3 Easy steps to complete your annual PPC checkup

The crazed dash to wrap up 2019 and close the books on a banner year for PPC may have left search marketers feeling wiped out right about now. Buck up, search marketers! 2020 is here and those who want to dominate search marketing need to start the year on the healthiest footing possible.

Great planning and powerhouse strategies require deep analysis of what has been working and what hasn’t. You need to identify early signs of problems, know where opportunities exist, and be even more crisp at keeping key stakeholders posted about how your hard work is ensuring the overall health of their campaigns. Sounds a bit like an annual checkup at the doctor!

2020 promises to be another year of change for the tech and data we rely on daily, so our team has developed a health plan for your paid search programs — a 2020 checkup that can put your programs on the right trajectory from day one.

From checkup to preventive care to reporting, with the right technology, it may be easier than you think to make your PPC account the healthiest it’s ever been.

The Account Checkup: Assess your overall changes in health

The first thing a doctor does before developing a plan for your physical health is order a full health assessment. This can be tedious in PPC if done manually, but tools can make the process virtually painless.

Optmyzr has a powerful one-click annual report to review last year’s account health. For those who have been using Optmyzr reports for a while, the assessments run quite deep with a variety of unique data visualizations in addition to all the standard PPC reporting widgets one would expect.

While the one-click annual report for 2019 in review is a great first step, PPC pros will want to take advantage of multi-account reporting capabilities that tap into the data across all accounts and campaigns to provide a flexible view into the most critical data about all PPC programs. Of course, good PPC pros excel at ongoing reporting for clients at regular intervals, whether daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Great PPC pros, however, use the transition to a new year to do a more full-blown assessment for their own well being.

What can the annual one-click report tell us? More than you might think.

Start with year-over-year data. Compare how 2019 overall stacked up against 2018. This full-year view can unearth a lot about subtle trends, cyclical activities by client, slow erosions across critical metrics, and much more.

For PPC agencies, the full-year report may help identify aggregate changes by industry, efficiency gains or gaps in how clients are managed, performance comparisons across Google, Bing, Facebook, and Amazon, or a wide range of other views into the overall health of the business.

Here’s a prime example.

In this screenshot from an Optmyzr report, one can see that conversions went up despite a decrease in clicks. This points to a more targeted ad buy in 2019 compared to the year before.

As with your personal physician, the longer you keep seeing a great doctor and follow her advice for getting healthier, the more you’ll see improvements to your overall health. The same holds true for Optmyzr. The longer you drive your PPC programs through our tool, the better optimized the account will be and the deeper your own insight into your PPC health.

Preventive care: Set benchmarks and track them

Account audits foster exceptional discipline and adherence to plans. Trouble is, fully auditing a wide range of campaigns and programs can appear to be a daunting task. As a result, many PPC pros think of audits as a year-end concept — one of those “must do” items that feels more like drudgery than anything else.

Break that line of thinking and redirect to a productive, strategic cycle in 2020.

Auditing accounts is much easier than you may think. In fact, auditing should be viewed as part of the ongoing practice of running accounts across all clients. The Optmyzr Audit tool can serve as the year-round guardian for search marketers, uncovering mistakes, anomalies, and other issues long before they become big problems.

The PPC Policy & Audits tool makes it easy to set up repeatable audit reports that scour your portfolio of projects. It automates analysis of critical structural elements and overall campaign metrics at a much deeper level. Use the tool to uncover structural problems earlier, such as not having sufficient ad variations in ad groups, repeating the same headline too often, using the wrong attribution models, or finding which ad extensions are being used inconsistently across campaigns.

If you’d like to see a sample audit for an account you manage, you can try the tool for free here: https://tools.optmyzr.com/free/signup

The following example underscores the value of regular auditing.

The more frequent audits are done, the faster you and your team can redirect and solve problems. Far too often, PPC pros find themselves in Q4 thinking “I wish we knew about that back in Q1.”

Audits are the key to effective preventative care and maintenance throughout the year.

Reporting: Surface the data and metrics that improve your life

When you meet with your physician throughout the year, they keep the critical data points close at hand. Having the complete picture of health is essential, including a view into the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Think of this framework for how you structure reporting throughout the year. Avoid the temptation to only report on the things that make you look good. If a physician only reports back to a patient that they have lost weight while ignoring dangerously high blood pressure, they do their patient a gross disservice.

In PPC, holistic reporting is essential for long-term success and growth. Critical metrics on a single dashboard with capability to maneuver within the data for cause-effect relationships can build trust with clients and empower the PPC practitioner to become much more strategic and a value-add in the marketing mix.

Optmyzr Campaign Reports include data insight visualizations that go beyond numbers in spreadsheets. They illustrate trends and knowledge through trend charts, geo heatmaps, hour-of-week performance, Quality Score tracking, and word clouds — just to name a few.

Powerful reporting uses easy to understand visuals that use commonly understood terms rather than industry jargon to help clients and internal stakeholders see the full picture (literally) and keep everyone on the same page. PPC pros become higher value strategists, with the ability to author defensible strategic recommendations based on data and insights that everyone can better understand. Powerful reporting then allows that same PPC pro to prove or defend their strategic decisions.

An apple a day…

The old adage about apples being the key to good health may seem like something Grandma would say, but it holds very true in many areas of life. Take that same concept to the world of PPC for unprecedented foresight in 2020. Start early with the one-click report for your full health checkup looking back at 2019 and even earlier. Get yourself on a preventative care regimen with tracking and auditing that keeps you in-the-know about PPC health much faster than in years past. Then set up essential reporting that illustrates critical information in an easy-to-use format.

Optmyzr has invested heavily in tools that promote great PPC health. They are designed to be easy and fast to set up and use. The end result can yield exceptional results and keep you several steps ahead of problems that, if left unchecked, could be devastating.

Healthier PPC living in 2020 with Optmyzr. Check out how easy it is with a free trial, or talk with one of our reps. We want to make this year your healthiest and most prosperous one yet.