1 - Tracking
Does your agency have access to your web analytics?
For proper optimization, it is imperative that your agency have access to your web analytics, AdWords integrates very nicely with Google analytics. Correct integration can help improve your campaign in many ways.
Additional data that can help your campaign includes:
- Visitor Bounce Rate
- Camapaign, Adgroup, Ads, Keyword: ROI
- Campaign, Adgroup, Ads, Keyword: Margin
- Campaign, Adgroup, Ads, Keyword: Revenue Per Click
Are you correctly tagging your paid traffic from other search engines like Yahoo and Bing?
Your ads from Yahoo and Bing need to be tagged. If they’re not, you will not see how they perform within your analytics, without this data, it will be hard to continuously improve performance for those specific campaigns. This is true for search engines such as Yahoo and Bing but applies well to other networks and banner campaigns.
2 - Maintenance
Setting up a campaign in the first place is only part of the job. A successful PPC campaign requires active stewardship, as well as ongoing adjustments and improvements based on real world results and data. You might hear that your agency is using the newest “tools” to optimize the campaign, but we have yet to see a tool that doesn’t require a critical mind to look at the numbers and make changes accordingly.
3 - Landing Page Optimization
A big determinant of success of your AdWords campaign is its Quality Score, the relevance between your keywords, ads and landing pages. If your landing pages are not designed correctly they could have a big impact on your quality score. Has your agency looked at this?
4 - Reporting
Reporting is critical for you to see continuous improvements. Make sure your getting at the very least 1 report per month and can count on your account rep to answer questions on a weekly basis.
Let’s say for example you have a new promo coming out next week with a 15% discount, this can be leveraged greatly in your PPC ads, if you can’t reach your account rep and it’s not implemented in a timely manner, this is a missed opportunity for increased sales.
5 - Testing
At this point, if your agency has done their job correctly, they have optimized your campaign to drive targeted traffic to your site. However, even if your site is flooded with closely targeted visitors, your website might not do a good job in converting them to leads and customers.
Make sure your agency is well versed in a/b split testing and multivariate testing, this will make sure you continuously stretch and test the limits of your campaign. Increased targeted traffic is good, but increased traffic and increased conversion rates are even better.
Mike McCready
September 2, 2009
@ 11:09 pm
I agree with all these points and I would imagine point 2: Maintenance is far too often overlooked. We are about to embark on a SEO/SEM process with a vendor and I know it may position as well at start, but without ongoing effort, it will all be for naught. The trick is to convince the executives the need to spend more money into the maintenance part.