After everything is setup and running possibly the most important step is reviewing all keywords every 2 weeks to a month to see how things are going and make potential corrections.  In this step it is important to have a quality ad tracker to ensure reliable data in order to make educated decisions.

The frequency of checking your ad tracker depends on how many clicks are being made, the more clicks and conversions that are recorded the more reliable the information.  It is important to not make immediate decisions but to wait until you have sufficient information.  A bad example would be after your first conversion comes through to assume that the keyword that generated the actual sale is the only good keyword when in reality it could have been luck.  Make sure you have enough data to make an educated decision.

After logging into your ad tracker it is time to go ahead and analyze the data to see which keywords are successful and which keywords are not.  The common error at this point is to look at clicks and not conversions.  Clicks are not the definition of success if a keyword receives 1000’s of clicks and no conversions it is not a good keyword by any means.  After looking at the profit or loss indicator from your PPC tracking tool you will know which how to change your bids.  Profitable keywords need to remain profitable or become more profitable.  If the profit margin on every click is high you may want to consider increasing your bid.  For example if you are making $2 on every click and you are only paying .50 you may want to consider increasing your bid to $1 per click to receive more traffic and more profit.

If a keyword is making money do one of the following

• Keep the current bid
• Increase the bid – if the profit margin is high
• Decrease your bid – if profit margin is very low.

The last series is extremely important and often overlooked which has undoubtedly led to PPC failure; we will talk about the last issue what to do if your keywords are loosing money!

Related Articles:

• Dominating PPC 101 – increase conversions (part 6 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – PPC Setup (part 3 of 8 series)