Your Ultimate PPC Checklist Guide

Looking for a way to optimse your PPC campaigns but you are not really sure where to start? Thankfully we have created a handy checklist of weekly and monthly tasks for you to follow to help you stay on top of your Google Ads accounts.

Weekly Checks

First and foremost, if you are using Manual CPC, making bid changes on your keywords should be conducted fairly regularly. These bids should allow you to gain a reasonable average ad position that should align with your objectives; anywhere between the top of the first page and first position is where we recommend you should aim for. 

Checking your budget and daily spend is something we suggest to do every few days to ensure that you are not caught out over or under spending when it comes to the end of the month. Although Google will try to stay within your daily budget range that you set on your campaigns, there will be days when it may deviate slightly from this, so it is therefore important to stay on top of this.

The impression share report shows how often your ads are showing when users are searching for your keywords which will help you understand whether you need to up your spend more if your campaigns are underperforming. You can either up your keyword bids (if using Manual CPC), up the campaign budget, pause underperforming and broad keywords or both. 

Monthly Checks

With Google limiting out its search term reporting tool on the ads platform to now only include terms with ‘significant’ data late last year, it has become more difficult to find any additional keywords to include, or add as negatives. Thankfully, advertisers can still see all search queries through their Google Analytics account, which we recommended analysing at least once a week.

Google’s best practices recommend that advertisers have at least 1 responsive search ad alongside at least 2 expanded text ads. We recommend that you review the performance of these ads every month, comparing stats and replacing the worst performance ones.

One rather large influence on your campaigns is the landing pages you are using. You should check at least once a month to see how well they are performing, including how relevant they are to the keywords and search terms – which will also improve the overall quality score. Looking at the page bounce rate is an important metric to analyse on your Google Analytics to further understand how well the landing page is performing, if this is high then you should consider making changes. Additionally, ‘hotjar’ can be another great tool to use to see how users interact with these pages, looking at heatmaps, session recordings and interaction rates.

Once you start to gather a fair amount of data on your campaigns, you should start to consider using ad schedules to adjust your bids based on the performance of your ads throughout the day and week. This can be analysed through the ‘Day of the Week’ and ‘Hour of the Day’ Reports where you can understand the periods of time when your customers are looking for you the most. 

If you are needing help managing your PPC account, don’t hesitate to contact us, our team of Google Ads experts are here to help.