Everyone has problems separating work and home. For me, sometimes it’s more about separating work and my cats. I must admit, I might be a bit of a cat lady (understatement of the year), so sometimes my mind wanders to my cats at work and to work when I’m at home with the cats. This combination of PPC and cats inevitably led me to find work advice from the unlikeliest of places: these 2 little furballs:
Here are three PPC lessons I learned from my cats.
Never Stop Playing With Something … Even If It’s Dead
Cats can sometimes be a little, well, creepy and continue to play with their prey long after it’s, well, dead. As a cat owner, this tends to not be very pleasant or fun, but the cats do seem to enjoy batting around some mouse or bird.
It can be easy to look at a campaign and see that it’s not working – either it’s too expensive or not even generating clicks – and decide to walk away. And at some point, you definitely should! But, even when it looks like it might be ready to be buried, keep batting it around. Try something new, maybe something even a little outside the box. Lower the bids, raise the bids, pause keywords, try new ad text – just play around. But don’t spend all of your time (and money) on it. Set a very small budget to play with and a time frame long enough to let the changes sink in (I would recommend at least a month, if not more). But don’t give up on that campaign, ad group, or keyword too quickly – you never know when it might jump back to life and scurry away.
Grooming Is Important
After sleeping and eating, grooming is probably a cat’s third favorite pastime. They are meticulous groomers and seem to need to have every little hair in its rightful place. Hours a day are spent cleaning – which can be a bit awkward for any guests you might have over.
Now I’m not saying that in order to have a successful PPC account you need to be clean and well groomed (although I’d imagine that your coworkers would appreciate that), but regularly “grooming” your account is definitely a good idea. Every few months, go through all your campaigns and make sure everything is in the right place:
- Look for keywords that are in the wrong ad groups
- Check for duplicate keywords
- Make sure you haven’t added negatives that might be blocking relevant traffic
- Clear out keywords with low search volume that are just bringing your Quality Score down
- Double check that your ads are going to relevant landing pages
When working with a large amount of numbers and keywords and ads, sometimes mistakes happen and items are missed. Spending some dedicated time combing through your account looking for these small mistakes can help get your account running better. (You can also use the Performance Tracker in our free AdWords Grader to automatically run an audit every month.)
Learn From The Big Guys
A little kitten always needs a big cat to help show them the ropes. They learn from their big buddy about what they can and can’t do, often showing them their place when they step out of line. It’s important for the kitten to learn from an adult so they’ll know what to do and how to find their way.
And it’s the same for PPC managers! Having trouble figuring out why impressions have dropped or why all of a sudden all of your ads have been disapproved? Look to a big guy for help – blogs like PPC Hero and (ahem) WordStream provide great advice for a variety of AdWords and Bing Ads problems. They also offer advice to help you avoid mistakes in the future (as well as cat gifs). And the AdWords forums are a great place to ask questions and get helpful, in-depth answers, no matter how difficult the problem might seem.
All gifs from http://www.catgifpage.com/