Quick Wins: Low Effort Changes For Incremental Gains

As marketers, we’re constantly making time to think about the bigger picture. Whether it’s meeting with senior decision makers to understand the strategic direction of the business, analysing years of past data to find patterns we can exploit or doing deep audience research to build more effective customer profiles, we’re always looking for the next major project to drive the account forward.

Luckily, it’s not always that difficult.

Any account needs a well built out strategy behind it to ensure that things are moving in the right direction and the activity that’s running is supporting both the immediate goals of the campaigns and the longer term goals of the business. However, there’s also the opportunity to find quick tactical fixes that can immediately improve account performance.

The best part? These require almost zero effort to implement and they’re almost guaranteed to lead to a bump in performance, especially for smaller accounts where spend is limited.

1) Ad Scheduling

Managing budgets is a constant battle, especially for smaller accounts. Overspending by even a few percent a day can quickly add up, leading to stretched budgets as the month comes to an end and difficult decisions about where to allocate spend.

Often you’ll find that the bulk of your performance is centred around a specific time of the day or week. For ecommerce accounts, people often do their shopping after work or on the weekend. For B2B accounts, you’ll see your leads coming in during the working day with interest significantly dropping outside of working hours. With this in mind, why waste spend during the times when your customers aren’t converting?

It only takes an hour to review day & time information for your account and you’ll immediately be able to identify the periods when your ads should be active. Scheduling ads to only appear during the times customers are proven to convert means that you won’t be wasting spend outside of those times leading to improved account efficiency. Whether it’s through the platform interface or in your site analytics, taking the time to review this information and make the necessary campaign changes more than pays off in the long run.

2) IP Exclusions

Everyone loves seeing their ad “in the wild”. Whether it’s an online ad, a billboard or a TV commercial, seeing the end result of your work out in the world is always satisfying. There is a problem with this though - every time you or your client see your online ad, that’s registered as an impression on the campaign which over time leads to a lower clickthrough rate and a less efficient account. In the worst case scenario, someone involved with the ad can click on it - meaning that you’re now paying for internal traffic that has no value.

Setting up IP Exclusions in your account is a simple way around this problem. Adding your IP address, your client’s office IP address and the IP addresses of those who work from home helps to ensure that your ads won’t appear to anyone involved with the campaign and will ensure budget is spent on your actual customers.

To help get this across the line, it’s important to remind your clients that IP addresses aren’t personally identifiable and they’re still able to check in on ads via the platform ad preview tools or third party sites like ISearchFrom.

3) Account Level Negative Keywords

We all know the importance of Google’s Search Term Report in helping you identify irrelevant searches that your keywords are matching to. This is a routine part of optimisation to make sure that each campaign is bringing in the highest quality traffic possible.

While campaign level negative keywords are crucial, the importance of account level negative keywords can often go overlooked. Applied at the top level to the entire account, these are negative keywords that are applicable to most campaigns and should be excluded from the day the campaign launches.

Here’s a list of 400 common account level negative keywords, split out by category including;

  • Academic Terms (Classes, Courses, Enrolments)

  • Careers (Job Openings, Hiring, Applications)

  • Informational (Articles, Posts, Stories)

  • Competitor Sites (eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia)

Reviewing and applying these terms is a simple and effective way to make sure you’re paying for the right kind of traffic and it only takes a few minutes to do.

Digital marketing is hard with every day bringing a new challenge and something new to learn. However, keep your eyes open for the quick wins and you’ll find that sometimes effectiveness doesn’t have to correlate to effort. With Q4 well underway, making sure that the small things are done well will help to ensure that results stay positive whatever peak period throws at you.

For more quick wins, get in touch.