Just-In-Time To Stop PPC | It’s Not the Worst That Can Happen

February 17, 2008 |

I am a little behind in writing about my adventures in SEM and PPC, but that’s because we are busy at Commerce360. I am also in the process of helping the Operations team kick start the use of our Kanban board system. Our software development team has been using a kanban board now for about 8 weeks to manage their Scrum sprints and it has been highly successful. Our sales & product development team also have kanban boards in play and since everything we do leads back to Ops, it only make sense for us to use one too.

To clarify, kanban is a lean tool not to be confused with kaizen which is another lean tool. And using kanban or kaizen on it’s own or together is not real lean either. Lean is far greater than using a set of tools and it’s also a topic for another post sometime later…

According to Kanban Made Simple by John Gross & Kenneth Mcinnis, the Japanese word kanban translates as “signboard” and is synonymous with demand scheduling. It was developed in the early days of the Toyota Production System where Taiichi Ohno developed kanbans to control production between processes and to implement Just-In-Time (JIT). Another way to look at kanbans, especially in a service or office environment, is that it is a visual way to manage operations. And making things visual in this way helps to eliminate “hidden factories” of file folders and documents buried on a laptop or inside stacks of paper on someones desk and generally helps to expose problems further upstream in the process.

Stop! Pull the Plug! Take PPC Offline

One benefit of using a kanban board to manage SEM & PPC is this idea of being able to identify problems much earlier in the process. And when identifying problems the first thing that should happen is to stop the process. Ed Hay referrers to stopping the process in his book The Just-In-Time Breakthrough. Ed says that “stopping the process is not the worst thing in the world. Rather, it is only the third worst thing in the world, ranking behind making another defect and letting another problem happen without finding a permanent solution. Stopping the process should be used to create the necessary pain to make sure the right kind of attention is being paid to the problem, so the first or second worst things don’t happen any more.”

When it comes to PPC, the most obvious time to stop a PPC campaign or ad group is when there is a serious anomaly in tracking revenue or other conversions. Most of these anomalies occur when analytics tags are not added to new website pages or when inheriting an existing PPC account from another agency who had been using their own proprietary analytics package. We all know that PPC analytics is anything but accurate, but there is a limit to where, outside of a certain percentage, you just know that things are off to the point you can justify stopping an account or campaign or an ad group for a few hours or more to verify and fix the problem as soon as it’s identified.

The other way to look at stopping to fix the problem is that when you stop a PPC campaign, you are not taking the entire website offline. If anything, when SEO is properly in place, PPC should be the smaller contributor to overall site revenue so, again, stopping to fix the problem should not turn off the online revenue stream entirely. At best you’ll save your client from wasted PPC spend and have better results once the problem is fixed. At worst, if you have one of those clients and you do not communicate effectively about stopping the PPC campaign, you’ll get an email or phone call asking why their ads do not appear when searching on keyword XYZ…

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