Compliance teams are essential to many of your clients. Compliance keeps your client legal, or at least aware of what they should do to comply with the laws and regulations that govern their business. However, compliance can slow down a PPC campaign’s momentum toward approval. Moreover, getting the compliance team what they need and the approval process can be tiresome. It’s essential, of course, but mind-numbing at times.
Here are a few best practices you can do to get your ads approved faster by your compliance team.
- Get some guidance before you write the campaign. It’s It’s a good idea to know what’s a no-go before you develop a campaign. So, ask the compliance team what you cannot say. It will save time and frustration on the back end.
- Learn from your mistakes. The best opportunities you uncover in the PPC compliance process are the missteps you make before you know any better. Take notes when you get changes from compliance so you can remember that for the next time around. Think of it as training for a streamlined approval process.
- Use templates. It is a good idea to have templates available for clients that have the notes you took on your past mistakes to make it easier to have a better draft next time. Keep them updated and accessible for your PPC campaigns.
- Avoid making guarantees or unsubstantiated claims. No matter what industry you are creating a PPC Ad campaign for, truth-in-advertising laws enforced by the Federal Trade Commission apply. To summarize the law, you should not guarantee what you cannot control, nor should you make promises you cannot keep. Not only is it bad business, but compliance teams hate this kind of stuff; it will necessitate another round of revisions every time.
- Be transparent about your terms of service, data management practices, and product risks. Transparency is vital for most messages. However, it is even more essential for your Terms of Service, what you do with customer data and any risks associated with using your product or service. These should be easy to read, understand, and find.
- Use an approval platform. Excel sheets have their place, but a back and forth with a compliance team for a PPC campaign approval process is not one of them. PPC Ad Editor has an online platform that makes the review process more streamlined and accessible for both sides of the approval process than a spreadsheet.
Examples of Best Practices for PPC Campaign Compliance Approval Process
Following is an example excel file sent to a PPC compliance team for approval. While we think the Excel file creates problems of its own, we do like some of the things it features to make this approach streamline approvals for compliance teams:
Showing an example ad in Google to show the compliance team how it will appear:
Breaking out each headline and description (with character counts) to allow for copy editing:
Grouping Similar Keywords based on themes for streamlined compliance review:
These best practices make it easier for compliance teams to see what they need to approve your PPC campaign. Also, PPC Ad Editor’s platform makes it easy to generate these breakdowns than Excel, which you can download as pdfs and show to your team.
Compliance is a necessary, if tedious, part of the approval process for many PPC campaigns. However, with better communication about what you should avoid saying, learning from your past mistakes to make a template for future campaigns, minding the truth in advertising laws, and being as transparent as possible, you can help streamline the process. Add in an easy-to-use approval platform (like PPC Ad Editor, naturally), and you can make the best of it for your next PPC campaign approval process.
PPC Ad Editor is the first all-in-one tool that allows teams to create, share, and edit PPC ads with their clients and then upload directly into Google Ads. For more information, visit www.ppcadeditor.com.
Sources:
Speer, Amber. “5 Tips to Managing Compliance Teams in Your PPC Accounts.”ppchero.com. 12 August 2009. Web. 16 April 2021. <https://www.ppchero.com/5-tips-to-managing-compliance-teams-in-your-ppc-accounts/>.
“Marketing Compliance Decoded: Everything You Need to Know.” Filestage.io. Web. 16 April 2021.<https://filestage.io/blog/marketing-compliance/>.
