SEM campaign overhaul - When should you do it?

Sometimes SEM campaigns (Google Adwords) require an overhaul.

Budgets increase slowly, keyword lists get doubled and before you know it you have a campaign that is performing well, but appearing messy and confusing to the person managing it.

After coming back from a refreshing two weeks off over Christmas, a client of ours entered into their peak season for gaining new customers.

The company is Urbanest, a leading provider of student accommodation brisbane.

The SEM campaign we run for them is delivering quite well, but everytime I logged in to manage the account - I was swamped by just how many keywords and campaigns we were running.

We were targeting nearly 10 different campaigns to over 300 keywords. It was time to refine, reflect and make some strategic changes to how we organised the content. 

So when is the best time to overhaul your SEM campaign?

You should consider starting your SEM campaign from scratch once you have enough data to know how you could do it even better the second time around. Since creating the campaigns from scratch again, we have seen a growth in clicks, conversion and ad quality score. This is not to say the previous campaign was not running well, it is now just running even better - giving me that warm tingly feeling you can only get from knowing your plan is working.

Most people monitor their accounts daily, which is great - but my advice is to not only do this, but schedule in a day to look at the account every 3 months and find ways to really neaten it up and make it work harder.