Digital Marketing Manager Carl Banks explains how a properly executed PPC campaign can be vital to seeing conversions and ROI.
These often-overlooked tips will give your PPC campaign a better chance of performing because we all know a poorly run PPC campaign can end up costing you a lot of money for very few results. PPC is not an exact science, but these small changes can help your campaigns in a big way and if you’ve got a healthy-looking campaign, you’ve a much higher chance of maximising your ROI.
1. Landing pages
One of the biggest overlooked areas of paid search is not spending enough time ensuring your landing page is relevant to your PPC campaign. Marketers spend hours lost in data, tweaking their bids and alternating creatives or copy only to find that the landing page itself does not align with their paid advert.
The first objective of a PPC campaign is to get someone to click: this then leads them directly to your website. But if you have not taken the time to optimise the landing page so that it aligns perfectly with your campaign, then you will see a huge bounce rate and your campaign will produce little to no conversions.
Consistency throughout is the key to a strong PPC campaign and this follows through onto your landing page. Your messages and CTA should be consistent across keywords, ad copy and your landing pages. If a customer has clicked on your advert, this suggests they were interested in those keywords or the advert’s message, so you must ensure the same messaging exists on the landing page for the customer to convert.
2. Negative keywords
Google Ads is a hub of data, and the things you can manage and view via the system is endless. One of the best tools you have at your disposal is the ability to ensure you’re specifying keywords that are not a good fit for your campaign. It’s just as important to tell Google what your service is not as it is to tell them what you do offer.
Explore Google’s Keyword Planner to see related terms to your campaign and get an idea of any you might want to remove, then look to utilise Google’s search query report to identify any new negative keywords. I’ve found this to be the strongest approach to locating the terms that do not relate to the campaign, and you’ll start to see the positive effects of these changes.
Google does a great job of serving your ads to the right people based on your campaign objectives, but you can help the algorithm avoid finding the wrong people by building a strong set of negative keywords. You should see an improvement in your campaign’s performance, and this will prevent you spending your money in the wrong areas.
3. Filter out low-performing keywords
When analysing the performance of your PPC campaign, the easiest thing to focus on is the top-performing terms, but what about the low-performing keywords? These keywords that are under-performing offer nothing to your campaign: they deplete your ad budget and offer no conversions, so why leave them active?
Look for terms that are not generating impressions as they’ll be one of the key culprits for wasting your ad budget. Remember, if a keyword is not generating impressions (even though you have the campaign optimised perfectly) then nobody is searching for that term in your pool. It’s important to give your campaign time to perform but if you’re seeing no results for specific terms, pause it or change it up.
You should also be on the lookout for terms that are not resulting in clicks: they will likely be lacking relevance and need reworking. And lastly, if you have keywords that are not producing conversions, take the time to check your campaign settings and refer to our point about landing page consistency.
There will be other reasons that keywords are not resulting in impressions, clicks or conversions but by taking the time to analyse these low performers, you can optimise your campaign better and see quick improvements in results.
Following these simple tips can help to ensure that your PPC campaigns are on the right track – none of the above should take a huge amount of your time. You can also easily include them within your daily campaign checks. If you’re struggling with your existing PPC campaigns or not sure where to start, get in touch with our Digital Marketing team today and see how we can help you transform your brand.
