Performance isn’t where you want it to be but at least you’re not overspending the budget so you have time to diagnose and rectify whatever is causing the lack of performance (assuming it’s in your control of course!). Often when you’ve been actively working on an account in the Red Zone, they will end up here, which means you are on the right path to safely pushing this.
Orange
The optimization zone – your performance isn’t great (gulp) but at least you’re not throwing good money after bad.
Often the most impactful performance change can be found by reallocating the budget from poor to better-performing campaigns (see this section) so start here.
Once you have made sure that your budgets are allocated correctly, use the same list of checks & actions as listed in the Red Zone Step 3.
For the account to be in orange it must be underpacing. In the scheme of things, that’s often a problem of lesser importance when compared to performance issues. If this is true for your client and you feel comfortable that performance is headed back to where it should be, it’s time to start increasing the budgets to try and get as close as you can to 100% of the budget spent. We’ve already covered how large budget changes can affect performance, so the trick here is to increase budgets gently (less than 20% increases per day in some cases) so you don’t negatively impact performance.
In the next section, we will explain how to manage clients in the YELLOW zone, including your downloadable checklist.
