Pam NeelyTime. It’s arguably the most valuable resource we have. It’s especially valuable to marketers, who usually have limited budgets, limited resources, and increasing demands for performance.
When you’re under pressure like that, anything you can do to save some time is valuable.
Which is why we aren’t at all worried about machine learning “taking” marketers’ jobs.
Marketers, almost universally, have way more than enough to do. If you’re in the marketing trenches, the one thing you could probably use more of is time.
Automation can provide that extra time.
Agencies like Philly Search Engine Marketing have saved “a ton” of time with pay per click automation, allowing them to take on more clients. The free time PPC automation can give could actually be the thing that finally gives you time to earn a promotion, or a raise, or a slew of new clients.
So what would you do with a little extra time? We’ve got 20 suggestions.
Your competitors’ ads can be a rich source of ideas for new ad copy, images, and videos. If you don’t have a library of which ads your key competitors have been running, you may be missing out on some fantastic ideas for your own ads. But no worries if you’re not doing this. All you need to get started is a simple spreadsheet, including a column or two for screenshots of the actual ads and landing pages.
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Keep your PPC skills sharp.
PPC marketing is constantly evolving. That means your skill set needs to be evolving, too. So try to read even a few more PPC articles every week, or listen in on a few PPC webinars.
Use those new ideas you picked up from your competitors to create and test more ads. Just a few words in PPC ad copy can make a major difference in results.
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Create more landing pages.
The more targeted your landing pages are, typically the higher your campaigns’ conversion rates will be. If you’ve got less than 10 landing pages for even a medium-sized PPC account, there’s room for opportunity.
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Take a walk.
Let’s squeeze in something for you. Even just a short walk can give you new ideas and perspective on your work. Many professionals find they get so many good ideas walking (and so many time-saving ideas, too) that taking a walk actually ends up making time, not taking time.
Bonus: Get one of your teammates to walk with you. Or really step things up and try a few walking meetings with your team.
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Redo your negative keyword list.
Keywords are still important. And while you may have worked really hard to develop a regular keyword list, most marketers spend barely 20% of that amount of time on negative keywords.
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Test your landing pages.
Running split-tests of landing pages can take a little work to set up, but once you know how to do it, it’s actually pretty easy. And if you can set up regular tests, it’s absolutely possible that you could improve your campaigns’ performance by 30% or more over time.
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Set up a few experimental campaigns.
Google, Facebook and the other ad platforms are always coming out with cool new types of advertising campaigns. If there’s a particular campaign type you’ve been wanting to test, that might be a great use of the free time PPC automation can give you.
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Take a co-worker out to lunch.
Marketers don’t work alone. Whether it’s Sales, or your IT department, or Customer Support, there are probably several people that help you do your job (or could help you). So spend a little time to get to know them. Even one lunch out a week can build powerful professional alliances.
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Document your work processes.
Want a promotion? One of the best ways to get one is to demonstrate that you’ve developed systems – proven, predictable systems – that you could easily hand off to a new hire.
Having documented workflows also helps a lot for vacations, too. And for business restructurings. It shows you’re ready for bigger things.
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Learn new technologies.
One of the major stress points for marketers is the number of new technologies we hear about and that we need to learn about. If you’ve got a little free time, it could absolutely change your career to be your company’s in-house expert on, say, Echo Auto, voice search or chatbots.
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Try out AMP Display Ads and AMP landing pages.
Page speed is rocket fuel for conversion rates. See how AMP display ads and landing pages could help your campaigns in this blog post.
Bing may not offer as much advertising inventory as Google Ads, but that’s no reason to ignore it. In fact, because so many PPC marketers focus only on Google Ads, Bing’s platform is often less competitive and less expensive. If you haven’t done some serious tests with this platform in the last few years, it’s time to give it another try.
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Use PPC ads to optimize the meta title tags and descriptions for your website’s pages.
Want to know the easiest way to get more free organic search traffic? It’s to optimize the title tags and meta description tags of your website’s pages. These two tags also just happen to fit nicely into standard PPC text ad formatting, which means you’ve got a tailor-made title tag and meta description tag system sitting right there in your Google Ads account.
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Meditate.
Seriously. Meditation minimizes stress, can help you think way more clearly, and will give you a proven way to shake off any friction among your co-workers.
Start meditation with baby steps. Find a quiet place, sit up straight, and count your breathes from one to ten, and then start back at one again. Aim for five minutes to start. Work up to 20 minutes if you can.
And yes – this will actually help you do your job better (though you may need to do it in your personal time).
Think you can’t meditate? No worries. There are plenty of great meditation apps to make it easier.
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Maintain a test and changes log for your PPC accounts.
Some PPC pros call this a “testing journal,” others call it a log. Whatever you call it, having a record of changes you’ve made and tests you’ve done and what the results of those actions were can be incredibly valuable.
Having a record like this will reduce how many mistakes you’ll have to remake, for one thing. It will also help you prove how hard you’ve been working (which is nice for review time), and let you work methodically, rather than sporadically.
Try to include screenshots in your test log if possible, too. Also consider putting your log into a Google spreadsheet so everyone on your team can access it.
There are so many things you can do with ad extensions to enhance your PPC ads. If you haven’t really tested these extensively in your campaigns, it’s time to try them now. The right ad extension, used wisely, could increase your campaigns’ results by up to 20%.
Done correctly, retargeting can often get conversions for a fraction of what standard PPC campaigns can achieve. That’s not always the case, but if you don’t have at least a couple of retargeting campaigns running right now, we urge you to invest some time and ad budget into testing this lucrative advertising tactic.
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Do more with audience targeting.
Some advanced PPC pros say that keywords are dead – the future of PPC is in selecting the right audience.
They could well be right. But this is also a clue for something else you could be doing. Audience selection can have a massive effect on campaign results. If you haven’t already been maxing out this aspect of campaign management, doing it now would be a great use of the free time PPC automation can give you.
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Play around with PPC tools.
What is it about marketers and tools? We just can’t get enough of them. So indulge: Play around with a new PPC tool at least once a week, maybe for an hour or so. Put it through its paces and see what it can do. Who knows… you might find a new way to save even more time.
Conclusion
As you can see, there’s no shortage of things for PPC marketers to do. While machine learning may automate parts of your job, there are dozens of significant, high-value tasks only humans can do. We hope you’ll enjoy the free time PPC automation can give you.
IMAGES:
- Unsplash, Rachael Gorjestani.
Tom Whatley
