Time. It’s arguably the most valuable resource we have. It’s especially valuable to marketers, who usually have limited budgets, limited resources, and increasing demands for performance.

Marketers, almost universally, have way more than enough to do. If you’re in the marketing trenches, the one thing you could probably use more of is time.

Automation can provide that extra time.

Automated Bid Management

Managing your bids manually is hugely time-consuming, and not only may it prove impossible to oversee across larger accounts, it may be more profitable (and accurate) for a machine to manage the bids on your behalf.

You can use AdWords scripts to automate common procedures (such as modifying bids) or interact with external data, and by far the biggest time saver I’ve experienced from using scripts has been the automation of bids for product groups on Google Shopping.

What to do with extra time?

Study your competitors’ PPC campaigns.

Your competitors’ ads can be a rich source of ideas for new ad copy, images, and videos. If you don’t have a library of which ads your key competitors have been running, you may be missing out on some fantastic ideas for your own ads.

Keep your PPC skills sharp.

PPC marketing is constantly evolving. That means your skill set needs to be evolving, too. So try to read even a few more PPC articles every week, or listen in on a few PPC webinars.

Create more landing pages.

The more targeted your landing pages are, typically the higher your campaigns’ conversion rates will be. If you’ve got less than 10 landing pages for even a medium-sized PPC account, there’s room for opportunity.

Redo your negative keyword list.

Keywords are still important. And while you may have worked really hard to develop a regular keyword list, most marketers spend barely 20% of that amount of time on negative keywords.

Set up a few experimental campaigns.

Google, Facebook and the other ad platforms are always coming out with cool new types of advertising campaigns.

If there’s a particular campaign type you’ve been wanting to test, that might be a great use of the free time PPC automation can give you.

Short conclusion

What’s the outcome of implementing these PPC automation techniques? Better performance and less time spent doing the work.

And the more time you save on your PPC wins now, the more time you have to spend on bigger wins—PPC or otherwise—in the future.