How to Create Your Own PPC Project Checklist for Optimizing Time Management

No matter how much experience you have running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, a checklist will help you manage your time.

Trying to manage your responsibilities without a checklist can make you skip important tasks even when you’ve performed them routinely for years.

There’s a reason professionals in various industries use checklists – they work. Although the consequences for mistakes are more serious in other industries, checklists are the perfect companion for digital marketers.

Time and task management are critical for PPC ad success

Technically, you can’t manage time because it will go on whether you like it or not. We all have the same 24 hours in the day and that won’t change. However, you can manage your tasks within time and that’s what time management is really all about. In other words, it’s about managing your tasks within the boundaries of time.

Time management strategies vary, but they all fall back on the reliability of lists and written tasks. When you’re managing a PPC ad campaigns, time management matters. There are so many different components to set up, manage, and optimize, that if you don’t strictly manage your time and tasks, your campaigns will suffer.

Checklists help you track recurring tasks

The main purpose of a PPC audit checklist is to help you track recurring tasks within your PPC ad campaigns. Most of the time, you’ll have weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and bi-monthly tasks. If you haven’t already organized your tasks into a schedule, this article will provide you with an outline to get you started.

Weekly PPC ad campaign tasks

Here are some common weekly PPC tasks to add to your PPC audit checklist:

• Performance projections. Are you over or under your goals, or are you right on target? Weekly performance projections can help you figure this out. To get the data you need, pay attention to your ad spend and conversions.

If your projections indicate that you’re going to overspend, decrease your keyword bids and/or budgets. If your conversions are lacking, adjust your keyword bids or put all of your PPC budget into your highest performing campaigns.

• Review your display network success. Are you spending a lot of money on placements that aren’t converting? If any of your placements aren’t performing well, revisit them and see what you can change.

Also, check to see if your campaigns exclude site categories where you don’t want your Google ads to run. For example, you may not want your Google ads to run on sites with content related to sexually suggestive content, sensitive social issues, or in-game placements on mobile apps. Many advertisers exclude mobile apps completely because they tend to eat ad budgets due to lower click and conversion rates.

• Adjust your bids. Are you manually bidding on your keywords? Look at the keywords that are using most of your daily spend, especially if they’re not converting or converting above CPL. If you’re utilizing automated bidding, pause your bids on broad match keywords that aren’t generating conversions.
• Check your budgets. It’s essential to regularly check in with your budgets to make sure your funds are being spent appropriately. Each week, run a report for the last seven days to see where you can reallocate your ad budgets to support your higher converting campaigns.
• Put low-performance keywords on pause. Don’t let more than a week go by without pausing your underperforming keywords. If you’re bidding on any keywords that aren’t converting or have a low CTR, put those on pause.

Bi-weekly PPC ad campaigns tasks

Here are some common bi-weekly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:

• Build up your negative keywords list. In your google ads account, run a search query report to identify negative keywords you can use to prevent untargeted traffic to your Google ads. This will keep you from wasting your ad spend. Keep doing this regularly for a while until you have a solid negative keyword list/negative keywords list.
• Target more keywords. Use all the tools available in your ad accounts to monitor your campaigns for new keywords to target. You don’t have to commit to new keywords long term right away. You can always add them to new ad groups and do a test run first of ad groups.
• Review your ads and write new ones. How many Google ads are you testing at any given time? Hopefully, you’re testing at least three ad groups. That’s the sweet spot required to gather enough data to evaluate your ad campaigns.

This data will help you stop running google ads that don’t perform well and add new ad variations to see if you can beat your control for your highest-performing Google ads.

Don’t forget to check in on your retargeting/remarketing ads. And if you haven’t started running these better-performing ads yet, it’s something to seriously consider.

Studies have shown that using remarketing ads generate a higher ROI because they bring back potential customers that didn’t convert the first time. Many people who come back to a brand through remarketing end up converting.

• Run a report for your Impression Share. Running this report will give you the data necessary to make important decisions. For instance, if you have a low Impression Share and you can increase your budget, optimize your match types and pause low performing keywords for better results.

Monthly PPC ad campaigns tasks

Here are some common monthly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:

• Verify your campaign settings. Every month, it’s important to check your ad campaigns settings to make sure they’re still correct. This is especially important when you have multiple people accessing your account who might change the settings periodically or even accidentally.

Check your account to ensure you’re targeting the right google search network, devices, languages, locations, and any other specific demographics you have set.

• Check your landing pages. When people click on your PPC ads, they’ll go directly to a landing page, but are they going to the right one? Is your page optimized for conversions? Does the content match your ad? Have you changed your ads without changing your landing pages to match?

Hopefully, you’ve been testing different landing pages with your ads. If so, run a Final URL report to identify underperforming landing pages and send your traffic to the pages that are converting better. Then, look at your landing pages to see if you can identify why they’re not performing as well. Continue your split testing by creating more landing pages based on the ones that perform the best and keep testing your page elements.

Bi-monthly PPC ad campaigns tasks

Here are some common bi-monthly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:

• Identify geographic performance. Run your Geographic report to find out where your ads aren’t performing as well as they could be and then consider eliminating those locations. Alternatively, you could target those locations with new ad campaigns and target them more specifically.

When you identify locations that aren’t performing well, add negative keyword modifiers to eliminate untargeted or ineligible clicks. Then, add positive bid modifiers on your locations that are performing well.

• Review Day Parting. Review your ad performance based on time of day. When you identify the times and days when conversions are lowest, pause your campaigns during those times and increase your bidding during the times when your ads perform better.
• Historical performance analysis. Run the appropriate reports to analyze your ad performance over the last two years, or as long as you can if you haven’t been running ads that long. This will help you evaluate seasonal data and long-term keyword trends.

Checklists are a valuable marketing tool

As you can see, there are plenty of tasks to perform on regular schedules in order to keep your PPC ad campaigns running optimally. By creating your PPC setup checklist, you’ll be giving yourself a valuable tool that will keep track of your tasks better than your memory.

Countless studies have proven that human memory is unreliable, especially when it comes to details. This is seen most clearly in experiments designed to determine eyewitness reliability. In these experiments, witnesses struggle to remember basic things like the color of a suspect’s clothing, their height, and even their physical features.

Don’t rely on your memory to manage your PPC ad campaigns. While you might be able to remember some things, you’ll never remember everything. Additionally, having a checklist makes your job easier because you can simply go down the list and check things off as you complete each task.

Having a list also makes it easier for you to ad scheduling your tasks in your calendar and set those tasks as recurring items. Having a to-do list is great, but if you don’t also schedule your tasks you’re likely to skip important things.

Need help with your PPC campaign? PPC.co has you covered!

Running a PPC campaign takes a lot of work and isn’t really suited as a one-person job. If you want big results from your PPC ads, you need a team to manage your PPC campaign.

Less than 25% of PPC search ads produce conversions, but that’s because most campaigns aren’t properly set up or optimized. When you work with us, we’ll get you the results you want.

We work with businesses in a variety of industries to create effective PPC campaigns that drive leads and sales. We’ll not only create effective ad copy, but we’ll also optimize your landing pages with effective ad copy. This is where most people get PPC ads wrong. A high click-through rate is only worthwhile when your landing pages convert. We’ll make sure your CTR improves along with your landing page conversions.

If you’re ready to take your PPC campaigns to the next level, get in touch with us and tell us about your goals. We’d love to help you generate the impressive results you’re after.

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Samuel Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at PPC Agency

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize search engine marketing (SEM) ROI. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.

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