How To Create A PPC Account Development Plan
There are so many different ways to improve the performance of your PPC activity. There are always new techniques to try and different campaign elements you can tweak, but without proper planning you can end up in total chaos. Ever heard the saying ‘Too many cooks…’? Well with PPC it’s too many tweaks!
Success doesn’t just happen. It’s planned for.
The easiest way to improve performance (without a magic wand!) is to create an account development plan and go after one metric at a time.
What’s An Account Development Plan?
An Account Development Plan (ADP) is simply a to-do list of PPC tasks that you’re going to implement to take your account from doing okay, to absolutely killing it. If you’ve never used one before, we have a template to get you started (at the end of the post).
So, Why Use An Account Development Plan?
Using an ADP will help keep you on track and make sure you’re not trying to move the needle on too many things at the same time. When you’re continually trying to make improvements on multiple areas of your account it can be so easy to drop the ball and that’s when costly mistakes happen. Don’t be that guy. Slow and steady wins the race, every time.
Ready to get stuck in?
Step One: Choose A Metric
Of course we’d all love it if multiple (or all!) metrics improved at the same time but let that dream go for a moment and focus on just one metric for now. If you already have key objectives for the account, great, use one of those. If not, take a look at the business objectives and find a metric that aligns with one of those. Here’s a few suggestions:
- increase click through rate
- reduce cost per click
- improve position
- achieve higher quality score
- lower cost per acquisition
- increase search impression share
- improve conversion rate*
*this is a toughie as generally the conversion rate is most influenced by the website itself but there are things you can do from the platform end to gently nudge conversion rate in the right direction.
Got your metric? Great, let’s move on…
Step Two: Brainstorm
Write a list of as many ideas/tests you can think of that can help move the needle for your metric. If you chose click through rate write down various ad copy tests, extensions you can implement, different keywords you can focus on etc. A few ways you can broaden your ideas might include looking at other accounts you run, checking out online case studies, reading awesome PPC blogs (😉), asking colleagues, or even re-visiting previous experiments.
Once you have all your ideas totally unorganised in a big mess, you’re ready for step three.
Step Three: Create Your Plan
Simple right? Abso-frickin-lutely! We’ve even created a template for you. All you need to do is organise your ideas into some sort of logical format and pop them into the template (you promise to duplicate it first and not screw up the original right? Awesome 😀).
Logical doesn’t necessarily mean all your ideas will fit into a neat one through ten order, but more like make sure you’re not overlapping anything. If you’re going to test two different call to actions in your ad copy, don’t test these at the same time as trialling different display URLs — you won’t know which one made the difference! Make sense?
Happy downloading…
The template isn’t branded, isn’t gated, it’s completely free for you to use and share. But hey, if you find it helpful why not return the favour and share this post or sign up to our email list? Ball’s in your court.
Originally published at www.beesonmedia.com on December 30, 2016.
