6 Ways To Optimize Your PPC Performance

Be sure to check out 15 Tips on How to Rock a Small PPC Budget, which can help with ideas for budget challenges.

4. Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)

Consider a variety of conversion actions.

Once an asset has 500 impressions and the ad has over 2,000 impressions, it’s time to replace low-performing assets.

The campaign needs to acquire data, so don’t make any big changes until there is enough data to analyze.

Below is a basic example of a shared negative keyword list designed to exclude searches related to job hunting that may trigger ads and waste click costs.

3. Budgets

Regardless of which match type you decide on to get started, you should continually review to ensure you’re reaching the right audience.

This may not apply in cases where branding and awareness or certain display campaigns don’t show many conversions. Also, company brand names may convert higher but don’t need more budget.

Below, in the location view, advertisers can see performance by the segment they select and then analyze performance.

With that said, Google doesn’t optimize between campaigns, so it is up to you to optimize this on a regular basis. Better-performing campaigns should receive a higher percentage of the budget.

You can also set an account budget if you are using monthly invoicing for payments. This enables a set budget amount across campaigns with a start and end date, which is handy if you need more structured billing.

This could mean thousands of impressions or clicks, or letting three to four weeks go by, depending on the volume allowed by the budget.

Final Thoughts

Digging more into the keyword topic, oftentimes irrelevant searches or navigation searches will trigger your ads and cause poor performance.

An example of this is errors in set-up or disapproved assets. You want the campaign to get to a stable place where the impressions, clicks, etc., look consistent with no red flags.

It’s a good practice to optimize location targeting by business goals and performance results.

PPC optimization needs to employ a solid negative keyword strategy.

While this is a good basic rule of thumb, it isn’t always the case.

For example, say your company has an employee login for your main website. You notice employees searching for the employee login are clicking on ads to reach it.

While exact match is the most relevant to serving ads, it is also the most restrictive and can leave some opportunities behind.

With the recent launch of GA4, be sure to audit your conversion actions. Some things to look for:

• Migrate goals in Universal Analytics to GA4 right away.
• Confirm the conversion tracking is working.
• Confirm that the primary conversion is your business’s key performance indicator (KPI).
• Can you add new conversion actions to get richer information on PPC results?

Create themed keyword lists themes around parts/accessories, job hunting, products/services you don’t offer, and competitors’ names you don’t want to show up for.

Now for the second big question: where should you start?

Using automated asset suggestions can be helpful, but use common sense and marketing writing best practices to showcase features, benefits, calls-to-action, etc.

5. Location Targeting

Pay-per-click (PPC) optimization is the process of reviewing, analyzing, and editing campaign elements to improve performance based on business goals.

After paid search campaigns are launched, running, and collecting data, optimizations begin.

On the other end of the spectrum, broad match is the most flexible in keyword matching but can lead to irrelevant searches triggering ads.

More resources: 

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For example: tracking purchases, email signups, whitepaper downloads, or chat interactions to get a full picture of the user’s engagement and actions with the website from ads.

Bonus Tip: How Often To Optimize?

منبع

I get asked about PPC budget strategy nearly every day, and for good reason! Managing a budget is an art; finding the perfect overall investment and campaign allocation for PPC ads takes skill.

PPC optimizations are critical to improve your paid search advertising campaigns’ performance.

I divide my negative keyword efforts into two categories.

Proactive Negative Keywords/Lists

Consider the following strategies to optimize the locations where your ads are served:

• Bid adjustments – Set bids by location so that your bids increase for searchers in the area you want to reach more.
• Layering a city over the state and adjusting the bid higher in that city to favor it over the rest of the state.
• Excluding locations you don’t serve or where you are not likely to find quality leads or customers.

Before we get into our top tips, what exactly is PPC optimization?

Keywords drive ads in the search results and help match searchers with the most relevant ads.

You will want to use that “login” theme to create negatives on possible searches that may occur to avoid spending PPC budget on employee searches.

Reactive Negative Keywords

Because people never stop searching, there are always opportunities to improve an account through frequent and consistent PPC optimizations.

When a campaign first launches, it will need to be monitored every day (or every few days) to identify red flags and fix those issues in real-time.

Therefore, while keeping an eye on the spend is important, checks are in place to ensure the automation is working for you.

As always, if this post generated some new optimization ideas for you, add them to your strategy and test them out today.

Here are a few metrics that serve as indicators of performance for keywords:

• CTR: The click-through rate (CTR) for search for more general keywords describing the product or service should be over 1% at a minimum. The CTR for brand terms is usually much higher at 3% or more. If the CTRs are less than that, it means the ad does not seem relevant to the user, who doesn’t click. Check search terms and ad relevancy.
• Conversions: Compare historical conversion data to the new keywords to see how they compare and whether the keywords are not relevant enough, or match-typed too broadly.
• Interactions, time on site, website metrics: If the traffic is not interacting with the website as you would expect, this may also be an indicator the keywords need optimizations.

2. Search Terms And Negative Keywords

In addition to the overall ad rating, individual asset performance ratings are provided: learning, low, good, or best.

Google will serve the ads to get the best results, so the actual spend may be under or over the daily budget, but will not exceed the daily budget x 30.4 days in a month.

Increase bids for high-producing locations, and consider reducing bids for areas that don’t convert as well or remove altogether.