I usually blog about the search optimization projects we are running for clients here in DC as well as our national clients. Thought today I would focus on PPC tracking with PPC software. Chad told me a great story from one of our clients the other day. They hired us to set up their PPC campaign in Google Adwords, which we did for a small fee. They wanted to manage the campaign themselves, despite our warnings about the importance of disciplined PPC tracking and how hard it is to do without PPC software. Off they went.
Well, we got a call the other day saying "help, something has gone really wrong with our PPC campaign." Turns out, they had made a change to their web site and there was some communication break down. The people who changed the web site didn't communicate with the PPC campaign team, so they kept spending money to send clicks (expensive clicks) to a web page that no longer existed. This went on for almost a month, at a great cost.
I said to Chad, if this isn't ad for PPC tracking services and PPC software, I don't know what is. When we bring on a client for PPC management, we of course use PPC tracking tools to manage their campaign. The first thing we do is set them up in our proprietary PPC software. What this PPC software does is:
1) Integrates with Google Adwords data via a daily feed.
2) The feed can be set up in about 5 minutes and is delivered to us via email.
3) Imports the data at around 5am each morning.
4) Crunches through the thousands of lines of data.
5) Applies PPC tracking business rules to the data to determine what needs to be done.
6) Builds actionable tasks in our workflow system to manually review and adjust ppc settings (bids, spend limits, etc) where needed.
The Semify PPC tracking system is a little different from others in that we have not tried to fully automate the bidding process. Our current view is that there is value in the human judgment process that is fairly difficult to program into a computer. That being said, there are very easy PPC tracking rules that can be applied to data to cut down the time spent reviewing data each day.
Just like our client mentioned above, many people start out with a great focus on their PPC tracking activities. At first, you can stay focused on the needs of your PPC search campaign. But over time, other things get in the way and people stop careful PPC tracking activities. That's when things go wrong. Our view is that easy-to-use PPC tracking software can keep this from happening by monitoring for you and flagging the events that really need attention and decision making. That's what we've built at Semify to support your PPC search campaigns.