Daily, Weekly, Monthly Checklist
This article is broken down into 3 categories, daily, weekly and monthly. I call the daily chores “coffee items” as I like to have them done daily before my 2nd cup of coffee has been poured. The important thing to take away is that you have a checklist, this one or one of your own that allows you to stay current on all goings-on inside your Adwords account. Set it and forget it is NOT an option for Adwords Professionals
Daily
Check ad spend
Look for outliers, too high, too low? Are we on budget for a month? Check spend on weekends; do we want to bid up or down on Saturday? Is it set properly for our busiest days of the week? Slowest day?
Add negative keywords
Clicks can be very expensive, $50 and even more in some cases. By removing non-relevant keywords we make certain our visitors are on point with our services.
Summarize previous day’s results
Compare against top days, slow days. Look for spikes and valleys in the data.
Make sure we’re in the ad position we want to be in
Careful here, many Adwords managers will simply check the average position of the ad for the previous period. This can be misleading as competitors ramp up and down throughout the day. This is better checked multiple times per day.
Track leads and revenue
How was yesterday? Compare to the previous day, week, month, year. What was our cost per conversion?
Exclude display network websites
Are our ads appearing on websites we want them to be on? Add an exclusion for websites that are not representing our service well.
Track the bottom dwellers
Do we have keywords that are just not performing? Why are they not performing? Check landing pages, quality score, ads. Are we getting any assisted conversions? Kill it if ROI is not there
Track performance vs other channels
Paid search, Organic, Social Media, other search engines? Check trends of all channels
Check for Adwords messages
It’s easy to overlook messages from Google in the account manager as Google will sometimes bombard you with unimportant items. However, this must be checked daily as there will times when there is something of value there.
Conversion tracking
Is your conversion tracking firing correctly? You don’t want to go a week without realizing that you haven’t been recording conversions.
Check Competitors Ads
This is another item that can be done multiple times per day. Check-in your ad preview tool what your competitors are up to. If you’re offering $25 off are they offering $50? Continual monitoring is essential!
Weekly
Website health
Check at least weekly that plug-in and theme updates have been done or are not needed. Also, check downtime, no malware insertions, backups have been performed and page speed is where it should be.
Testing data is being recorded
How is you’re A/B and multivariate testing going? Ads, landing pages, keywords button text tests all need to be checked at least weekly to make sure it’s all working. If not you could waste an entire month with no actionable data!
Geo-targeting
Is the geographic source for our clicks on target?
Errors in Search Console
Check to make sure there are no errors being reported in the search console.
Monthly
Time of day, dayparting
Are you maximizing exposure during peak conversion times and minimizing during off-hours? Even a bid of minus 20% can make a difference in your ad spend and conversion counts.
Determine winners and losers of tests
All month long you’ve been testing ad text, calls to action, button text, imagery, unique value propositions and more. Now is the time to declare a winner in each category.
Throw out the losers!
You’ve declared champions in all your testing. Now is the time to take that knowledge and create new challenges to go up against the winners. It could be a subtle color change or a complete redesign of your landing pages. Remember ABT is the rule ALWAYS BE TESTING!
Schedule a call with Google
You Adwords Support Team at Google might not have your business acumen (or maybe they do) but one thing for sure, collectively they know the Adwords Software better than anyone. A monthly call with your Adwords account manager can many times uncover outstanding action items that can make a difference in your campaign!