Whether you’re just starting with paid media or reassessing your strategies, it’s important to evaluate the performance and best practices for your overall PPC marketing strategies, accounts, and campaigns. Taking the time to revisit your paid media plan ensures that your strategy is in line with your current objectives.
Additionally, reviewing the best practices for pay-per-click is an excellent way to stay updated on trends and enhance performance by leveraging newly introduced ad technologies. Through this review process, you’ll discover new strategies and features that you can incorporate into your paid search program.
Here are effective PPC and Paid Search best practices to guide your changes and planning for the months.
Your Goals
When strategizing, it’s essential to establish goals for the entire marketing program, including ad platforms and individual campaigns. Setting primary and secondary goals provides direction for the entire PPC plan. For instance, your primary objective might be to generate leads through your advertisements.
Additionally, consider secondary goals like building brand awareness, which sits higher in the sales funnel and can cultivate interest leading to sales opportunities.
Budget Evaluation and Optimization
Some advertisers find themselves in a routine and overlook the importance of assessing and optimizing the allocation of their paid media budgets.
To maximize budget efficiency, consider the following steps:
- Regularly compare planned budgets with actual spending for each account or campaign. The frequency can vary based on budget size—monthly, quarterly, or semiannually, as long as budget targets are met.
- Identify campaigns that may no longer be effective and consider reallocating their budget to more productive campaigns.
- Explore opportunities to capture additional traffic and enhance results for successful campaigns. Most ad platforms offer tools that estimate daily budgets based on clicks and costs, providing insight into potential click volume if desired.
- Evaluate the performance of other paid media channels; if they are underperforming, consider reallocating their budgets elsewhere.
- Review the overall budget for paid search and paid social advertising—can your company allocate more funds to capitalize on successful campaign outcomes?
Explore New Advertising Platforms
If there’s room to adjust or increase your budgets, why not explore new ad platforms? Understanding your target audience and their online behavior can guide your decision-making process when selecting ad platforms. Don’t limit yourself to common platforms like Google, Microsoft, and Meta Ads.
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Consider using these additional advertising platforms:
- TikTok: Targets a younger Gen Z audience (16 to 24) and emphasizes video content.
- Pinterest: Suitable for promoting products, services, and consumer goods, especially with a focus on female audiences.
- LinkedIn: Ideal for professional and business-oriented targeting. LinkedIn audiences can also be accessed through Microsoft Ads.
- Snapchat: Targets a younger demographic (13 to 35) and offers various ad formats like video ads, app installs, filters, and lenses.
Key Trends in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads
Recent developments in search and social ad platforms have opened up opportunities to engage with potential customers in more targeted, innovative, and efficient ways. It’s important not to overlook newer targeting options and campaign formats that you may not have experimented with yet.
- Video Advertising: Integrating video into your PPC strategies requires careful planning of goals, ad creative, targeting parameters, and ad formats. There’s considerable potential here, whether you opt for including videos in responsive display ads or delve deeper into targeted YouTube campaigns.
- Automation Tools: While artificial intelligence can’t replace human strategy and creativity, it can streamline campaign management. During your planning phase, identify areas where automation can be beneficial, such as automatically-generated assets or optimizing AI-guided strategies within Performance Max campaigns.
- Performance Max Campaigns: This automated campaign type extends across Google’s entire ad inventory. Microsoft Ads has also introduced a similar PMax feature, ensuring consistency in campaign types across platforms. Consider allocating budget towards PMax campaigns and explore how they compare to traditional search campaigns.
While exploring these new features, don’t forget to explore lesser-known PPC features that might enhance your campaigns.
Reassessing Keywords
The role of keywords has undergone significant changes in recent years, with match types becoming less rigid and focusing more on understanding searcher intent. For instance, in the past, exact-match keywords would strictly match with the exact keyword search query. Now, ads can be triggered by search queries with similar meanings or intent.
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A valuable planning exercise involves organizing keyword groups and evaluating if they still accurately represent your brand and offerings.
Regularly reviewing search term queries that trigger ads helps discover trends and behaviors that might have been overlooked, potentially impacting performance and conversions over time.
Key considerations for your strategy include:
- Stay updated on current keyword rules and assess their impact on your account, especially regarding close variants and changes in traffic volume.
- Familiarize yourself with how keywords work on each platform, as differences can significantly affect outcomes.
- Increase the frequency of reviewing search term reports to identify irrelevant keywords resulting from match type changes. Integrate these findings into match-type adjustments or negative keyword lists as needed.
Reevaluate Your Target Audiences
Take a fresh look at the audiences you’ve previously targeted, especially with the emergence of intent-driven campaign types. Automated features that broaden your audience can be beneficial, but it’s important to monitor performance metrics and post-click behavior on your website.
Keep in mind that an audience is essentially a group of users categorized by their online interests or behavior. This means there are endless possibilities for combining and targeting these audiences based on the sales funnel.
Here are some opportunities worth exploring and testing:
- LinkedIn User Targeting: Apart from LinkedIn, this feature is exclusively available in Microsoft Ads.
- Remarketing: Reach users who have visited your website, engaged with your ads, or interacted with your videos on YouTube.
- Detailed Demographics: Consider factors like marital status, parental status, home ownership, education, and household income.
- In-Market and Custom Intent: Target users displaying search and online behaviors indicative of purchase intent.
Keep in mind that these options can vary depending on the campaign type and are subject to frequent updates. Therefore, it’s important to regularly review and adjust your audience targeting strategies across all platforms.
Enhance Reporting Practices
Are you still relying on the same performance reports year after year? It’s time to reassess your essential PPC metrics and update your reports accordingly.
Here are two helpful resources to guide this process:
- The 6 Most Important PPC KPIs You Should Track
- How to Measure Success in PPC Campaigns With and Without Conversion Data
In reevaluating your reporting, consider the following objectives:
- Is the data you are using still relevant and actionable?
- Are there new metrics you should consider adding to enhance decision-making?
- How frequently do you need to access this data?
- Do stakeholders understand the data presented in the reports?
- Introduce new data purposefully to support actionable insights and decision-making in your marketing strategy. Also, determine which data warrants deeper analysis as needed.
Streamline Data Management
As you manage campaigns across various platforms like search, display, and video, it’s essential to organize your data effectively.
Reflecting on your goals, identify the critical data points and determine which platforms you’ll use for monitoring and reporting. Consider consolidating data into a single analytics platform for easier comparison and sharing.
Google Analytics is widely used by millions of companies and offers centralized views of advertising performance, website engagement, and conversions, making it a valuable option.
Explore Scripting Solutions
Modern ad platforms offer numerous AI recommendations and automated rules, and there’s a plethora of third-party tools available for optimization purposes. Scripts provide another avenue for advertisers, especially those managing large accounts or with scripting expertise, to automate tasks and report generation within Google Ads accounts.
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Embrace Collaboration
An effective strategy in planning is to collaborate with peers and seek diverse perspectives. Much of the expertise in PPC management is unique to each individual or agency, offering a wealth of ideas to exchange. Consider joining the Paid Search Association, a global hub for paid ad managers, to forge new connections and discover industry events.
Effective PPC and Paid Search Best Practices
Begin by aligning strategies with clear and measurable business objectives. Then, assess your campaigns’ current status against these updated targets.
Your paid media approach should blend insights from past performance with forward-looking opportunities. Take time to reassess existing assumptions and systems, while exploring new platforms, topics, audiences, and technologies.
Stay abreast of trends and continue learning. Explore ebooks, connect with social media experts, and follow industry publications for valuable resources and motivational insights.
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