that are consistently not meeting your goals. For example, it might be useful to average six months of data and measure it against your goals. Let’s say you require a 350% ROAS and several of your ad groups have a monthly average of 150% ROAS. These ad groups are pulling down your overall ROAS and need to be either optimized or paused. Organizing several months of data across a large campaign can be time consuming and tedious, but it helps you to really get to know your account and help it become the best account it can be!