It’s well known that a lot of the effort that goes into running a successful PPC campaign is in the initial setup of the account. Making sure the right keywords and ads are used and structuring these in a way to take full advantage of being rewarded by Google with better quality scores and therefore lower CPC’s is massively important to the long-term success of the account.

If you employ someone in any capacity, either internally or externally, to manage your companies PPC account it’s good to be able to check on the time and effort they are putting into the account, particularly if results haven’t been as good as you had hoped or been promised.

Here are a few tips to allow you to review the management of these PPC accounts:

Look at the change history

In both Google and Microsoft Ads there is a section called ‘Change History’. This shows every change that has ever been made within your account and the dates the changes were made, along with the email address of who made the changes. Take a look into the change history section of your account and see what changes have been made recently and the overall frequency of changes.
You can drill down into the types of changes as well, look out for changes to max CPC’s, which are the bids set for each individual keyword as these are important.

Review key metrics over a few months

If you have recently had a PPC account built for you should expect to see some improvements to key metrics over the first few months:

Has the CTR % increased? CTR stands for click through rate, the percentage of people who see your ads who then decide to click on them. A properly structured account, that’s being managed properly would expect to have abetter CTR as the campaigns got older. This is because on-going optimisation and analysis into keyword data would mean negative keywords were being added regularly and new keywords with good CTR would also be identified and added to the account.

Has the average CPC decreased? Going back to the importance of account structure, an account that has been built well will generally see CPC decrease overtime as Google awards correctly built accounts with higher quality scores and then lower CPC’s.

Has the Cost//Conversion decreased? Good optimisation should see the cost per conversion, literally the cost of each sale made through your PPC account, decrease after the launch of a new account. How has your cost per conversion changed since any big changes were made on your account?

How much is whoever is managing the account sharing data or results with you?

Are you receiving regular reports into the performance of the account? Are you getting involved in reviewing factors such as ad copy variations, location reports, hourly and day of the week analysis and things like A/B testing of landing pages. These are factors that should be being looked at regularly by whoever looks after your PPC account.