November 9, 2012: In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, it’s clear that marketers running SEM campaigns need to prepare themselves for disasters and disruptions that can wreak havoc with their plans by causing unexpected staff shortages, technology outages, and other disaster-related issues.
This article provides four pragmatic steps marketers can take to harden their SEM operation against destructive external events:
- Back up your knowledge. There’s a tremendous trove of knowledge in your brain about your SEM campaigns that probably isn’t documented anywhere. Have an advance discussion with your team and/or superiors as to how best to take some of this valuable knowledge and document it. As long as there is a consensus on the process to capture this knowledge, there are lots of ways to incorporate it into a usable storehouse. Some of my favorites methods for doing this are:
- Setting up a private wiki, organized by campaign.
- Using a project management platform like Basecamp, Asana, or any of the other many management platforms out there.
- Using some combination of Google Docs or shared documents on the Microsoft Onedrive platform.
- Back up your campaigns within an editor. There’s no reason not to install Google’s AdWords Editor and Bing’s Ads Editor. These applications automatically create a copy of your campaigns on the desktop — this can be a life-saver in the event of a disaster.
- Export and back up your campaigns with a bulk sheet. Bulk sheets are .csv files that contain the exact information contained within your campaigns. Just like backing up any data, it’s good to date your backups and not just have one (because you might not catch a problem until several backup cycles have occurred).
- Show your boss what you actually do every day. Yikes, that’s scary! Do you really want him to know? Yes, you do. Your transparency — at least in forward-thinking, readiness-oriented organizations — will be appreciated and rewarded. Resist the temptation to stay a “black box” hoarding all the knowledge to yourself.
Read complete article on ClickZ.com: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2223552/4-ways-to-disasterproof-your-sem-campaigns