5 Tips To Optimization Of PPC Campaigns

Optimizing your PPC campaigns is a constant challenge. There is no such thing as a 100% perfectly optimized PPC campaign. There is always room for improvement. Thus, marketers typically dedicate a few hours out of their weekly, or even daily, schedule towards optimizing and improving their PPC efforts.

This is a big commitment of time. So, you want to ensure that you use it wisely and improve the areas of your PPC campaigns that will produce the biggest returns. After all, there are hundreds of ways and combinations that can affect your PPC campaigns. The goal of optimizing your PPC strategy is to select the paths that lead towards adding to your success, rather than taking away from it.

1.) Have A Goal In Mind

Why are you investing money in paid search marketing in the first place? What do you hope to get out of your campaigns? Is it brand awareness? Increased website traffic? Improved revenue? Whatever your goal is, you need to build your optimization efforts around furthering your progress towards achieving that mission.

When selecting what and how to improve, think about your goal. Will this change positively impact your goal in some way? If yes, then it is a smart use of your time. If not, then look elsewhere to make positive changes.

This is not always easy because PPC changes often create a rippling effect. A change with seemingly no impact on increasing sales may unexpectedly boost a metric that does affect sales. You want to select the opportunities that relate closest to your goals first. Then, you can explore potential changes that offer smaller levels of improvement.

2.) Make Your Biggest Changes First

When prioritizing changes to your PPC campaigns, it’s important to target your biggest improvements first. These areas offer the greatest potential gain. You can think of it like a report card from school. If you have four A’s and one C, you should study harder in the class where you’ve received a C-grade because raising the A to an A+ has a much smaller impact on your GPA than getting that C to a B.

Look at your campaigns, ad groups and even individual keywords and identify your lowest performers. These are the areas that are hurting your performance the most. Thus, they represent the greatest opportunity to improve!

If you need inspiration for how to improve these weak points, look at your campaigns on the opposite end of the spectrum. Your most successful campaigns and keywords should shed some light into what sort of PPC strategies are most effective with your target audience.

In some cases, you may find that you can’t improve your low-performing ad groups or keywords. Some keywords are just not valuable. It’s better to pause these areas of your campaign because they may be hurting your Quality Scores.

3.) Understand The Importance Of Quality Scores

If you are using Google Ads, which many PPC marketers do, then you should be familiar with the concept of Quality Score. This is Google’s way of grading ads in terms of relevance, quality and expected performance. The higher your Q-Score, the more likely you are to rank in a top ad placement. And, you’ll pay less money doing so. This means that improving the quality and relevance of your ads will improve your ROI and increase campaign performance.

There are a lot of factors that Google uses to grade ads. The culmination of these factors results in your Q-Score. Google is notoriously hush-hush regarding the exact science behind grading ads, but there are some known components that impact Quality Scores:

• Ad copy relevance to the targeted keyword
• Landing page’ relevance to the targeted keyword
• Expected clickthrough rate
• Quality of the landing page
• Relevance of each keyword in the ad group
• How well your past campaigns have performed

As you’re optimizing your PPC campaigns, look at ad groups or campaigns with lower Quality Scores. How can you improve the relevance and quality of these components to improve your scores? It may be a matter of improving a landing page experience or making a keyword-specific page for each ad. Alternatively, you may have too many keywords in the ad group that don’t relate well enough to one another.

4.) Spend Some Time (And Money) Experimenting

There are no cheat codes or hacks to developing the perfect PPC campaign or ad copy, despite what some marketing gurus may advertise. Every audience is unique, which means they respond to different messages, care about different features and act at their own pace.

If you take the experiences of another marketer and try and apply it to your own PPC campaigns, it’s like asking what bait they are using, even though you’re trying to catch completely different fish.

The only way to learn how your audience acts and behaves with regards to paid search messages is to experiment on your own. If you aren’t putting some of your optimization budget (both time and money) towards split-testing new ad copy, exploring fresh keyword opportunities and playing around with different settings and strategies, then you could miss out on discovering a valuable insight that improves your entire PPC account!

5.) Apply The 1% Improvement Principle

Optimizing your PPC campaigns on a routine basis shouldn’t be a massive undertaking every time. Your goal isn’t to make a successful PPC campaign every time. Instead, your objective should be to simply improve your campaigns by a small margin, even by just 1%. Over time, these small steps forward will begin to grow exponentially. In a year’s time, those 1% improvements evolve into 3700% growth!

Eventually, you may run out of vital tasks. There are no more low-performers with giant “Start Here” signs over their heads. What do you do then? How do you find areas to continuously improve?

Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect campaign. So, there are always areas of improvement available. If you can’t find any vital improvements, look at what useful tasks are available. This is when (and only when) you can begin improving aspects of your campaigns that do not directly impact your marketing goal.

Conclusions

There are plenty of ways to change your PPC campaigns. The goal of optimization is to select the moves that provide the most significant steps forward. However, you also have to think in terms of what’s possible from a time and money standpoint.

You can’t go start to finish in a single day.

Instead, you need to develop ways that allow you to improve your campaigns in small ways but on a continuous basis. Then, growth and high performance will come in due time!

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