the PPC Book

While not the ideal situation, many PPC analysts have been in the position where they have to take over a PPC campaign that was originally opened by the client themselves. What often happens is the client started with Adwords as a way to gain new customers, being the entreprenuers they are, they take it on themselves, and one of 2 things happens:

1. They get slaughtered (70% of the time).
2. They overachieve, and actually have a marginally ok campaign (30%).

I can think of many examples of both situations. The 30% are the easiest to work with, because they actually have an idea of how to do it the right way, but they realize the number of hours required to actually do a comprehensive job managing the campaign correctly, and by the time they come to me they are more than happy to hand over the reins.

The 70% are the most difficult to work with. These are the people who jumped in the water without thinking, and didn’t set the campaign up remotely correctly for whatever reason, and have high expectations. What they’ve done is actually worse than never trying, because now their account has a poor history, which can be difficult to overcome.

In either case, the analyst ends up working on an account in which the client can log in and access the campaign. Now, we’re spending their money, so that’s perfectly ok, I would do the same thing. However, what has to be avoided at all costs is the client actually making any changes whatsoever to the account while it’s under the analysts control. I know it sounds crazy, but it has happened to me personally (only once, thankfully). Not a fun conversation to have with someone, but at that point you have to let your client have it, full on.

So, the question is, how do you keep an eye on your client? Well, that’s simple, and as soon as this feature came out (seems like eons ago) I was all over it. It’s the My Change History tool. To get to this page, go to the:

Campaign Management Tab
The click Tools
Under “Analyze Your Ad Performance”, see My Change History

Here you can track everything that has happened within the account for the last 3 months. Specifically, it will tell you:

* Daily budget adjustments
* Keyword edits or additions
* Changes in distribution preferences
* Changes made via the AdWords API

So, if you are in the situation with a client that you suspect there are changes being made (it’s usually very obvious), you can confirm this fact by checking here.

How do you know if the change was made by the client specifically? Well, the first column in the history tab will tell you the user login. Since you should be using your MCC to manage the account, the client will always login under their own username.

How else can this be used? Well, in two primary ways.

1. Managing multiple campaigns at the same time can get tricky, and sometimes you need to go back at your own changes and try to correlate cause and effect. For example, all of a sudden you see a huge drop in CPA for an adgroup, and also a drop in overall impression volume. What happened? Well, you can go back and see that 5 days ago you lowered the content network bids to $.10 for an adgroup that wasn’t converting well for content targeting. Ah, now I remember! Sounds silly but it you’re managing 20+ accounts, you can relate.

2. Keeping an eye on your junior analysts or sub contractors. If you are in the process of training newer analysts, or you are responsible for the performance of a campaign you aren’t managing directly, the account history tab is absolutely invaluable.

So, as you see, if you haven’t yet taken advantage of this feature, you should defintely get on the ball. It’s extremely useful in a number of different scenarios.

written by Jeff Hudson