5 Tips to Improve Your PPC Campaign’s Performance

 

It’s not enough to set up your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign, you’ll need to monitor and optimize it on an ongoing basis if you want to improve its performance. Fortunately, there are steps you can take with your PPC campaign to achieve a higher return on investment (ROI). Check out our five tips to see how you can enhance your PPC campaign’s performance.

Negative keywords are words or phrases that you DO NOT want your ads to show up for. By using negative keywords, you’re telling the ad platform to avoid placing your ads on results pages that are generated when a user enters those search terms. The benefit of doing this is to avoid advertising to people who aren’t searching for your type of products or services. When your ads are aligned with your target audience’s search terms, they’re more likely to click your ad.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is a Google Ads feature that can improve your click-through-rate (CTR) by making your ad more targeted to the user’s search terms. It allows advertisers to create ads that automatically replace a piece of the ad’s text with the keyword entered by the user. You can add DKI in your ad by entering {KeyWord: Example} in the space where you would want the user’s search terms to fit within your ad’s headline or description. If the search term is too long to fit within the allotted space, the keyword in the brackets is what Google Ads will write into the ad.

 

For example, let’s say your Yoga Pants ad group has a breadth of keywords like black yoga pants, cotton yoga pants, quality yoga pants, etc., so you write in the ad headline Buy {KeyWord: Yoga Pants}. Google Ads will replace the word after “Buy” with a keyword from your ad group if it matches the user’s search term. So, if a user searched for black quality yoga pants, then the ad would show Buy Black Quality Yoga Pants. But if the inserted keyword is too long, then the ad will show Buy Yoga Pants. DKI is great for customizing your ads based on users’ searches which increases clicks and conversion.

You can change the frequency of how often your ads are shown based on factors like location, time, and device. For example, if you find that most of your audience uses mobile rather than desktop, you can increase your bid for when users conduct a search on their smartphone or tablet. Doing this shows your ad more often to an audience you perform well with so you can get even more clicks. Before applying bid adjustments, make sure to carefully read reports and look for places where conversions perform the best so your bid adjustments can match. Over time, you’ll be able to refine your PPC spend.

When you’re able to get the right messaging in front of the right eyes at the most opportune time, marketing magic happens. It’s why picking the right ad schedule comes down to knowing your target audience. What times of the day are they most active? B2B businesses have it generally easier since most of their audiences are most active during regular 9-5 business hours. Consumers, however, can be trickier to target.

 

In the beginning, set your ad schedule to 24/7. While this does cost a little more at first, you can scale it back when you discover the most active time periods. Then, you can make bid adjustments to slow down the campaign during certain times or days to lower your average cost-per-click (CPC).

Performing A/B tests lets you see what is and isn’t working, thereby allowing you to optimize your campaign and enhance its performance. There are four elements you can split test in PPC campaigns:

 

• Headline
• Body
• Link
• Keywords on ad display

When A/B testing, look for patterns in how certain keywords perform in terms of CTR, conversions, raising awareness, etc. Certain keywords may work well in one area but awful in other areas. This doesn’t mean that they’re more or less valuable than other keywords, it just shows how they perform at different stages of the buyer’s journey. In summary, conducting A/B tests allows you to optimize your campaign.

The digital marketing experts at Sales & Marketing Technologies have created, managed, and optimized PPC campaigns on a variety of ad platforms for clients big and small. For more information about how PPC advertising can benefit your business, give us a call today at 407-682-2222 or fill out our contact form.