One of the trickier aspects of a PPC campaign is the early monitoring and management. Most paid search practitioners tend to adopt a data-driven approach to the task. What are the issues faced in a new paid search campaign and how to deal with them? Two major problem areas can be higher CPAs than expected and lower volume than anticipated.

Each of these can lead to their own irritants within a new PPC campaign, so here are some potential solutions to handle them efficiently.

When you launch a campaign, it may well fail to drive any traffic or you may feel the need for more leads. Usually, the reaction to lower volume than that anticipated is trying to increase budget allocation and/or your bids. Ideally, finding a way to fetch more traffic and/or generate lead volume without increasing your spend is the key. Of course, this is easier said than done.

Given that you’ve time and resource constraints to accomplish this, focus your energies on the following two areas:

1. The first one is expanded targeting. By revisiting your keyword targeting strategy, see if you are able to locate new niches to explore. Identify specific search queries you can build on, or try to leverage other alternate PPC keyword expansion tactics. You can also seek to generate more amount of traffic from your content network campaigns.
2. Other option is to increase CTR. Refine your ad text and ensure better segmentations for turning a greater number of impressions into clicks. Reconsider your landing page optimization if your area of concern is leads and conversions more than traffic.

Another tricky issue in a new campaign, as stated above, is that of higher CPAs than you would want. Sometimes you will generate requisite volume, but your campaigns won’t create cost-effective conversions. Again, increasing your spend is not the right thing to do. There are other alternatives, which can help bring down your AdWords CPA.

1. One approach, especially if you’ve a test budget for a campaign that you are piloting, is to control spending until you have had an opportunity to iterate on the initial campaign structure, ad text and landing pages so that you are not actually spending as much of your allocation on a high CPA.
2. Other option is to analyze match types and relevant search query reports. May be, your match types are leaving your PPC ads exposed to the wrong traffic source. So you perhaps are required to leverage a better negative keyword approach. This well also means matching options such as modified broad match or phrase & exact are preferable.

Increasing CTRs and creating better segmentations can yield good pricing discounts from AdWords. Also, reserve your precious spend for more specific terms, which could mean lowering bids on broader terms and opt for better converting, more specific terms. It could well also mean exercising the same for more granular, new keyword options.