As hard as your company may try to increase profits from PPC advertisements, there may come a time when you feel you have hit a profitability rut. During her session at eTail East 2013 in Philadelphia, Purna Virji, Marketing Manager at Stroll, shared the following 5 tips on how companies can dig themselves out of such a rut and get back on track:

1. Review macro trends for search and display networks. Virji advises companies to step back from the day to day activities involved in running their advertising campaigns in order to look at their campaign reports, which can be downloaded straight from Adwords. This will allow companies to look at what aspects of your ads are not performing well, as well as give you the chance to evaluate each ad campaign within one report. That will save you the time of having to look at each campaign separately

2. Analyze (but don’t obsess) over Quality Score. By using a tool like Tenscores (or Excel pivot tables), you can monitor your Quality Score and how each Quality Score is affecting your account.

3. Audit the basics. Make sure you keep track of the simpler aspects of your Adwords account, such as the amount of keywords you are using, the amount of negative keywords you are using, your placement reports as well as any technical issues your account maybe having

4. Review your bids. By analyzing how you are bidding, it gives you a chance to re-evaluate whether you would prefer to maximize clicks, monitor your cost per action or optimize your display network with a display campaign optimizer.

5. Take into account external factors. There may be some deeper issue affecting your PPC ads, such as a competitors ads, a creative burn-out on ads that have lost their initial effectiveness as well as company-wide issues effecting not just your PPC effectiveness.

Virji suggested that in order to keep your PPC ads at maximum profitability, it is important to do quarterly audits that follow the above steps, thus keeping your PPC ad campaigns thoroughly effective.