Streamline PPC Tasks w/ Production Calendars – AIMCLEAR‘s Deep in the Sheets (Season Finale)

Posted in Analytics & Reporting, Paid Search

Posted on May 20th, 2015

In PPC management, many tasks need to be done regularly and at different intervals. PPC is fast-paced so it’s crucial to stay organized. Creating a production calendar helps keep a balanced and organized workload.

In the season finale of Deep in the Sheets, we’ll show you how to organize a PPC production calendar using Excel. Follow along in the attached spreadsheet to organize tasks by time frame and level of difficulty.

The end result? A full production calendar that has consistent regularity each day.

Thanks for watching Deep in the Sheets this season! Stay tuned and we’ll see you next time.

Read on for the full transcript:
Hi everybody, Dion here. Welcome to the season finale of Deep in the Sheets. This week we’ll look at organizing a PPC production calendar using Excel. So, first to just give an overview of what’s going on here, in pay per click management, there’s a lot of tasks that need to be done regularly and at different intervals. Here at AIMCLEAR, ya know, we like to put that on a calendar to keep everything organized and consistent. And a problem you might run into is having different tasks stack up on the same day. So you’re doing on quarterly, you’re doing one weekly, and all of a sudden you have ten different tasks on the same day. So, to get around this we like to use a system such as the one seen here. And we’ll include this spreadsheet here in our blog so you can go ahead and grab that anytime you want. And just to kind of dive in here we have—let’s see—six different time frames we can set tasks to: semi-annual, so twice a year, quarterly, four times a year, bi-monthly, every two months, then we have monthly, semi-monthly, which is twice a month, and weekly. So, what we end up doing is we’ll go Monday through Friday here, so, once a week anytime on that day, and then we’ll start putting tasks into these different corridors. So, when it’s filled up it’ll look a lot like this. So these are just a sampling of the regular tasks we’ll do for an account, just routine maintenance just like a location report or an extension audit ad scrub, and that sort of thing. So, what I’ve done here is assign each task a value from one to three in terms of the difficulty and the time it requires. So, when they’re mapped out, what you end up the bottom here is a total summary of—of all the tasks that line up and end up on that day, what is the time requirement in sort of rough estimates, ya know. So, this one’s a 14 rating, let’s call it, for time. And I have this go ahead and highlight anything that’s over 18. So, if I’m looking at this and all these different tasks, ya know, we’ll have these tasks that happen once a week, these twice a month ones, and we notice on the first week of February, we just happen to have far too many tasks lined up. We have a difficulty of 18 tasks for that day or that week in February. So, what we’ll end up doing is make an adjustment here. So, on the 18th, you can see we have a location report, so if we move that over here, we go ahead and get rid of that, we can see already that that’ll help that day. So I’m just gonna go ahead and copy this, across to the rest of the year, so moving that from the first week of the second month of that quarter to the first. And once we do that all the way across, that 18 is gone, the 14 turns into a 16, and those small things like that can really help us organize the calendar overall. So, what you’ll end up doing is in each of these days you’ll give it a day of the month, and you’ll go ahead and say for this task it’s gonna be a one in terms of difficulty, and you’re gonna assign that once for—if I zoom out here you can see the month as a whole. So, that one because it’s only bi-annually, you’re just gonna do that twice. So the first, and the first. This one happens twice a month so we’ll give it a two. And just copy that all the way down the line. And with this, ya know, if you keep bringing these all the way down and putting in your tasks you can use this for social tasks or paid tasks, you can do more, less, you can adjust the time frames more regularly for certain accounts or less regularly. So, it’s a good way to organize and keep things in check and even easier is if you take this and now that you have everything lined up, so the regularity of the tasks is organized and the—ya know, the way they fall on the calendar is lined up to not make any particular week too crazy. You can go right into Google Calendar or whatever calendar system you like to use. You can create a task, so let’s say we’re doing and impression share audit. And we know the impression share audit happens on the first week of—well this one—on the first week of January and the third week of January. So we’ll throw the name in there. It’s gonna be an all-day task so we just need to get it done sometime that day. We’re gonna repeat this and it’s gonna happen every two months so we’re gonna put it on monthly, every two months, it’s gonna happen on the same day of the week. And first we’ll wanna get this on the right day for the initial one. So, it’s gonna be on a Monday the first week of January. First week of January. The first Monday, which is gonna be the fifth. We’ll repeat that every two months. That day of the week, so every two months the first monday. And once we save that, you can see scrolling through our calendar here, it’s gonna line up on the same time each—each day. And you can go ahead and create more tasks for all these. Go down the list, and when you’re done you’ll end up with a full production calendar that’s never too stacked for any particular day, and has consistent regularity for each task. So, go ahead and find this document on our blog, AIMCLEAR blog. Happy to share it with you guys, and let us know how it works out for you. Thanks for joining us on Deep in the Sheets.

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