Managing Client PPC Campaigns on the Go
Don't leave things to chance when you leave the office for any significant period of time. Here's how to keep your campaigns running smoothly.
Don't leave things to chance when you leave the office for any significant period of time. Here's how to keep your campaigns running smoothly.
Business travel is a fact of life. Your clients expect that professionals such as yourself keep up with the latest industry news. Sometimes this means traveling to conferences, such as the upcoming SES London conference from February 15 to 19 in the U.K., or maybe SES New York from March 22 to 26.
Because we travel, managing client PPC affairs can be daunting — but it doesn’t mean things shouldn’t be firmly under control. Leaving some campaigns unattended 24 hours can spell disaster for your career and business. Let’s look at some effective ways to keep things running smoothly even while you’re away from the office.
Balance Work & Travel
Transparency = Trust
Companies trust you to manage their interests professionally. Handling communications in a proper manner when you won’t be available to do the usual job you’re being paid for is key to building that trust.
Your client wants you to let them know that you’ll be at SES London for three days learning how to kick things up a notch for the year to come. But you also need to let them know what steps you’ve taken to protect their campaigns.
Who’s your Backup?
Always have a backup manager in case of emergency. Though this may not always be possible, or practical, if you can have a colleague perform your management routine in your place, you’re partly covered.
However, teaching every little thing you do to a colleague to cover for you for three days is a little much. You definitely need someone you trust, with solid PPC fundamentals, on stand-by if the proverbial doo-doo hits the fan.
Budget Discipline
We’ve all done it — the old six figure daily budget. In the hopes of getting more traffic for the best ads, we’ll set campaign budgets so incredibly high there’s no way you could ever miss a single impression.
The problem? The existence of Murphy’s law. Something weird always seems to happen just when you’re not looking, or even worse, you’re looking but can’t fix it.
Before you leave, take some time to review all your campaign budgets and look for those that could put your campaigns — and your job — at risk. Once you’ve corrected the situation, do yourself a favor and keep them down where they should be.
Alerts, Baby
Obviously, the key here is to set up alerts to monitor campaign activity while you can’t do it yourself. Many of us have e-mail on our phones, which makes it easy to receive alerts.
If you use Google AdWords conversion tracking, then you can also use custom alerts to monitor changes in conversion rate, conversion volume, and cost per conversion.
Unfortunately for agencies, custom alerts are still only available for accounts that aren’t linked to a MCC. However, if you can login directly into the account, you should be able to set custom alerts even if the account is linked to your MCC.
Last But Not Least: Automation
Several excellent third party solutions allow you to automate some of the daily maintenance and to monitor performance and trigger alerts at will. These come at a cost, but for most agencies, such solutions are an excellent investment that comes in handy to protect their clients’ campaigns, and to make sure no details are left unmonitored. Among these are:
So there you have it. In short, don’t leave things to random chance, when you leave the office for any significant period of time. Make sure your clients know about your absence, that someone is available to execute simple tasks on your behalf (like pausing runaway campaigns or ad groups), that your budgets are in line with reality, and that you have e-mail alerts set for every critical component of your campaigns.
One more thing: try to bring a laptop with you and to check on things every night. After all, do you really have to attend all these after-show parties?