The Client To begin with, let’s start by talking about the client. This particular client was—as you can probably imagine—fairly large and well-established. They were spending about $90,000 a month on paid search advertising and had been managing their accounts in house for several years. To their credit, their campaigns were actually working. They were driving a fair amount of leads and a reasonable number of sales. But, despite all that, they were barely breaking even on their campaigns.
A few months before they came to us, they whatsapp database bumped up their budget by 30%, hoping that this would fix things and make their campaigns profitable. However, as they eventually discovered, you can’t fix an unprofitable campaign by spending more money. So, by the time we started looking at the account, they were spending almost $120,000 a month and still not getting great results. They had a problem, they just couldn’t figure out what it was. Assembling the Data As we started looking at the account, the first thing we did was choose a date range to evaluate.
Simple as this sounds, it’s actually an important key to successfully tracking down the problems in a bad paid search account. While it’s tempting to try and track down problems by running a blow-by-blow analysis on your account, the best way to see what’s going on in your account is to start by looking at the big picture. On a day-to-day or even week-to-week basis, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds, but if you take a step back and look at the past 3-6 months, it’s a lot easier to spot fundamental problems. So, with that in mind, we decided to look at the account performance over the past 90-days. That date range was long enough to see broad trends, but also didn’t dip into the time period before their last big adjustment.