PPC School: Make Evidence-Based Decisions
One of the things that drives me crazy about failing PPC campaigns is that the vast majority of the time they could be successful, if only a more scientific approach was taken in the process of building and maintaining them. At least four or five times a week a client comes to us with a campaign that isn’t working and when we ask them to explain their decision process, they say things like, ‘I reckoned’ and ‘I assumed.’ A lot of the time these campaigns have been built on little more than educated guesswork, guesswork that has often cost their creators thousands of pounds.
When dealing with the Internet there really isn’t an excuse for guessing at things, the beauty of the online world is that everything is trackable. In the initial stages you can look at search volumes of particular keywords, traffic estimates, click price estimates, etc., then, once the campaign is up and running you can begin to track things in even more data with analytics, what’s the most popular page on the site, what’s the least, where are people clicking off, all this can be used to optimise the account.
There are still no guarantees but at least you’re making sound, evidence-based decisions rather than operating on hunches like some online Columbo. The mantra should be, if you think it’s going to work, prove it. When the information is out there, it would be crazy not to.
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