In your Paid Search Advertising, account growth is vital to maintaining profitability and staying ahead of your competition.
Bids, position, and ads are the lifeblood of your account. Without detailed management, you will begin to offset the increase in revenue with wasted spend and missed opportunities. But what do you do if you simply do not have the time?
That is where AdWords Automated Rules come in.
Automated Rules, released by Google in November 2010, is a tool that can help you effectively manage your account at the most granular level you need. The triggers you set up, using your own parameters, can help you quickly identify poor and strong performers, freeing up time for you to perform the analysis needed to make the right decision.
One of my clients has an account pushing the limits of scale. I use a rule to identify high CPA’s on the Display Network, as well as domains that spend but do not convert. Just recently we added branded terms to the Display Network. Volume for the search term was not very high, so there was not a lot to expect. However, I came in one morning last week to find a rule was triggered. I quickly found an automatic placement that spent $368 in 1 day without converting (it was a poor match on Google’s end). Because of the size of the account, and the fact that the Display Network regularly underperformed compared to search, it could have been 2 or 3 days before I found the bad domain. Instead, I found it the first day, excluded the placement, and was able to save hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars.
Keep in mind, however, that Automated Rules are not a substitute to manually adjusting bidding and enabling keywords and ads; instead it is a directional guide that can make this work quicker, and more effective. Using rules along with an analysis of historic performance can help you find new opportunities and identify wasted spend while saving dozens of man-hours.
AdWords rules should not replace bid management, only enhance it, allowing you to continue to grow your online presence, without sacrificing performance. Read more from Google about AdWords automated rules and their wide variety of uses.
