Improving the effectiveness of your paid search advertising campaigns through PPC Optimization. Before going into our key recommendations, let’s clarify the concept of PPC optimization. Once your paid search campaigns are up and running, and data is being gathered, the optimization phase commences.
PPC optimization involves examining, evaluating, and adjusting various campaign components with the aim of enhancing performance in alignment with your business objectives.
Now, the next pertinent question arises: Where should you initiate this process?
Let’s explore several strategies for optimizing your PPC performance, either as a starting point or as a source of fresh ideas.
Keywords
Keywords play an important role in driving the appearance of ads within search results, facilitating the connection between searchers and the most fitting advertisements. Professionals are well aware that oftentimes, search queries do not precisely align with the keywords stored in the account.
This is where the concept of keyword match types becomes significant. While exact match stands out as the most precise in serving ads, it also imposes the most constraints and may overlook certain opportunities.
Conversely, at the opposite end of the spectrum, a broad match offers the greatest flexibility in keyword matching but carries the risk of irrelevant searches triggering ads. Irrespective of your initial choice regarding match types, it is important to consistently review your approach to ensure you are effectively reaching your intended audience.
Here are some key metrics that serve as performance indicators for keywords:
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): For more general keywords describing your product or service, a CTR of at least 1% is a minimum benchmark. Brand terms typically achieve substantially higher CTRs, often exceeding 3%. If your CTR falls below these thresholds, it suggests that your ad may not resonate with users, leading to fewer clicks. It’s important to scrutinize search terms and assess ad relevancy.
- Conversions: Compare the historical conversion data with the performance of new keywords to evaluate their relevance or whether they are matched too broadly.
- Interactions, Time on Site, and Website Metrics: If the incoming traffic fails to engage with your website as anticipated, it could indicate the need for keyword optimizations.
Paying meticulous attention to these metrics helps refine your keyword strategy and ensure that your ads effectively connect with your target audience.
Search Terms And Negative Keywords
Expanding on the keyword aspect, it’s quite common for ads to be triggered by irrelevant searches or navigation queries, leading to subpar performance. To counter this, a robust negative keyword strategy is imperative for PPC optimization. I segment my negative keyword endeavours into two distinct categories.
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Preemptive Negative Keywords
Generate organized keyword lists based on specific themes such as parts and accessories, job hunting, products or services that are not in your offering, and names of competitors you wish to avoid appearing for.
For instance, if your company provides an employee login on your primary website and you observe that employees are clicking on ads to access it, you should utilize the “login” theme to establish negative keywords for potential searches. This proactive approach helps conserve your PPC budget by preventing expenditure on employee-related searches.
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Responsive Negative Keywords
Examine the search terms that are activating your ads, taking into account both the match type and the keyword. Select the checkbox beside each search term for editing, addition, or exclusion, as needed.
Use these newly created negative keyword lists as a preemptive strategy across analogous campaigns. These shared lists can be effortlessly modified in the future, ensuring that all campaigns linked to them receive automatic updates whenever changes are made.
Here’s a simple illustration of a shared negative keyword list crafted to prevent ads from appearing for job-related searches, thus safeguarding click costs.
Budgets
I’m frequently asked about PPC budget strategy, and it’s a topic of great importance. Managing a budget is an art; determining the ideal overall investment and how to allocate it across PPC ad campaigns requires skill.
While many advertisers establish a monthly budget as their upper limit, it’s important to note that technically, budgets are set at the campaign level on a daily basis. Google’s aim is to optimize ad serving for optimal results, which means the actual expenditure might vary, sometimes falling below or exceeding the daily budget. However, it will not surpass the daily budget multiplied by the average number of days in a month (30.4 days).
Therefore, while monitoring your spending is important, there are built-in safeguards to ensure that automation is working in your favour.
It’s worth mentioning that Google doesn’t automatically optimize budget distribution between campaigns, so the responsibility falls on you to perform regular optimizations. High-performing campaigns should receive a larger share of the budget.
