I was recently reading an article one Social Media Today about PPC tips and what stated as a small comment turned in to a big list of detailed tips regarding how we have approached Google Adwords and what we think works regarding optimizing your PPC. Here’s a link to the original article by Shailesh Ghimire: socialmediatoday.com

It seemed daunting at first when I thought about managing my PPC weekly let alone daily but now I find myself checking my Google Adwords account nearly every hour if not at last at 8am, 12pm, and 5pm. Here’s my take and tips on the subject.

What I’ve come to learn is that my ad position sweet spot in somewhere between 2.5 and 4.5. That there is a good return with in that position, if your position is below 2.5 you are probably over paying and if it’s over 4.5 you probably aren’t getting enough click to reach your daily maximum.

Now the reason I check at these 3 times through out the day is that my first visit at 8am is to adjust the PPC max bid based on the position. Based on my scenario above I look at the previous day and adjust appropriately by adding a penny or two depending on the position. For example if yesterday the ad was at position 5.5 then I add a penny to the PPC or if it was 6.5 maybe I add 2 cents. However, if it was 1.5 then I take away a penny.

Now everyday is slightly different than the last, there could be a trend of the competition going up or down and at around 12pm I can get a pretty good sense of where it’s going. If at 12 my adjustments from earlier in the day are taking effect correctly then my ad positions should reflect that change. At this point i have to consider that about half my day is gone so if it’s not working say my ad position was at 7.5 in the morning and I added 3 cents to get it to 4.5 and it still didn’t work, then I’ll up that to 5 cents. I keep in mind that I only have a few ours before the end of the day so I want to at least get as many clicks as I can to meet my daily maximum.

Lastly I’ll check it again at 8pm, this is really just to see how my ads performed through out the day and perhaps the most important is that I reset all my ads down to the lowest I can, why? because during the twilight hours I’m more certain that I can capitalize on good positions for the lowest PPC and also its a safety mechanism to ensure that I don’t leave some ads running rampant with high PPC bids. An example of how this could go wrong is that one time I had a bid at .80 PPC and forgot about it which burned a couple hundred dollars in a few minutes.

The last tip I can give you is that most trends if you are creating ads on trending topics is that they all follow the bell curve but its more of a left leaning bell curve. What this means is that in the first days of the trend the PPC cost are super low, you can get many click of pennies, however it quickly rises at an accelerated rate meaning it gets very expensive in a matter of days or hours. It then plateaus for a couple of days before dramatically dropping after a week or more. At this point in you can get relatively steadily dropping PPC where you’ll see your PPC dropping steadily and your clicks and impressions rising at the same rate. The best time to capitalize is at the beginning and at the end. I know it sounds like it’s easy to say and much harder to do. This is because few people are riding at the front of the trending topic wave constantly. My only tip for this is that if you are specialized in a category of discussion and you are regularly involved, you can get on top of these trending topics more often.

I hope these few tips will help other out there who are using Adwords.