What are the next best steps to improve your Adwords account? Raise the bids to increase CTR? Lower the bids to lower the CPC? Write new ads? What to do? What to do?

My advice: NOTHING. Don’t do anything! Sometimes it is best to just leave your Adwords account alone. Sometimes there is no silver bullet. As has been said before, great ppc performance will never compensate for a crappy website and/or crappy business. At that point, throw in the towel, quit wasting you or your clients money! But if you truly believe it is an issue with your Adwords, and not the site or the business model, then I have some advice that will help improve your Adwords account, besides doing nothing.

You’re probably thinking, “Wow, thanks for wasting my time!” But hear me out before you bounce from the page. Don’t change anything until you get more information. So I’m not here to tell you what to do, but to tell you about the first place that I turn to when diagnosing a solution to my Adwords woes, BEFORE I make any changes.

I’m talking about the Dimensions Tab. So, why would I turn to the dimensions tab? Because when you are faced with a lot of data (and let’s face it — there is a LOT of data in any Adwords account), you need to sort through it to make any sense of what it means.

This is the very purpose of the Dimensions Tab — it lets you sort the data in your account in various ways. That is what you need to help you find the solution.

Caption: Different ways to carve up data using the Dimensions Tab.

A PPC Scenario to Consider:

The problem is that your CTR is consistently lower than you are comfortable with over several months.

Solution: Open the dimensions tab, and start using the different ways of breaking up your data by time. Over a long period of time your campaign might seem stagnate, however, if you break up the data by week you might find that you always do better in the last two weeks of the month or you break up the data by day of the week and find that on the weekend you get lots of impressions but few clicks.

The solutions now might be to manually, by using rules, or ad scheduling, increase your bids to be more competitive at the end of the month. You will want to pause campaigns or adgroups that perform poorly only at the times that you notice an issue. You can’t do that with a billboard. What if you were a coffee shop and you could pay for your billboard to only be up when people are on their morning commute to work? I guess with digital billboards you probably can, and there are probably shops that do that, but I’m getting sidetracked.

A Couple More Dimensions Tab Ideas:

Use the geographic sorting to see if there are locations that you should target with a new campaign because that area performs stronger than others that you are reaching.

Create customized reports by labeling campaigns, adgroups, ads, and keywords, and then using the dimensions tab, pull together just the data for that label that you have selected.

These are just a few ideas of how you could use the Dimensions Tab to help you know what to do to overcome whatever Adwords problem you are having. If you already use the Dimensions Tab, what other ideas do you have? If you aren’t using the Dimensions Tab, you can thank me later for the tip. 😉

-Steven McFarlane, PPC Manager