This post was sponsored by Adzooma. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Paid advertising is a time-intensive discipline. There’s so much to concentrate on and so little time.

On a regular basis, PPC managers need to:

• Run reports
• Research keywords
• Do account maintenance
• Devise strategy
• Work on creatives
• Mull over ad copy
• Tweak landing pages

But there is an easier way to do all this – and it involves automation.

In this piece, we’re going to look at how automation can streamline your common tasks such as:

• Researching keywords
• Reallocating ad budgets
• Optimizing keywords
• Compiling reports
• Enabling ad scheduling

These tasks take so much time from your working week, but with automation, it gets easier.

Keyword Research

When running search campaigns, thoroughly researching keywords needs to be one of the first tasks you undertake, and it’s important to look at the following three metrics:

• Estimated search volume: Choosing a keyword with low search volume can cap performance.
• Keyword difficulty: A keyword with a lot of competition will prove more expensive to bid on.
• Cost per click: The auction price indicates whether it’s profitable to go after this term.

From here, you also want to look at related keywords, keyword variations, and commonly searched questions that contain your keyword.

In order to increase sales and leads, you need to be able to target the right type of customer looking for products and services that are relevant to your business.

It’s a continuous process, too. Initially starting with a small pool of keywords is best so you can easily monitor what’s working well, then you should add to these keywords and remove the ones that aren’t working as you progress.

Conducting this type of research is difficult without tools. You could do a lot of it manually by searching over and over on Google, but with a tool, all you need to do is enter your keyword ideas and it will automate the process for you.

Which Tool(s) You Should Use

When starting your keyword research process there are a number of great tools out there showing you key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and cost-per-click.

When your ad campaigns are running, the Adzooma platform gives you keyword recommendations inside the Opportunities feature. This means you won’t have to go back through the keyword research process again.

The platform looks at your last 30 days’ worth of performance and identifies new keywords that will lead to an increase in clicks and conversions.

You can apply these recommendations to your account in a few clicks.

Account Maintenance

It’s important to check in on your Google, Microsoft, or Facebook accounts everyday or so for general maintenance and campaign optimization.

There is always room for improvement and there are always opportunities to improve account performance, whether that’s reallocating budgets or changing location targeting.

This maintenance can be very time-consuming. Going through every part of your account on the lookout for opportunities is long and hard work, but that’s where automation comes in.

With automation, you can get hours of your working week back by applying recommendations, such as:

• Optimizing keywords: Pause non-converting keywords, increase bids for successful keywords, add negative keywords, etc.
• Reallocating budgets: Increase budgets for effective campaigns and change budget delivery.
• Fixing spelling mistakes: Adjusting the grammar and spelling errors in your ad copy.
• Enabling ad scheduling: Fix wasting spend by only running ads when they’re most effective.
• Changing location targeting: Only target the people who matter.

It isn’t possible to automate all your paid advertising maintenance, but there are areas that you can fix with just a couple of clicks that will have a huge impact on campaign performance.

Which Tool(s) You Should Use

Adzooma offers hundreds of powerful recommendations for Google, Microsoft and Facebook Ads, many of which can be applied with a single click.

It makes optimizing your account so much easier and will improve your campaign performance considerably.

You can see just a few of the recommendations below:

Reporting

Reporting remains one of the most important aspects of PPC.

Reporting allows you to communicate clearly with your stakeholders to give them a full understanding of the work you’re doing and allows you to easily explain and illustrate your strategy.

Reporting also allows you to step away from the granular data and take in a birds-eye view of your overall paid advertising activity, where you can compare the likes of Google vs Facebook performance or analyze your customer journey models in more depth.

However, manually compiling data from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook Ads, and importing it into a visually compelling spreadsheet can take hours. It’s time from your working week you don’t have to lose.

That’s where tools come in. Reporting tools allow you to build captivating reports by just dragging and dropping your key metrics from a number of different sources into a dashboard.

It takes minutes and from there you can easily download the report and send it to your key stakeholders.

Which Tool(s) You Should Use

The Adzooma platform is the ultimate in paid advertising reporting offering a number of different, including:

• PPC Performance Report: Identifies where you can improve your campaigns and allows you to take action from the report.
• Best & Worst Performers: Shows which keywords, ads, and campaigns are performing best and worst across your Google, Microsoft and Facebook accounts.
• Cross Channel Report: Compares ad accounts from two different networks (e.g., Google and Microsoft) and identifies what’s performing best.

You can also create your own report within the platform too by dragging and dropping in the key metrics that matter to you.

From there, you can download the report as a PDF and send it to your key stakeholders.

A Nuanced Understanding for Paid Advertising Success

Automation has been a buzzword in marketing circles for many years, and it has its detractors and disciples. However, it’s a nuanced approach that should be taken to automation.

It’s clear that for menial tasks, automation is a blessing. But for tasks that require a human touch, relying too heavily on automation can lead to detrimental results.

So stay mindful. Don’t let automation take over and always make sure that you’re staying on top of your campaigns yourself and remaining healthily skeptical over the recommendations you’re receiving.

It’s that nuanced approach that will not only save you time but help you navigate PPC’s complexities better than ever.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Adzooma. Used with permission.
In-post Image: Image by Adzooma. Used with permission.