Many businesses who are new to Digital Marketing, PPC (Pay Per Click advertising) or SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) ask the question, “Just how important is ongoing management and optimisation of my ads and SEO keywords?”
The answer to this question is that ongoing management is crucial.
Or rather, the answer is that ongoing management and optimisation of your PPC ads is only important if you want your spend to be effective, and you want good results from your digital marketing efforts. But we figure it’s probably a yes to that.
Ongoing optimisation of your digital marketing campaigns is important for many reasons
1. Optimising & monitoring saves you wasting money
Without keeping an eye on how your campaigns are performing, how the budget breakdown is working and what is getting you clicks, leads and ‘return’, you could waste money on the wrong traffic, ads and clicks. While testing is important to determine where you should place your efforts, it’s important to look at the performance of those tests and reevaluate as needed.
If you don’t constantly monitor performance and optimise, your budgets won’t get their maximum return. This is particularly true for paid ads. You could also waste money on the wrong traffic, ads, and clicks; you want to make sure the ads and audiences that give you the most return are what is spending the majority of your campaign’s budget allocation.
Monitoring and optimising your campaigns also stops you wasting money down the track. By properly testing the waters, you’ll determine what works and what does not for your business, which will save you from throwing money into areas that are likely to yield a poor result later. But of course, if you’re testing what platforms, audiences and strategies work, you do want to make sure you do this properly, with good management, monitoring and optimisation.
2. Things change
3. Keeping an eye on things means you can act on opportunities (and not miss them)
Without monitoring and optimising, you could miss important opportunities to win leads and customers.
At Excite Media, we prioritise optimising and pivoting when needed. We don’t just rest on our laurels when a campaign is performing well. We look out for which exact elements are performing the best, and take a look at what aspects of your results are most important to you (giving the best return for your business). We then revise the budget breakdown accordingly and give you our recommendations if we see an opportunity in making changes.
Say, for example, that you have a campaign that’s set up with three audiences, each with equal spend allocated to them.
- Let’s say for this example that they’re being served the same products.
- The campaign is going great and you’re seeing steady leads coming in.
- Everyone is happy.
- But as time goes on, it becomes clear that one of the audiences is driving 90 per cent of the leads. Another is driving 10 per cent. And the third audience isn’t contributing much at all.
- There are opportunities here to change the budget allocation from an equal three-way split to favour the higher return audience.
- There are also opportunities to work on changing up the messaging on the lower-performing audiences; perhaps the messaging does not resonate with audiences 2 and 3.
- The point is, you need to be seeing these patterns in order to act on the opportunities they provide.
- In this scenario, performance is great. But it could be incredible. Ongoing optimisation and monitoring give us that opportunity.
It’s similar for organic opportunities in SEO. You could be performing well for targeted keywords, but through ongoing monitoring, management and optimisation, your team of SEO experts could uncover opportunities in high-converting keywords for you that you could optimise more for. They could identify search terms with high relevancy that you hadn’t previously targeted that are all of a sudden getting high monthly search volumes on Google (that you’d do very well to show up on page one for).
So now that we’ve established why it’s important to continue monitoring, managing and optimising digital campaigns, you might be wondering the answer to another question…
Why do things change so much in digital marketing campaign performance?
Many people ask us this when they first get started with Digital Marketing. But we’ve got all the answers for you here — so read on, dear reader.
Algorithms change
Google is constantly changing its algorithm, for both organic Google search, and paid Google Ads. Even Facebook’s algorithm changes. We’re always reiterating and optimising, so that we are able to pivot when we need to — like when this happens.
Sometimes, an algorithm or core update will come into play, with new rules, new weight towards certain features over others, or smarter ways to monitor existing rules.
In these cases, keywords and ads that were performing exceptionally well previously can suddenly drop down in their ranking and performance, or become more expensive.
Competition changes
Just like you wanting to improve your own performance in organic search, competitors too will update their SEO efforts and strategies.
This could mean that a competitor you were previously outranking for certain terms now outranks you, particularly when they ‘up’ their SEO efforts.
Other times, a new competitor could come from ‘nowhere’, and — very suddenly — your top keywords could drop from #1 to #7. Constant monitoring, optimisation and reiteration is the solution, in order to ensure you’re getting the best bang for your buck for SEO.
Where there’s not much point in investing more into a keyword that’s already performing at #1, continuous reiteration, monitoring and optimisation means that we always have a finger on the pulse of where the budgets of effort, time and spend is needed the most, at any one given time, with all of these fluctuations in mind.
Keyword trends change
Keyword trends also change all the time, from seasonal factors to recent events and what’s popular at the time. (Searches for trampolines are always much higher in the lead up to Christmas and school holiday periods, for example). So it’s important to keep optimising and monitoring regularly, to ensure the SEO strategy accommodates changes in search volume and other keyword trends, pivoting when needed.
Ad policies change
Performance changes
There are so many other factors that come into play with performance and the changes in this.
On Facebook Ads, audiences and ads that were previously performing amazing will at some point come to the point of fatigue, where an audience has been exhausted and you’ve got the most benefit you can with those exact ads, to that exact audience. Ads that are left too long don’t just drop in results, but also end up being more expensive.
When we look after your ads, we keep a good eye out for this, so that we’re ready to go with new strategy, new creatives, new copy and other changes when a refresh is needed.
Some other things to keep in mind about digital marketing campaign management
New data brings new information to light
On both Meta and Google Ads, we can learn so much from doing a round of ads, allowing us to improve your Return On Ad Spend, and prioritise your budget allocation to the areas that will get you the best return (with your goals in mind as well). We’ll also test different variants, audiences, strategies, approaches, messaging, and ad creative types, in order to find what works.
Auto-applying changes sucks
While it’s tempting to opt for automated changes, we strongly advise against this — it ends up more expensive, and tends to get you lower results.
Take Google Ads bots for example (known in the industry for making silly decisions when set to auto apply suggestions within a Google Ads campaign). They’re known to add a bunch of broad, unrelated but kind of similar keywords as auto-applied suggestions when auto updates are enabled…meaning you suddenly start paying for clicks from irrelevant search terms, spending your precious budget that could have gone to relevant searches instead.
At Excite Media, when we’re looking after digital marketing campaigns for you, we will do the opposite; refining the searches your ads come up for by adding irrelevant search terms into a negative keyword list (so you don’t pay for clicks on close but irrelevant searches) and will also add any beneficial keywords that become an opportunity to improve your results. Every suggested keyword will be carefully reviewed before applying. And we’ll also use data and insights to drive decisions, not chance.
SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-off
In terms of SEO, we are constantly monitoring and analysing the keyword performance of specific focus terms, overall organic search performance, your website’s technical performance and more, to ensure that your SEO efforts are having maximum impact.
Each month we work on the SEO keywords and improvements that will help achieve maximum Search Engine Optimisation.
There’s a lot of technical stuff in what we do
There’s so much more we could talk about here — there’s a lot of what goes into each of these areas on an ongoing basis, and as specialist areas, they do get a bit complicated (how long is a piece of string?).
But if you’d like more information on the kinds of things we do in a certain area, just ask your friendly neighbourhood Excite Media Account Manager.
