Have you ever tried using Zapier or IFTTT to automate daily or weekly tasks?
As a PPC agency, it sometimes feels like we do the same tasks again and again. I wonder if there’s a solution out there to do it for us, so we can focus our time on more important things.
Since our curiosity hit an all-time high, we’ve partnered with SEMRush to explore what’s possible with today’s PPC automation tools, so that you can get more things down and be more successful.
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If you’ve read our blog post from yesterday, then you saw how we do PPC research a little different from other agencies.
We don’t do it for the sake of seeing competition levels or average cost per clicks. We do PPC research solely for the sake of finding expansion opportunities, like:
- Keywords we’re currently not getting impressions for
- New display placements we’re not targeting
- Social audiences we could take advantage of
In addition to this, you can create Google Ads scripts that help you create brand new Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAG) from the search terms that reach a high enough impression threshold.
This means that automated research, like having a Google Ads script create your new SKAG, can help you save time.
In addition to that, you can also do the same for automatic display network placements that you find in your dimensions tab.
With a script, you can automatically extract high performing automatic placements to target directly.
If you deal with a lot of keywords -- or have a lot of eCommerce product groups -- you may be spending a lot of timing adjusting bids.
And while you can create keyword filters to speed up your bid optimization efforts, automated bidding can help you identify the exact bid you should set down to almost real-time efforts. This will give you the best margins for that conversion.
PPC automation tools like Acquisio or Marin help do so much more than automated bidding, but that’s where they started out -- with bidding.
If you’re an online retailer, then you know your costs and margins pretty well, and bidding becomes very black and white.
If you’re in the lead gen or SaaS space where the sales happens offline or weeks later, you can still use automated bids. Just make sure you can track things back to your actual sales and ROI.
Did you know that you can actually tell Google or Bing to pause your ads if performance for the day is below a certain threshold?
These automated rules and scripts don’t require an expensive subscription to a SaaS product. In fact, they’re completely free.
Automated rules help you automatically pause and enable things, or even adjust bids. Scripts can be much fancier and make adjustments based on things like weather patterns (if you’re a water park for example).
This video shows how automated rules function in Google Ads. As you'll see, automated rules and scripts can be great time-savers.
If you think about all the different combinations of how you can test text and image ads, then you’ll quickly see that your opportunities are expanding as fast as the feeling of your brain exploding (in a good way).
A PPC automation tool like AdBasis can help you identify which different combinations of your ad you want to test.
With this in mind, you can start testing different ad variations much quicker and at scale. You can also mix and match things like location, device, day of the week, or other factors to make your ads more geographically specific and relatable to your prospects.
Most PPC platforms have great analytics and metrics to begin with. Data insights, however, are only great if you can use them to take action.
By using automated rules, you’re going to be limited to the data and metrics that the PPC platform has made available to you.
But what if there are other data insights you can’t see in plain sight?
A tool like Optmyzr helps you see opportunities that regular Google Ads metrics can’t show you.
It could be that a certain day, or time of day, has the best opportunity for a stronger ROI. Or you can use something called “Cause Trees,” which shows “how different PPC metrics influence other elements of an account. Quickly visualize the root cause of a change in performance.”
I don’t even need to tell you why this is important :)
We automate things to both improve performance and free up time to focus on other aspects to grow our business.
PPC automation helps with all of that. When done correctly and based on a solid foundation, your PPC campaigns can reach a new level.
What have been your biggest time savers and new insights you’ve gained?
Curious to hear! :D
