As anyone involved with PPC will tell you, optimization is key. But, it can be very hard when you have a ton of data to monitor and act upon each day. Keeping cost per conversion in check or making sure our campaigns don’t exceed their weekly spend caps can be a huge time-sucker. If you’re managing more than a few campaigns -- especially cross-network -- there’s little to no time left to take your PPC performance from good to awesome.
By automating PPC campaign management, marketers can set up catch-all rules for maintaining an ideal CPA, preventing overspending, and much more. In this post, I’ll discuss three of my favorite cross-network rules to save you time, increase ROI, and make your PPC life easier.
Lean on PPC Automation and Focus on the Bigger Picture
With automated rules, you can monitor and control your campaigns across networks more efficiently. As you grow your business and team, you will need more time for strategy and management. Bigger clients value deeper expertise, which makes smart automation critical to your agency’s future.
And some things are just better left to automation. Manual, repeated, error-prone tasks can be easily handled by a PPC automation tool, saving your team time to focus on things humans can do better than machines.
If you’re new to automation, you can start at the network level and use AdWords automated bidding or go more granular with AdWords scripts. Facebook also lets you automatically update campaigns, ad sets, or ads in bulk with automated rules. But as you add more networks, you will need a more robust solution to run checks and take the actions you’d normally do manually -- across all networks.
Cross-Network Automated Rules to Lower Cost per Acquisition
Suppose you’re running location-based ads for a brick-and-mortar retailer. You probably want to advertise during active business hours, cap your campaign spend, and pause low-performing campaigns as soon as possible. Chances are you don’t want to be sitting at your laptop late on a Friday night to manually control all of those things. By creating cross-network automated rules, your campaigns will run smoothly even when you leave the office.
PPC automation offers endless combinations of If/Then rules to streamline your PPC scheduling, bidding, and budget management. Here’re three of my favorite ones to get started.
1.Pause Poorly Converting Ads
Pause ads that are getting clicks but low or no conversions so you can re-evaluate your landing page and creative.
Example: If Impressions > 100 and Spend > $300 USD and Website Conversions < 2 Using Data from Yesterday Then Pause Campaign
2. Increase Budget for Low CPA
If your cost per conversion is trending toward the lower end, allocate more budget toward those highly-converting ads.
Example: If Spend > $500.00 and Cost per Conversion < 30.00 Using Data from Last 30 Days Then Increase Budget Value by 50% Max Budget 5,000.
3. Cap Your Weekly Campaign Spend
Limit your campaign spend to your desired amount by using this rule to ensure campaigns are paused once they’ve hit your spend limit.
Example: If Spend > $499.00 * Using Data from Last 7 days * Then Pause Campaigns
These rules provide a great jumping-off point for streamlining your PPC optimization strategy. Not only will they provide a safety net, preventing things like overspending on poorly converting ads, they’ll also set you up for success with actionable insights from the “last run log.”
Better yet, while setting your email preferences for each rule, select “Run an Email Results” to get a full digest of which campaigns the rule took action on for each run. Then, dive into each campaign, ad set, or ad to gather the full story of why it hit your rule criteria.
Take command of your ads at scale with automated rules in AdStage today.
