A well-executed PPC campaign, whether it’s on Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, can bring in new customers and encourage previous buyers and visitors to return.
However, if you’ve been running paid search campaigns for a while – and still feel as though your results aren’t improving – it might be time to re-evaluate your PPC performance.
Let’s walk through six PPC tips to help you enhance your paid search performance and get the best ROI from your efforts.
To get ahead in paid search, you need to focus on driving the most efficient conversions by optimizing your campaigns across various dimensions.
Although improving the performance of PPC campaigns can seem like an exhilarating process, there are plenty of PPC tactics you can implement to boost the performance.
Common go-to strategies for improving your Google Ads campaigns can vary from small tweaks like switching off add suggestions through testing different audience segments and to full-on automated bidding strategies.
Essentially, PPC campaign success comes down to profitability. A good campaign will drive high-quality impressions, turn clicks into conversions, and help grow your business.
An unsuccessful campaign, on the other hand, will often underperform, and – no matter how much time you spend optimizing it – it won’t end up making a profit.
The key to a successful PPC campaign lies in knowing when and how to optimize.
A common misconception among PPC-beginners is that PPC directly affects SEO rankings.In reality, however, paid ads do not have a direct impact on organic search rankings. After all, one of Google’s main goals is to provide searchers with organic listings that are most relevant to their queries, rather than the most relevant listings from brands with the biggest ad budget.
With that in mind, SEO and PPC can work together seamlessly to help create a cohesive marketing strategy that enhances your business and brings benefits such as increased SERP real estate and consistent branding experiences.
Ultimately, combining PPC and SEO may give you the best chance of bringing traffic to your business in the short term, and enhancing your online presence for long-term success.
Successful PPC campaigns require you to commit ample time and resources to monitoring and tracking performance, as well as building and testing different strategies.
That said, even your strongest campaigns can face unexpected underperformance due to changes to the market, consumer behavior, your competitors, and even the ad platform itself. Here are some go-to PPC tips you can start implementing today to improve your campaign performance.
Defining your goals early on is a crucial element of any well-performing PPC campaign. Your goal may be to generate more sales leads, increase revenue, or boost awareness. Whatever your goals are, though, remember that they need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and anchored within a time frame (SMART). In turn, the key performance metrics (KPIs) such as your CPA (cost per acquisition) or conversion rate related to these goals will help determine pivotal elements of the campaign such as your ad spend and copy.
Geo-targeting, or local PPC, is a strategy designed to target an audience within a specific area. Using geo-targeting best practices in Google Ads allows you to create customized campaigns that deliver your message to prospects based on their geographic location.
Local PPC can be highly beneficial to optimizing performance. For example, it enables you to create ad copy that accounts for location-specific aspects, such as specific keywords or terms that only locals know. This will resonate better with your audience and they will be more likely to engage. As a result, the more your ad appeals to your users, the better your chances of improving your click-through rate (CTR) and getting more qualified prospects.
With the rise of automation, Google Ads has really stepped up its game. The platform’s machine learning algorithms are continuously improving to, eventually, fully automate advertisers’ manual work with ad copy, bidding, and targeting.
Google’s new Performance Max campaign type, for instance, utilizes machine learning to maximize performance across all of Google’s networks, including YouTube, Display, Search, and Gmail.
Taking advantage of PMax campaigns is one of the most valuable improvements that you can make to your account. Inherently, they are driven by your brand’s unique goals and the automation leverages all of the available data to create and deliver ads that make the most sense for these goals.
Your ad creative can make or break your PPC campaign, and figuring out how to write ad copy that appeals to your audience can be challenging.
A good place to start when trying to improve the performance of your PPC campaigns is by remembering that your ad copy should strive to:
When working on your ad copy, set reminders to regularly check in on your ad creative, as well. Refreshing your ad creative is an effective strategy for ensuring that your campaigns continue to inspire your target audience.
Another good way to boost the performance of a paid campaign is by redefining your audience.
Because your audience is one of the main pillars of successful marketing, you need to target the right users with the right product or offer.
Audience segmentation drills down into the specific aspects of your audience and can significantly increase the likelihood that prospective customers will click through on your ad and take action.
Fundamentally, marketing audiences are segmented by identifying elements such as demographics, psychographics, behavior, and geographic location. Google Ads – as well as Microsoft Advertising – give you vast options to either just observe how different audiences engage with your ad, or to exclusively target users from the most relevant audiences for your business.
A successful remarketing campaign places ads in front of users who are already familiar with your website or app and persuades them to come back and give you a second chance.
Remarketing can nurture the buyer journey by engaging prospects with content that helps them re-evaluate your offer and see it as the right solution for them.
In order to see results, however, you need to get users to care. You can showcase your use cases, benefits, and features, as well as support prospects when they are measuring you against the competition through comparison landing pages.
A well-thought-out paid search campaign can take your business to the next level.
With that in mind, if you’ve tried these PPC tips – and you’ve optimized your campaigns – but don’t see a change in your performance, it might be worth investing in a professional PPC audit.
Need a fresh take on your campaigns? Head over to our PPC services to learn how we can help your business discover ways, specific to your strategy, to improve and scale PPC performance.
I help companies to spend their Google Ads budget in a way that brings results. To achieve this I mix analytical thinking with a pinch of creativity.
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