Today is going to be the first episode of  what we are calling “Account Adjustments“.

There are a lot of times when people have their pay per click (PPC) accounts up and running and they’re making some progress but they don’t know exactly what they should be doing on a regular basis to change the account up to help improve it and get more leads, sales, etc.

So today is our first episode. They are going to be very short and sweet, so sharpen your pencils and pay attention.

The first PPC account adjustment is to: Check Your Settings!

Inside of your campaign, go to the “Settings” tab. Now, this may seem like a simple idea, but depending on how many people have access to the campaign and are active in it, sometimes things can get switched. Other times when you’re setting up the PPC campaign for the first time, there are instances when some settings can just get overlooked.

So, go into your account settings and make sure everything is as it should be.

1. Is the campaign set up for the Search Network or Display? Is this the correct setting?
2. Are you using the Google Search Partners? Do you want to be?

One area where I’ve seen some of the biggest mistakes is in the Location settings.

Early on in my career when I was setting up a new campaign, I was trying to do it quickly and when I was going through the setup, I did not set the locations correctly. All of a sudden POOF!

The daily budget was gone in about five minutes and I couldn’t figure out why for a few minutes until I realized that I had the locations set to worldwide when it should have been limited to local advertising (and yes, we did reimburse our client for the mistake). So make sure your locations are set up correctly.

3. Is the campaign in the correct language?

4. What is your bid strategy? When selecting between bid strategies, there are so many different ways that you can adjust your campaign that you need to make sure it’s the correct one for what your goals are.

5. Is your budget set correctly? This is a big one. In campaigns that I’ve audited in the past, I’ve heard from clients “I’m just not getting any clicks.” My response was to tell them that their budgets were only set at $5.00/day and their clicks were running $4 – $6. So they were only getting 1 click a day or every other day. So make sure your budgets are set correctly.

6. Another big mistake can be with the scheduling of the campaign. I find what works best (especially for service businesses) is to have the campaign start at 6am – 7am and run until around 10pm – 11pm (local times). A lot of the time after 11pm and before 6am you’re not getting a lot of high quality traffic. Most people are sleeping and they can’t call you that late because you’re not open (not that you would want them to call at that time anyway). So keep an eye on your scheduling.

With that said, it depends on your business. We have a client who is a divorce attorney. We turned the scheduling on overnight and we saw his leads start to skyrocket. The reasoning behind it is that he is in fact a divorce attorney. A lot of people come home at night to their spouses, maybe get into an argument, they are upset, they start to do some research online about what they can do about it (look for an attorney).

This worked really well for him, but all businesses are different. This may be something you can test.

So those are a few things to take a look at. If your campaign is not performing correctly, the first thing you should always to is go in and double check your campaign settings just to make sure that they are exactly how you want them to be.

Mike with PPCVideoTraining.com “See you next time”.