Keeping on top of account performance is essential to PPC management. Sometimes you’d love to just have an “FYI” about your account performance changes. This could be related to anything from conversion volume or high CPAs to over or underspending budgets. Alerts are the an easy way to get those types of FYIs. There are a few ways you can get alerts. Many PPC channels have rules directly in the interface, but did you know there is also an option to get alerts across all of your paid channels? Keep reading to learn where you can set-up both in-channel and book of business alerts.
Using Rules as Alerts
All too often, we think about using rules in relation to taking an action once the rule is met. For example, creating a rule to pause campaigns once budgets exceed $1,234. However, you can designate rules to just be an FYI email, letting you know exactly what has happened in the account to activate them.
Let’s take a look at where you can find each of these in some of our favorite PPC platforms.
Google Ads
In Google Ads, you can select your keywords, go to Edit, then scroll down to “Create an automated rule”. Under Type of rule, select “Send email”. You can then navigate through the steps and conditions for the particular alert you’d like to receive about your account’s performance.
Microsoft Advertising
In Microsoft Advertising, you can also set alerts. Instead of going to Edit, here you’d go to Automate. You’d next select “Notify me when…”
Facebook Ads
To set up email notifications for Facebook, just highlight the campaigns, ad sets or ads that you’d like to receive the alerts about, then click on the triple-dot icon to the right of Export in the navigation bar. Scroll down to “Create a new rule”. From there, select “Send notification only” under Action.
Google Analytics
There are times when you’d like to receive alerts for platforms that don’t have alerts in them (LinkedIn Ads or Pinterest Ads for example). Or, maybe you’d like to get alerts for your entire PPC portfolio. Here comes Google Analytics to the rescue! I absolutely love this hack. To navigate to alerts in Analytics, click on the gear Admin icon in the bottom left navigation bar.
From Custom Alerts, click the “+New Alert” button. From there, you have the option to select multiple views (or sites) for which to have the rule apply. This can be very helpful if you’re managing multiple accounts for one client.
I also love that you can select the alert to be sent to anyone else, whether or not they are a user in your Analytics account. From here, you can customize the alert based on the many options available. For example, if you’d like an alert for when all your paid channels exceed a certain cost, then you could set the alert for “medium is cpc” and the spend amount like this:
You could set the Condition to apply to Source, then value to Pinterest. Maybe you’d want to know if Brand campaigns have a spike in clicks (which could be due to a publicity issue), then you could get an alert for all your Brand campaigns with the condition set to Campaign contains Brand.
There are countless possibilities here. And, if you don’t see a particular segment you would like to track, then you can always create a new custom segment.
Conclusion
Play around with the settings and try a few out. You can always come back to edit or delete your alerts if you’re receiving too many or if they aren’t useful. Try to think through what you’re always manually checking that an alert could quickly do for you. Also, evaluate what really would be the most helpful data to know.
For example, it might be a good idea to have an alert for all traffic to a particular landing page is zero or a certain conversion goal is zero, then you’d know if a landing page or tracking is suddenly broken and needs to be fixed.
What tools have you found to be the most helpful to stay on top of your accounts? Which alerts are the most helpful to you? Comment below to share!
Here are some other resources you might appreciate about rules and saving time:
Get Your Time Back: Rescue Your PPC Life With Automated Rules
