If your clients are like mine, they’ve been talking about the fourth quarter for a while now. Q4 is a time when sales teams are trying to close the last of their sales in lead generation companies and you’re often trying to stretch ad budgets (meanwhile eCommerce companies are busy as can be with holiday sales).

Depending on the company and their goals, companies may pull back on Q4 budgets, making it a little harder on us PPC pros.

If that happens, don’t fret. Here’s a couple of strategies and reviews you can do to make sure your lead gen accounts have a winning 4th quarter without additional budget.

Utilize Remarketing

Now is the time to get in front of all the eyeballs and revamp your remarketing strategies. However, Q4 is a common time for CPCs to rise in Facebook (and other channels), so how do you combat that?

This post outlines a couple ways to combat the Q4 CPC surge, so reviewing your bid strategies, updating ad copy and updating audiences (more on that below) can keep performance strong.

If you aren’t sure quite what your strategy should be with remarketing, here’s a great post of 5 remarketing strategies for Q4.

If your remarketing campaign has recently taken a nose dive and you need to do some investigating, use this post as a guideline to help you “bring back the glory days” in your campaign.

Update and Refresh Audiences

Are you excluding converters and/or current customers from your campaigns? I sure hope so! (If you’re not, you should check out this post to see how and why to do this in your accounts.)

If you are already excluding folks, there’s no time like the present to review your list exclusions and refresh any manually uploaded audiences with the latest version. Especially when it comes to excluding customer emails lists and company names in LinkedIn, you’ll want to make sure you’re excluding everyone that you can.

Dive Deep into Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a Clix favorite for gathering handy reports and diving deep into data. It’s never too late or too early to pull some reports in Analytics.

If you need some help getting started, here’s 3 ways to utilize Analytics for better AdWords reporting.
If you find a discrepancy between Google Analytics and Google AdWords, you can use this post to decipher and understand these differences.

You can also leverage Analytics’ multi-channel funnels to see what role your PPC efforts have played in the conversion path. I’ve written about these reports before, but this is a great tool for more insights. My favorite report? The Top Conversion Path which shows all of the ways that folks have interacted with different channels through the funnel. There’s plenty of other multi-channel funnel reports, as well, so don’t stop there.

Review Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking problems can be a huge pain. I like to head off potential issues by checking in on tracking regularly. Here’s a couple of ways to do that:

Review conversion data within interfaces and compare the numbers to any CRM data or Analytics information that you have.

If you see some discrepancies in LinkedIn, get started with these 7 common reasons for discrepancies.

Are you counting lead gen conversions correctly? Make sure you’re locking down accurate counting, you don’t want to find out at the end of Q4 that your numbers were off!

Weed Out Underperformers

This is likely something that you do on a regular basis anyways, but in Q4 it’s even more important to review campaigns, ad messaging, keywords and extensions that may not be working.

Ad Reviews

This doesn’t have to be time-consuming: Give our free ad review tool a shot.

Ad Extensions

Are you actually hampering your campaign performance with too many ad extensions? It might be time to give those extensions a review and make some changes for improved performance.

Automated Rules

Do you have automated rules that have accidentally turned into “set it and forget it”? They can be a timesaver but can also impact performance if not utilized correctly. Here are a couple tips to make sure you’re making the most of handy automated rules.

Campaign Performance

Take a look back at performance in a couple of different time periods. My go-tos are typically past 7 days, month-to-date, 90 days and 1 year if I’m immersing myself in data. Are there campaigns that could have a different budget breakdown? Are your bidding strategies still serving you well?

Bid Modifiers

These handy adjustments are great… When used correctly. It’s easy to forget that these modifiers pile up and can, in turn, work against one another. Take a look at your modifiers and make sure you’re not over or under-bidding anywhere.

Wrapping Up

There’s a lot of ways to make sure your lead gen accounts end Q4 on the right note. While it can seem like everything requires additional budget, there’s a lot of ways to maximize your budget and continue driving leads.

What are your favorite Q4 strategies for lead gen accounts? We’d love to hear your thoughts and tips in the comments!