It’s our question of the week. We often hear people say “does PPC campaigns run by themselves?” or clients telling us “someone told us doing PPC campaigns are so simple, they’re running themselves”.
Are PPPC Campaigns running by themselves?
In a sense they sure do. You don’t have to walk around the city and glue poster to boards and walls and repeat it every day and week. Once a pay-per-click campaign is launched you don’t need to take care of every little details every minutes of the day. But what happens when someone go around the city and rip your posters? You have to go out and do it all over, again and again.
But that’s naturally not what people refer to when they talk about “running by themselves”. Their thinking goes more along the way of: “you launch it and you can (almost) forget about it.”
You can naturally fire and forget PPC campaigns but that’s a recipe for disaster.
We know some SEM companies do it, but people and companies who have a fire and forget mind set usually fall into 2 categories; the clueless or the lazy.
PPC for the Clueless
The Clueless act (or think) like it’s a bit magic. You plan and launch a campaign and it suddenly happens. And because it happened it’ll stay the same for a long time. Dead wrong.
Like every dynamic environment (online advertising is a very dynamics environment) it’s always changing and evolving. The PPC marketplace is extremely dynamic. Your competitors change and update their campaigns and they make them evolve. So if you don’t evolve at the same pace you end up behind. And fast.
Even worst if you think you don’t have to touch, test and test again your campaigns (from your ads copy to your keywords and your landing pages) you’ll be so far behind that it’ll be very hard to catch up once you fell behind.
Pay-per-click needs maintenance
Pay-per-click involves maintenance just to stay afloat. Think of it as your car maintenance to maintain a good milage, or for techie people, software maintenance.
The only chance you can stand still with online campaigns is if your competitors are lazy. Then and only then you can say I’m already ahead and I can rest a little while because my competitors are really lazy.
PPC for the lazy
We’re always happy to see lazy people and companies doing PPC and compete with them. They make your job so much easier.
We won’t go over why lazy is good to compete against. Lazy persons or lazy companies can still do a decent job at PPC. They can even be good at launching an account or a campaign, even if most of the time they tend to cut pretty big corners.
They can be good at launching something, but improving it afterward? Rarely. That’s when the “forget” comes into play. They tend to forget about it and that’s when you can eat their lunch. While they rest you can move in front of them and look at them in the rear view mirror.
The fact is that if someone you know fall into the lazy category they should not be doing PPC. They may get a few early win but they’ll fall behind every time.
You’ll then hear them complaining about Google’s changing algorithms and quality scores. Google this, Google that. Sounds familiar?
If you are a bit lazy (or have a short attention span) get someone else to do PPC campaigns for you. You can at least set them up but please let someone else improve them. You’ll be much better for it and so will your bottom line.
PPC’s 2 magic words: Continuous Improvement
Once you launch a campaign work on it a minimum of 1 hours a day. The secret is to optimize everything. Always test. And test everything. There are no sacred cows.
Improving your campaign 3% per month over a full year will have a bigger impact than trying to do a big swooping 40% improvement. In fact, simply testing and improving 3% a month will provide you with a 42.5% improvement over a year.
It’s tempting to try to aim high and do a one time 40% improvement but the chance you’ll achieve it everytime is pretty low. Truth be told, when you start testing, getting a 40% improvement can be pretty easy; you start where your improvement will have the biggest impact. But getting 40% improvements every month is pretty hard. Better to focus on continuous little improvements.
Conclusion: Aim lower but hit your target every time.
