The 3 Laws of PPC Success

For too many times we have seen website owners trying to manage and optimize paid advertising accounts in Google AdWords without having the basic knowledge to do it properly and without knowing which rules to follow to easily and successfully manage such online marketing campaigns.

In our opinion, here are three fundamentals laws of PPC success (optimization):

1. Don't waste time with online interfaces

Setup the campaign online and download the AdWords Editor to manage the campaigns on your desktop. This will save you tremendous time, by:

* not waiting for web pages to load
* the usability of find and sort functions of GAE (Google Adwords Editor)
* by customizable views and multiple updates on the account and
* many others you don't have in the online interface.

Note: sometime you will still need to use the online interface, but do it only when you don't have that report/view in the AdWords editor

2. Think globally, act locally

Well actually the saying goes the other way round, but to manage your PPC accounts you need to start small, then grow. Constrain the budget for your campaigns so you get maximum 25-30 clicks a day (keep in mind that can be a lot for some industries). Start with a test campaign, a single product type or service, create just one ad group and limit the number of keywords to 10-15 and bid for phrase match and exact match only (no broad match yet, baby).

3. Get intimate with MS Excel

This is a must. Once you will add more keywords to the account, you will need to analyze data in manner of thousands of rows of data and columns. At least you should become good with sorting functions, conditional formatting and, as an Excel guru you will become, you will have to dream pivot tables.

We could add to this rules another important ones:

1. If you don't want to throw money on the window and waste time in the beginning, avail the services of a PPC consultant and ask them questions and at the same time learn it by yourself
2. If you manage tens of thousands of keywords and $8-10k/month budget, you may want to have access to a bid management tool (at this moment, I don't believe rules-based tools are offering much value, go for portfolio-based tools, but try to understand what they mean by portfolio first)