I recently passed a milestone. A campaign I created on Oct 2, 2006 has been running every day for 2 straight years. More importantly than that, it has been making money for 2 straight years. Its not the first campaign I launched, I think I started in Feb. 06, but no other campaign has ever lasted that long.

Why am I sharing this? I think people think too short term about their campaigns. If they can get a month or two of profits they seem happy. I have always advocated building something that lasts. It is possible to establish long running and profitable campaigns.

Was it easy? No way! It has been a constant battle to keep this running and in the black. The campaign has been slapped, offers switched, network switched, domains changed etc. In fact I think I have been through about 8 domains with this campaign. But through it all, the PPC traffic kept coming and the conversions kept rolling.

With the speed at which our industry changes, you have to be very nimble and pivot quickly to keep things running. No campaign can be set on auto-pilot forever. They are like plants, you can leave them alone for a while, but eventually you have to keep watering them or they will die.

The major benefit of a long running campaign (other than profits) is historical data. I now have 2 years worth of data so each day I can go back to the previous years and see what happened. Then I can use that info to forecast where I want to focus my attention regarding trends and bid pricing.  That’s an advantage that 99% of the competition does not have.

I recommend always keeping great daily records in a spreadsheet or database as your campaign runs. Don’t just rely on the networks data because most networks only hold if for 3 months. Keep at it, pick a solid niche, and start building that long running campaign today!

Getting a profitable campaign up and running is one thing, but keeping it profitable over the long term is even harder. It’s tempting to just set it and forget it, but if you want to keep you quality scores from slipping, campaigns require ongoing maintenance. I’ll be going into several of these maintenance techniques, to help you:

The topic for today is removing 0 impression keywords. Long tail keywords are great. They usually have super high CTRs, sometimes 100%. But the downside that you never hear people mention, is that if you have keywords that never get impressions it hurts your campaign. A keyword that just sits in your account without ever being searched for is just dead weight. It’s a tough call to determine how long you want to wait for those long tails impressions before removing the keywords.

Personally, I like to run a pretty tight ship. If a keyword hasn’t shown an impression in 3 months, it’s gone. This is fairly easy to do, but time consuming. Just check the ad group with the stat interval you want, sort by impressions, then delete everything with a 0. Doing this on a regular basis will purge the dead keywords from your campaign, and keep your quality scores high.