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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has the potential to grow your business quickly by attracting new leads, driving sales, and increasing profit margins. However, all of this success is contingent on whether or not you — or your advertising manager — knows strategies for managing PPC campaigns, especially with the immense PPC competition that businesses face nowadays.
A solid PPC campaign management strategy can deliver sterling results. Conversely, diving headfirst into PPC advertising without a plan can be an expensive mistake.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the biggest challenges in Google Ads for advertisers, and provide the solutions you need to generate better results, and ultimately, improve your profitable PPC campaign in 2021.
Paid advertising is no stranger to artificial intelligence (AI). Google Ads has embraced the age of AI wholeheartedly, offering you the chance to run smart campaigns that are driven by automation and machine learning algorithms and also good care is taken by this technology in PPC campaign management.
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Through this cutting-edge technology, companies can tap into the potential of their consumer data, reaching more new prospects at all stages of the customer journey.
It all sounds great, but for some PPC managers, the idea of handing control to the robots is cause for concern. How can you be sure that you will stay on track towards your marketing goals?
The nature of the digital age pressures businesses to get on board or risk getting left behind their more innovative, ambitious competitors. While some CEOs may worry about losing control, they must realize that AI doesn’t spell the end of human involvement.
In fact, by letting technology take care of the data and automation, you free up your workforce to focus on strategy.
It’s not easy to manage your keywords and bids and monitor your key metrics at every turn. When you have a vast Ads account, with reams of historical data, the task becomes tougher again.
You may have a thriving campaign that drives a lot of impressions but do these impressions have worth, if they are not being converted? So having a keen eye on your campaign performance and its conversion is important.
The best way to get a clear understanding of your conversion is to trim your data:
Once the data is clean, implement the right tools, and only use tracking events that add value to your business. Make sure to record conversions correctly both in Google Ads and Google Analytics, then you’ll finally understand the role your ad plays in moving customers along your conversion funnel.
As you get involved in PPC competition, you’ll soon discover that paid search campaigns generate a massive amount of data. It becomes hard in managing PPC campaigns. Of course, more data creates some high complexity, but unless you know how to leverage data insights, it can quickly become burdensome.
Quite often, business owners find themselves short on time, and they can easily find themselves lumbered with outdated, disparate data sources that serve only to confuse and frustrate.
Data can be daunting. However, if you change the way you look at it, the picture can become clear. With data visualization and reporting tools, it’s much easier to analyze and learn from your data.
Visualizing your data through graphs and charts can make all the difference, allowing your team to glean insights that help improve your business going forward quickly.
You can’t get far in Pay-Per-Click advertising if you don’t adapt your strategy over time. There are a plethora of tasks to keep you busy, from launching PPC campaigns, optimizing keyword lists, spotting data trends, monitoring competitors, and reporting on performance, to name just a few.
Throw in the constant changes in Google Ads and fluctuating cost-per-click (CPC) rates, and you have your hands full. When you’re in charge of a huge account that contains hundreds of ad groups and thousands of keywords, it’s challenging to keep everything fresh.
A/B testing allows you to figure out what works best for your campaigns, your audience, and your goals. Also, you can use Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) across your campaigns to deliver more targeted ads for each user.
You can draw inspiration from the PPC competition around you, taking ideas from rivals to create fresh new content that makes your content stand out. If you’re not the biggest brand in the market, you should look to move to areas where there is more space for you to capture the attention of prospects.
Keep best practices in mind when creating content for your ads and landing pages, as having clear guidelines will help hone your content quality.
Sometimes, while managing PPC campaigns, no matter how hard you try, it can feel like you’re never going to score in PPC advertising. When PPC competition is fierce, experienced competitors may claim the rewards, and you can see your budget dwindle with little return on investment.
How can you grow if you struggle to compete with deep-pocketed big guns?
Instead of hedging your bets across multiple hit-and-hope campaigns, you should conduct thorough market research and budget planning. This approach sets you up for better financial decision-making, and ultimately, more sustainable spending.
