On reviewing someone else’s PPC Campaign

May 8th, 2006 Jackie

I love looking at someone else’s PPC Campaign - particularly campaigns on Google because it’s so darned easy to generate reports. A colleague of mine, Nick (owner of Hot Sauce Blog and www.sweatnspice.com) put it succinctly. Nick says that looking a someone else’s PPC campaign is like looking in their wallet. 

Here are some of the metrics I routinely review and disect when evaluating an existing, or past, PPC campaign.

1. Daily spend activity: Generating a daily account summary report enables me to see the daily trends for the campaign’s spend, clicks, average ad position and impressions (searches) at a glance. It’s easy to graph this for a great 10,000 foot view on campaign performance during whatever time period is specified.
2. Keyword Summary Report: This report shows the top performing keywords in a given campaign for a given time frame. It’s helpful to break this campaign report down by month, to see what the month-to-month trends have been and whether increased activity for a certain month can be attributed to external events (e.g., world events for a political campaign, for example or offline marketing of a sale for an e-commerce site).
3. Ad Copy Report - This report shows me how each ad performed during the life of the campaign and gives me valuable knowledge about what ads people clicked on. It not only helps me review how people responded to the campaign’s messaging, it gives me more insight into the receptivity of certain ad groups based on ad copy (e.g., one ad group may be more receptive to the “Big Sale” and while another may be more receptive to the “Huge Selection” ad).

Other things I look at: The overall cost per click (CPC) for a given campaign - is it really high? Search to click conversion rates (anything below 1% for a keyword campaign = not good), overall click to sale conversion rate (if available), was content or site targeting used, were there vast swings in campaign performance, either for better or worse, across any of the topline metrics. For example, did the CTR suddenly drop from 2% to .3%. If so, why?

I use the above information to formulate a point of view with a list of recommendations for campaign optimization and improvement. In most cases the goal is to unearth “what went wrong” for campaigns that underperformed, went over budget or did not convert well.

So…what’s in your wallet?

Entry Filed under: E-Marketing Advice