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You can read the follow up to this article here – Our Top 5 “Must Have” Safety Checks For Small Ad Accounts
When managing lots of small ad accounts it can be challenging to make a meaningful impact when faced with small budgets and tight margins.
The day-to-day management activities that add value within these small accounts can generally be categorized as one of the following:
This article focuses specifically on optimizations, with the safety checks and balances article here.
Small ad accounts come with tight margins, which means agency resource allocation will often sit around the 30-minutes-a-month mark, per account. It’s critical then that this time is focussed and spent on high value activities. Spending an hour where only 30 minutes is allocated is easy to do and instantly makes that client unprofitable. Further, the time creep means you have no buffer left to spend on the accounts that are on the critical list.
We’re here to help with our top five optimizations that really pack a punch and are super quick to deliver for small ad accounts. These optimizations are based on our experience helping scores of agencies who specialize in delivering value when managing large volumes of small accounts.
If you’re running a large number of small accounts, it’s a huge task to make sure that you get as close as possible to your spend targets by the end of month. Having an automated dashboard that helps you visualize how you are pacing through the month is incredibly valuable.
Even better if you have a system that can auto-adjust your budget up and down to hit the target, manage rollovers from one month to the next, and even turn off campaigns if the spend targets are hit.
The most common bid strategy we see producing results for new campaigns on small volume accounts is Maximize Clicks. Often This is upgraded to Maximize Conversions over time, but only if:
Assuming you are tracking conversions, adding converting search terms as new keywords and pausing high spend/non-converting keywords can really improve results over time. This is not really about improving reach and increasing spend, but rather it’s about improving the quality of your keyword set over time.
If you are struggling to spend your budget and need more traffic, try adding your best keywords as broad matches. Google is getting much better at matching intent now, and we are really seeing great results from broad match keywords, particularly when combined with the Maximize Conversions bid strategy.
Run a scan to clean up any negative keyword conflicts that may exist in your account. You can’t rely on Google’s internal scan or recommendations to find these (it misses more than it finds), so a tool like PPC Samurai can really help you to make sure that you’re not inadvertently blocking good traffic.
PPC Samurai can automate almost every aspect of these optimizations for you (and many more of course!). In our experience, running a full suite of safety scans, fixing any problems that are uncovered, plus these five optimizations on small ad accounts would take an average account manager less than 15 minutes per month to complete. This should give you time up your sleeve to spend on the accounts that really need it.
Now that’s time well spent!
If you’re like to discuss this further or have some more questions, please feel free to reach out to us or book a demo– we always love a good chat.
