PPC optimization hyperbole? Could be. But for me, any one of the following ppc tasks can take me a mere 10 minutes and have produced a 10%+ bump in performance. The spirit of this post is not to convince you these can be done in 10 minutes, though. So please give me some space here to make the greater point.

That point being that it doesn’t always have to take hours of work to move the needle. Insightful analysis is needed when identifying areas of improvement, creating monthly action plans, and presenting overall strategy. But there are things that you could do today, right now actually, to get a 10% bump in performance with little to no risk.

Below are three metrics. For each metric there are multiple 10-minute performance jolting tips. Some you’ve done, some you haven’t. Enjoy!

Increase CTR by 10% in 10 Minutes

1. Sort your ads with highest CTR at the top. Copy that ad to your 3 highest traffic ad groups. Insert the keywords in your ad to increase relevancy.

2. Set your ads to “Optimize for Clicks” and add site link extensions to your top 3 impression campaigns.

Optimize for clicks:

Site links:

3. Run a search query report (SQR) for the past 90-days—don’t download it—scan the top impression keywords, identify a trend in the less relevant queries (such as “Interior” being in many of the queries when you offer only “Exterior Paint”.) Add the infringing keyword as a campaign level negative.

10% Boost in PPC Conversion Rate in 10 Minutes

4. Take a look all your keywords over a 6-month period. Apply your own strategy for when you know a keyword isn’t working for you (at Hanapin we call this our Cost to Conversion Threshold Matrix) and cut bait with the underperforming keywords.

5. Double the size of your “Buy-Now,” or “Download” call to action buttons. Of course this may take more than 10 minutes if you have to involve someone else, but it shouldn’t take them more than 10 minutes to do this task for you.

6. Test a new description line 2 in the best version of your current ads in your top converting campaign(s). Include, “Buy Now,” “Download Now,” etc. in order to let searchers know what action is being offered on the page they are about to click to.

Get 10% More PPC Spend in 10 Minutes

7. Increase daily budgets. Right, seems simple. It is. But do it. Sometimes we only increase daily budgets when the “Limited by Budget” warning prompts us to. And that’s usually fine. But there are times when you aren’t limited by budget enough to get that warning. Increasing the budget by 5x your average CPC will put some extra headroom to allow you to always spend unrestricted.

8. Increase all your bids on keywords that perform within your goal CPL/CPA to the estimated top of page bid. Just open the Editor, download statistics for the past 90-days, sort by CPL, highlight those that are under goal, click advanced bid changes, check the box that says “Raise keyword maximum CPC bids to their top of page bid estimates”. If this makes you nervous set an addition constraint of a bid no higher than “x”.

Advanced bid changes:

9. Set up a display network ICM campaign. These have huge spend potential and perform somewhere between remarketing and contextual display advertising. And you can set one up in under 10 minutes if you already have text ads and/or image ads to use.