Friday, May 11, 2012

Spending Too Much Time on AdWords? Here Are 3 Ways to Be More Efficient

 

Save time

Recently we?ve published a series of posts designed to help you save time and money on Google AdWords management, including:

In today?s post we?re focusing specifically on tactics and adjustments that can help small to midsized AdWords advertisers get more done in less time within their Google AdWords accounts. We?ll walk through three general ways you can get some of your time back when managing your AdWords account:

  1. Give Google More Control
  2. Automate Processes
  3. Break Out Your Wallet

We?ll flesh each of these tactics out in the coming paragraphs.

1. Give Google More Control of Your AdWords Account

Intuitively this doesn?t seem like the type of advice you?d get from someone who manages pay-per-click campaigns, but in actuality there are some instances where it might be best for an advertiser to just cede more control of their account to Google.

If you?re spending a couple hundred dollars a month on PPC and can?t afford more budget or much time to dedicate to managing ads on the channel, there may be some Google tools that could generate greater efficiencies for you than actually managing your campaign yourself (in terms of time, and in some cases maybe even in terms of results):

As you?ll see by visiting the links above, these solutions are frequently suboptimal in terms of getting the absolute best returns possible from your campaigns, but in the event that you?re not spending very much on PPC, the universe of profitable PPC clicks for your business is small (for instance you?re a local business that can only service a fairly tight geographical region) and you just don?t have much in the way of time or money to dedicate to the actual running of your AdWords account, these can be viable alternatives that might save you a lot of time while generating similar results to what you?d get if left to your own devices.

2. Automate Processes Within Your AdWords Account

If you?re already fairly proficient with pay-per-click marketing but just don?t have a ton of time to dedicate to hands-on management of your campaign, you might be able to get similar results in less time by automating some of your PPC management via AdWords Automated Rules or by leveraging Excel for PPC for a number of automation tasks, from leveraging VLOOKUP within your PPC campaigns to re-creating performance charts for reporting purposes. Our friends at PPC Hero had a really great series on the topic as well ? basically there are a number of functions that you can leverage within Excel to make the process of managing your AdWords campaigns more efficient. If you have some time to dedicate to campaign management (but not enough) and are familiar with both basic PPC best practices and Excel, this can be a great means of building efficiency into your PPC process and getting back some of your time.

3. Buy Back Some Time with Paid PPC Services or Software

Obviously we?re a bit biased, but another way to save time in managing your PPC campaigns is to leverage either paid software or an agency. If you?re a small to medium-sized business, your time has a hard cost ? you could be working on growing other areas of your business, whether you?re a business owner or are in charge of multiple marketing functions within your company. For that reason software or services that creates efficiencies in terms of time savings and allows you to focus on other areas of your business has value beyond improved performance within your PPC campaigns: it allows you to buy back some of your time, often at a very good price relative to the actual value of your time.

If you think you might be in the market for either PPC management software or services, check out our free buying guides:

 

About the Author

Tom Demers is co-founder and managing partner at Measured SEM, a boutique search marketing agency offering search consulting services including pay-per-click account management, comprehensive SEO site audits, content marketing strategies and services, and a variety of link building packages such as guest posts and blogging strategy.

You can learn more about how Measured SEM can help, get in touch with Tom directly via email at tom at measuredsem.com, or by following him on Twitter.

Image via bigbirdz

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/03/22/save-time-on-adwords

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