I think the first questions that we tend to ask are around the underlying business metrics, which would really apply to any marketing. So, how much money are you making per sale? How much are you willing to pay for a lead? Or how much are you willing to pay for a sale? What's the lifetime value? Then we go into the PPC specifics like keyword research. Essentially, what keywords should we be running? What's the likely CPC? What are the likely search volumes? And then we build out a forecast and a set of assumptions.

I think it's really important to make sure that you don't put all your reliance on one keyword or one audience. If you put all your eggs in one basket and think that one or two keywords are going to generate all of your volume, that's obviously not a particularly good position to put a client in. So, it's really good idea to have a fairly solid backup plan.

We do have a custom-built forecasting tool, but we also use Excel. In fairness, that tends to be the simplest way to do it. Especially when you are starting out. I used to be on the cautious side of things when I first started working at Fountain. I would turn campaigns on in an incremental basis. I'd test one thing and then learn and then go from there. Working with larger and larger accounts, I think it's actually important to try multiple things at the same time and try and learn as quickly as possible. A lot of the time, I would potentially do employ a number of tactics, and front load the budget.

I'll jump in on goals. It depends on those initial conversations that we have about the underlying business metrics. In general, it's really about trying to drive back to what is most profitable for the client. And, there are things like document downloads that aren't direct sales but can create opportunities for your sales team. We try to figure out the purchase cycle and then select goals based on that.

Bid strategy is an interesting one. It can depend on client budget, but it also comes down to the number of conversions running through the account. When there is an unlimited budget, I think target CPA is gold standard. However, it doesn't work in all scenarios. Sometimes, target impression or maximise conversions might be more appropriate.

It does depend on the account size. So, I look at I look at all my accounts every day. I wouldn't necessarily make changes every day, but I'd always keep a good look at what's going on. In an ideal world. I think it's important to leave things maybe a week or two before making changes. If you keep making changes every day, you'll never understand what's worked, what hasn't, what's impacted and what's not.

There's so much variety when you think about what you type into Google. And, there's sort of quite a lot of nuance to that. What you really want to do is capture the people with the intent to buy your product. You want to make sure that you're removing any searches that are irrelevant. Expensive keywords can really add up. You need to regularly review the search term reports and considering whether the searches are relevant. If they aren't, then add them. Try to add them at the account level to keep things organised.

To be honest, it tends to be the top ones. A good thing to remember is that when using broad match keywords, don't use single keywords. The search query report doesn't show you all of the different search term variations. It just shows you a picture. I try to add phrase match negatives.

I don't obsess over actually. I think it's important to make sure that the quality score of the keywords you have in your account is at least five or six. In an ideal world, ideally, it will be higher than that. Obviously, that's not always possible. It does add value if you want to compare historical metrics. For example, if you've made changes to a landing page then you can see if quality score was impacted. But I wouldn't obsess over it.

If you do clean things up, then Google is quite good at responding. If you've optimised things properly from a poorly managed account, then Google usually recognises this. I'll give you an example. We took over an account that had eight different Ads accounts and probably 15 accounts in total when you include Facebook and others. We decided to centralise all of them. It allowed us to put all of the data in one place. It helped practically but also optimised the accounts. The automated bid strategies worked better, and our remarketing campaigns were more effective.