Truth be told, there are no specific things that will supercharge your PPC campaigns. You have to do everything to the highest possible standard. Nevertheless, I’ve put together some tips that should give you a leg up on the competition.
Define Your Goal
Number 1 on the list is defining your goal and ensuring that you understand exactly what you’re looking to achieve from your campaigns. The goals you set right off the bat are what you use to structure, optimise and report on the performance of your campaigns. If you haven’t defined a goal that’s clear or maybe you’re trying to achieve the wrong goal, then you’re destined to fail.
Simple but important. Could brand awareness be the key to powering branded searches, providing more exposure and lifetime value? Then maybe a display campaign finely tuned might be the way for you to go.
Generally, our goals are very similar but the way to achieve them can vary massively. There’s “no one size fits all” guide but ensuring you know exactly what you’re setting out to achieve and what is realistic is important.
All of our clients are put through a detailed onboarding process because if we didn’t have information from them regarding their actual goals and targets.
The road map to success is crucial.
Understanding your site’s performance
Again, another fundamental issue that most businesses face. You could have the healthiest and most well-tuned Google Ads campaign in the world but if your websites conversion rate sits at 0.25% then chances are you’re going to be extremely unprofitable but you’re focusing on the wrong thing by trying to supercharge your PPC campaigns.
Google Analytics allows you to view site performance (as long as you’ve created goals) across all channels together or individually, painting a true picture of website performance both for landing pages and how your site performance on different devices.
Once in Google Analytics head to the audience tab > mobile > overview, here you’ll see something similar to below:
Have a play around with the segments you’re using (all traffic, organic, paid etc) and something might jump out at you. Is your conversion rate significantly lower from paid traffic than organic? Then there could be an issue with your campaigns set up. Is your mobile conversion rate flat-lining but 70% of your traffic is from mobile devices? Then you may need to look at optimising your website for mobile.
Pro tip: Try using landing pages that are specific to the adverts you’re using in Google Ads. Simply amending the titles of your landing pages to the top-performing keywords that are using that page can have significant changes to page conversion rates and engagement.
RLSAs (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads)
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. A relatively easy to implement yet often overlooked feature that allows you to serve search ads to people who previously visited your site, based around specific criteria that you set. Want to show a specific type of ad to someone who has visited your website service page and gone on to search for your most profitable keyword on Google again? RLSAs are what you need.
RLSAs allow you to double down when a visitor has performed whatever action you specify in the list on your site and then go on to search for keywords in your Google Ads account. By continuing to search for your product or service you can see that this visitor is highly engaged and are very possibly ready to enquire, so RLSAs allows you to increase the bid for your keywords if they’ve already visited your site before as they’re more qualified.
Allowing for a second bite of the cherry, remarketing lists for search ads are essential to an increasingly profitable PPC campaign, especially if scaling your campaigns is a problem.
We often see average cost per conversions reduce significantly in these types of campaigns, depending on how aggressive you want to be.
A/B testing Google Ads
It goes without saying that all ads need to be professionally written as they are often the first time you get a chance to present your company to the individual searching for your service.
However, in the competitive industry that is Google Ads, this simply isn’t enough. You need to be creative with effective calls to action and try to create a sense of urgency without looking like just any other advertiser. You need to light up their eyes and draw their attention and that’s not an easy thing to do when you’re directly competing with other advertisers doing the same thing and such a short amount of characters to work with.
Creating urgency is vital. If in our every day lives we’re relaxed and chilled out then we’re less likely to move and our proactiveness suffers (which isn’t always a bad thing, we all need a break). However, our state of mind is also affected by this very same process.
Make your ads specific, relevant and make the searcher believe that they can’t miss out on your product. Once they’ve visited the site, let your branding & landing pages do the work for you.
There’s often a direct correlation between the click-through rate in your Google Ads account and the number of conversions you’re receiving. This isn’t always the case but it’s logical to think that if you have improved overall relevancy, thus improving quality scores, then your overall campaign performance will improve.
Implement Automated bid strategies
The first point of this blog was understanding your goals and that applies here. Automated bid strategies are vital to any PPC campaign. Using AI, your campaigns develop, learn and refine at a level that is impossible for a human to do as we’re not managing a campaign 24/7, nor do we get data in real-time. However, automation is absolutely nothing without human interaction and this is the key balance that needs to be found and is often what causes issues by listening to needless recommendations or over-engineering a campaign.
When it comes to automation, we have many strategies available to us:
- Target CPA
- Target ROAS
- Maximise Clicks
- Maximise Conversions
- Maximise Conversion Value
- Target Impression Share
If you’re using manual cost per click bidding then there may be a fantastic opportunity for you to improve your performance by experimenting with your search campaigns bid strategy.
- Target cost per action (CPA): If you want to optimise your campaigns based around your conversion actions (to increase them) then the target cost per action campaign might be for you. It allows you to double down on conversions, using AI, whilst aiming to maintain a target cost per action. A great option if you’re struggling to scale and have lots of historic data in your Google Ads account.
- Target return on ad spend (ROAS): ROAS bidding allows you to aim to automatically aim to increase the monetary conversion value that’s being returned from your Google Ads account, targeting a certain % return on your investment. This can be a great option for e-commerce companies but your goal must be realistic.
- Maximise Clicks – This bid strategy gets you the most traffic for your budget on the keywords you’ve selected. It’s a great option if you just want to maximise the traffic through to your site for your set budget. Be aware though, because the quality of your traffic can suffer.
- Maximise Conversions: This conversion action can provide huge scale success but it must be done in a very controlled environment. This strategy aims to maximise bids but there’s no limit to how much conversions will cost you.
- Maximise Conversion Value: Similar to maximise conversions, there’s no target ROAS here, it’s all about maximising the amount of revenue that is generated, disregarding the % of return on investment you want to see. A braver option but it may fit your businesses marketing plan.
- Enhanced cost per click (ECPC): If you want to automatically adjust your manual bids to try to maximise conversions, you can use ECPC. It’s basically an upgrade on the manual CPC bidding option and it’s a nice way to dip your toe into the world of Google Ads automation.
These points are great for looking at some of the fundamental things that can be done to look at campaign performance and ensure you’re set up properly for success. Again, all successful marketing campaigns run cohesively so it’s important that you’re doing every well, holistically.
Want to discuss this further? Get in touch with our team of PPC experts today!
