The first 30 days are the most important part of a PPC campaign optimisation process, all PPC campaigns have a learning period that you need to make sure you are following a step by step optimisation process to make the proper adjustments for the campaigns to deliver on your goals. Once you have your PPC campaigns up and running, a critical step in the optimisation process is to make sure that your campaigns are giving you the right return on your investment. There are 7 key factors that we are going to explore in this post which will help you ensure that you are reducing unnecessary ad spend from your campaigns.
By assessing and adapting your tactics you can ensure that your campaigns are optimised and you are maximising the return on your investment.
Some key factors that will help you reduce your unnecessary ad spend are:
Tracking
Step number 1 that will help you with the campaign optimisation process is always making sure that you have tracking configured for your campaigns. Without tracking you are not able to calculate the ROI of your campaigns or identify campaigns that are working and contributing to generating leads or sales for your business.
Keywords
Keywords are an important part of a campaign and it determines your success in reaching the right target audience for your business. Check the keywords that are being used and delivering the right traffic and adjust your bids if necessary (we are making an assumption that manual bidding is used at the start of a campaign), check your search terms that are matching those keywords and also the bounce rate for each one. A broad match can trigger a lot of unwanted searches. While broad match should have a place in marketing campaigns, using other match types such as phrase or exact match, can reduce unecessary spend on your chosen keywords.
Ad Text
Your ad text needs to match the keywords you are using on the campaign. Take into account the targeted keywords and write ad copy in relation to that. At the same time as this, you will need to be mindful of the landing page that you are using, and whether your ad copy and keywords relate to that page. Getting all this right for the user will help increase your ad quality score. The quality score for your ads is important and the higher it is the lower your advertising costs for the chosen keyword will be
Time and Location
Just as making bid adjustments based on different keywords is important, it is also crucial to make sure that you are adjusting your campaigns based on the times and location that your audience. You need to be aware of the time that your audience is active and make the right bid adjustment for the proper time. We do not want the campaigns to run out of budget at the time that your audience is active, so you need to make sure you spot the right patterns. Location is also important as you need to be very specific in your campaign targeting for the products or services that you are offering.
Multi-channel Marketing Attribution
Marketing attribution can be defined as the way that a customer has been acquired. Nowadays customers have a lot of different touchpoints from a business before they convert, and a marketeer needs to identify the specific touch points that contribute to that conversion. In an ideal world, the customer would click on an ad and then immediately convert, but that is not always the case. There are a lot of marketing attribution models that are great at helping you understand the customer journey, and attribute the acquisition to the right channels. One of them is Google Analytics, with the Multichannel funnel report that can be used to help you tweak and increase the conversions of your campaigns.
Negative Keywords
Whether you are new at using Google Ads or have been doing PPC campaigns for some years, you know that an important part of a successful Google ads campaign is the keywords that you are targeting, however, fewer people are devoting time and energy to build a negative keyword list that will reduce your unnecessary advertising spend and thus increase the return on investment from your campaigns. Having a negative keyword strategy is a big deal, you need to create a list of keywords that your ads should not appear as this will eliminate your unnecessary ad spent instantly Be mindful that match types also apply with negative keyword lists.
Remarketing
Another overlooked factor of PPC campaigns is including remarketing audiences in your targeting mix. There is a big percentage of potential customers who are visiting your website that will return back and convert, by having remarketing campaigns in place and by utilising remarketing audiences in your campaign mixture you make sure that users who already visited your website are seeing your ads. Remarketing audiences are cheaper to target as users are already familiar with your business and the products and services that you offer, so make sure that you include them in your targeting mix on your campaigns.
Return on investment is a key metric that estimates the success of your PPC campaigns. We often see people who had a bad experience with the PPC campaign because the optimisation process of them has been overlooked. The success of a PPC campaign depends on the right optimisation progress, it is never a case of set it and forget it as you will always need to stay on top of them and also stay ahead of your competitors.
