Do's and Don'ts in PPC Ad Management	Visited: 1350 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Liza Anne Martinez October 16, 2008

When you have gathered all the keywords you need and have incorporated them in your ad copies, when you have placed your bids and activated your ad campaigns, what's left to do with your PPC campaign?

Of course you don’t just sit there and wait. The internet has become such a popular business avenue that everyone is vying for a position in the market to have a piece of that pie. Because of this, no ad campaign is fool proof, you have to work at it with continuous effort and not let your guard down.

First of all, DO know your limits. It’s easy to get excited during a bidding war. Create a budget for your campaigns and stick to it. You don’t want to overspend for a top position when a lower one will generate you a fair amount of Click through Rates (CTR) just the same.

Don't bid too high or too low. As mentioned above, bidding too high to get the top spot will more likely generate a bidding war between you and your competitors. Conversely, if you bid too low, the less likelihood your ads will gain much visibility. You don’t have to get the 1st position to get high CTR, 3rd to fourth position would do just fine.

Do have different ad groups for different keywords and key phrases. Create several ad groups or campaigns where you can place highly related keywords together. This will allow you to make well suited ad copies that will reflect each ad group more specifically.

When using a landing page for your ads, don’t just bring traffic to your homepage. A common mistake among rookie advertisers is simply aiming their ads at their homepage where all their product info and other details that the consumer wouldn’t be interested in is shown. You only have a few seconds to turn a viewer to a customer so it is strongly advised that you link your ads to where the searcher will get the information or product he is looking for. Be sure the landing page is related to the ad you have placed. This will highly affect your CTR. Engage the customer through your ad but convince them completely through your landing page by giving them what they are asking for.

Do monitor ineffective keywords, ad copies, and campaigns. You should not leave your ad campaigns for too long without checking which ones are not working for you. The longer time you spend keeping useless keywords or ineffective ad copies, the higher your expenses get.

You can also replace or modify your keywords and ad copies with ideas you can get from your competitors. There are keyword tracking tools out there such as KeywordSpy that allows you track down your competitors’ keywords and see which ones are working strongly for them and which ones are not. You can even look at their current ad copies and see what makes their advertisement work.

Lastly, you don’t have to run your campaign 24/7. To prevent spending too much on your campaigns, schedule your ad group wisely. There are two ways you can go with this: (1) You can go with your competitors schedule and take advantage of what could be a good time to sell your products or (2) you can avoid other advertisers and take advantage of low competition. You can experiment with these two tactics and see which would suit your campaign the most.