Chapter 7: The Blue Zone

Blue

The opportunity zone – this is the easiest zone to pull back to green as your performance is great but you are spending too quickly.  You either need to reduce spending or get more budget from your client.   

Step 1: Ask the client for more budget

Imagine that you are the client, and you get a call from your PPC Manager to tell you that your account is doing so well that you are beating your performance targets, and that you’ve found some ways to get even more leads if you want them.  Sure, in some cases your client won’t want more leads (plumbers who are already heavily booked in advance for example) but in a lot of cases, the “more leads/sales” question goes down very well indeed.

Step 2: Decrease bids

Pulling back spend by reducing bids can be a great way to control budget and increase traffic volume at the same time (you can often get more clicks per dollar spent if the available traffic volume is high).  We generally recommend starting with your poorer-performing campaigns – reduce bids by 10% per day and continue to ease them down until you start to see a drop in spend.

Step 3: Decrease budget

If step 1 & 2 are not pulling your spend back into line, consider reducing budgets starting with your poorer-performing campaigns.

Step 4:  Turn off poor performers

As a last resort, you can always find your worst-performing keywords, adgroups, and campaigns and pause them.  They can always be turned back on at a later stage if the need arises.

There is no checklist for the Blue Zone as the actions above are sequential, and are reasonably straightforward.  The Blue Zoned accounts should not take much time or management, which is great!  Just keep an eye on them to make sure they start heading toward the Green Zone.