Although this is a general guideline, it may not always apply. There are situations where branding and awareness campaigns or certain display campaigns yield fewer conversions. Additionally, campaigns related to your company’s brand name might convert well but may not require a significant budget increase.
If you’re using monthly invoicing for payments, you also have the option to set an account budget. This allows you to allocate a fixed budget amount across multiple campaigns, complete with a specified start and end date, which can be quite useful for more structured billing.
Responsive Search Ads
Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) represent the standard ad format within Google Ads. If you still have earlier ad versions in use, it’s essential to swiftly transition them to the most up-to-date format.
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RSAs use a pool of up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, which are dynamically combined and tested using Google Ads’ AI capabilities. Over time, as data accumulates, Google’s algorithms generate ad strength feedback ratings, which can range from poor to excellent.
Beyond the overall ad rating, individual asset performance ratings are furnished, including learning, low, good, or best. Once a specific asset accrues 500 impressions and the entire ad garners over 2,000 impressions, it’s advisable to replace underperforming assets.
These ratings provide valuable guidance in pinpointing which assets necessitate optimization efforts.
While using automated asset suggestions can be advantageous, it’s also important to apply common sense and adhere to established marketing writing best practices to effectively showcase features, benefits, calls-to-action, and other compelling elements.
Conversion Actions
Following the recent introduction of GA4, it’s essential to conduct a thorough examination of your conversion actions. Here are some key aspects to focus on:
- Migration of Goals: Promptly transfer your existing goals from Universal Analytics to GA4.
- Verification of Conversion Tracking: Ensure that your conversion tracking is functioning correctly in GA4.
- Primary Conversion Alignment: Confirm that your primary conversion aligns with your business’s key performance indicator (KPI) in GA4.
- Exploring New Conversion Actions: Explore the possibility of introducing new conversion actions to gain more comprehensive insights into your PPC performance.
Consider a diverse range of conversion actions, such as tracking purchases, email sign-ups, whitepaper downloads, or chat interactions. This multifaceted approach provides a holistic view of user engagement and interactions with your website stemming from your ads.
Location Targeting
Optimizing location targeting based on your business objectives and performance outcomes is a best practice.
Certain advertisers may opt for the convenient setup options within PPC platforms, which can sometimes default to broader target areas like entire countries, even though more precise geo-targeting options are available, such as states, cities, zip codes, or setting a radius around a specific address.
Here are some strategies to enhance the efficiency of your ad placements in specific locations:
- Bid Adjustments: Adjust your bids based on location, increasing them for areas where you aim to generate more traffic.
- Layered Targeting: Overlaying a city within a state and adjusting bids higher for that city to prioritize it over the rest of the state.
- Exclusion: Exclude locations where you don’t provide services or where the likelihood of finding quality leads or customers is low.
Within the location view, advertisers can assess performance metrics for each selected segment and make data-driven decisions. You can raise bids for high-performing locations while contemplating bid reductions or removal for areas that don’t yield favourable conversion rates.
Keep in mind that using more specific location targeting may decrease your overall reach, but it often leads to greater efficiency.
This underscores the significance of regularly reviewing reports to assess the performance of different geographic segments and make the necessary optimizations.
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How Often Should You Optimize PPC Performance?
Upon launching a campaign, it’s imperative to maintain a vigilant watch over it on a daily or semi-daily basis. This routine monitoring serves to promptly identify any warning signs and address issues in real-time.
For instance, errors in campaign setup or the disapproval of assets can crop up, necessitating immediate attention. The goal is to guide the campaign toward a stable state where metrics like impressions and clicks appear consistent, devoid of any concerning anomalies.
However, it’s important to exercise caution when integrating significant adjustments. The campaign needs to accumulate sufficient data for meaningful analysis. This might entail accumulating thousands of impressions or clicks or allowing a period of three to four weeks to elapse, depending on the budget’s capacity to generate volume.
In Conclusion
Since individuals continuously conduct online searches, there are perpetual chances to enhance an account through regular and steady PPC optimizations.
If this post has sparked fresh optimization concepts for you, consider incorporating them into your strategy and commence testing them today.
Would you like to read more about how to optimize your PPC performance related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!
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