As it’s the time for New Year’s resolutions — high ideals we aim for in order to improve our lives in any number of ways — my advice to you is to resolve to increase the amount of automation used within your SEM campaigns.
Why? Well, my philosophy has always been that an account manager’s strategy will make or break a client campaign. Small changes here and there can nudge performance in the right direction, but an overall vision is what can lead to changes that help performance reach a global, rather than local, maxima.
So it would seem odd to be advocating as much automation as possible. However, it’s a long-held view of many experienced PPCers that getting rid of as much heavy lifting as possible — in this case, by handing it off to an automated process — will free up your time for the all-important strategizing that a machine can’t do.
To help make this point and provide some inspiration for areas where you could lean on automation, here are a few examples (and some resources to help you on your way).
Reporting
At QueryClick, we use various APIs (AdWords, Google Analytics and more) to populate our reports, allowing account managers to quickly get the data and make sure that the large majority of “reporting time” is put to analyzing the information, digging for insights and planning important actions.
A really accessible way to quickly get the same sort of data — and to create custom, insightful dashboards — is to use the Google Analytics Spreadsheet add-on.
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