If you’re PPC geek, then you understand that every account has its own dynamic and personality. As much as you want to treat them all the same, you can’t. Yes, there are best practices that you can replicate and apply (think scalability), but that’s not enough to grow your account.
So what am I getting at here?
Think Relationship
On the surface, you can treat everyone equally. You can smile at them, buy them a drink, and converse with them. However, everyone has their own unique features and quirks. If you want to know them beyond the superficial, you’d have to dig deeper.
A PPC account is the same. You can run best practices and get friendly with every account you encounter. You can smile at them, and buy them drinks. You can run ad copy tests and ‘optimize’ your keywords, but at the end of the day, you’re going nowhere. Why? It’s because you don’t KNOW your account.
Think Benchmark
How do you know when your account has grown? To want to grow an account, you have to know its benchmarks.Do you know the seasonality indices of your account? What is the conversion rate segmented by search and display? What is the CTR of a brand campaign compared to a general campaign?
Get to know your keywords and your adcopy. Know your benchmarks. Familiarize yourself with the control ad copy. Understand what it means when CTRs increase, or why your positions improve while CPCs drop.
Take a look at the following metrics for these two accounts:
These two accounts sell the same products, in the same industry, with just about the same demographic. Their general keywords are relatively similar. Yet, looking at their metrics, you can see that they’re completely different.
Why is this the case? It’s because every business is different, and have very different needs. If you assume that both accounts should have the same numbers, you will shortchange one and overwork the other.
Think Growth
Once you understand your PPC campaign to this degree, then you are ready to grow it. You are now able to bring your account to the next level, breaking the upper and lower statistical limits to your core metrics. Please keep in mind that some metrics such as AOV and CR, are not directly within your control, and should not be used to gauge your account’s growth. Other metrics however, such as CTR and CPCs, can be directly manipulable. These are the metrics that should be focused on when growing a PPC account.
The focus of this post is not about ‘how’ to grow your account. It is about approaching account growth strategically and with understanding. As the famous G.I. Joe adage states: Knowing is half the battle.
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