Done right, a solid forecast can help you reduce spend in wasteful areas, and you will have the insight needed to allocate your budget in a more effective, efficient way. Rather than driving CPC up by competing for highly-competitive terms, you can chase value in high-converting terms with low competition.
In 2021, you cannot ignore personalization. If you’re still ignoring this massive marketing trend, your business is losing money hand over fist.
Personalized marketing paves the way for stronger relationships with prospects and existing customers, helping your brand establish a relatable voice that resonates with the individual needs, fears, and desires of every customer. In paid advertising, such an approach is great because it ensures you maximize your data insights to create a memorable user experience for everyone. Unfortunately, not every PPC manager has the time, skills, or know-how to make personalization happen.
Use layered demographic targeting to reach a targeted audience that is most likely to convert. For example, let’s say you advertise luxury apartments with average rents of $3,000 or more. You can serve your ads only to the users that Google classified to be in the top 30% of household income.
By doing this, you can prevent wasted clicks by users who may not be able to afford the apartment. Therefore, you will conserve your budget to only connect with prospects who can afford the rent.
You can take this granular targeting further by layering by age, gender, and parental statuses if you have the data to prove who is most likely to convert.
Depending on your audience, and the products and services you offer, your ads may be more effective or less effective at certain times of the day. Also, while managing PPC campaigns, you may have more success advertising in certain locations or on different devices. It’s not easy to figure all of this out straight away, and you can quickly lose a lot of money advertising on the wrong device, in the wrong location, at the wrong time.
Analyze your data to look for positive trends in conversion rates regarding devices, locations, and time of day. Take these results into consideration, and use bid modifiers to ensure your ads are laser-focused to have the most significant impact.
You can begin by testing a small +25% bid modifier for a month or two. If your test results indicate a bump in conversions, you can adjust your bids to focus on specific locations, devices, or time. Similarly, you can use this strategy to identify negative bid modifiers that will protect you from wasting your budget on low-ROI locations or devices.
Remarketing to people that have previously engaged your business is a smart way of driving brand awareness and increasing sales, as people are more receptive to brand messaging when they are already aware of your business.
In PPC marketing, it can be a little tricky to share your remarketing lists across your manager account and sub-accounts.
Sharing audience lists across manager accounts requires multiple steps. You can make it easy by enabling continuous audience sharing in your manager accounts.
Whenever you opt-in, any remarketing lists you create in your manager account will be shared with all of your existing and future sub-accounts. These accounts can receive lists from multiple manager accounts, and you still have control over which lists are active.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that bidding on branded keywords is a waste of time and money! They assume that their brand will appear in the top spot for these keywords anyway, but in reality, that’s not guaranteed.
If you don’t bid on your branded keywords, while managing PPC campaigns, and your competitor does, you’ll lose quality, interested traffic to a competitor.
It’s a simple solution – bid on your branded keywords! When you do this, you ensure you will top the results in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) and it will attract high intended users.
Seasonal campaigns provide opportunities to engage with your audience during a time when they are more inclined to make purchases. For example, people may buy more swimwear in the summertime.
However, what do you do when your products aren’t aligned with a busy season? You can’t expect great results if your audience isn’t engaged, which makes it hard to leverage seasonal trends and managing PPC campaigns.
You should strive to tweak your products, services, and promotions in a way that means you will continuously have something of interest to your audience, no matter what the season.
By getting creative with your brand messaging and ad copy, you can frame offers in a way that makes them relevant to your audience at that particular time.
Google Ads doesn’t stay still. If you want to make the most of this advertising platform — and your Pay-Per-Click budget — you must remain vigilant and be willing to adapt changes in the market while managing PPC campaigns to improve your ROI.
If you’re just getting started with PPC advertising, an open-mind, and a proactive approach to new strategies will help your business stay ahead of the curve, no matter how tough the PPC competition is in your industry or niche.
You can learn more about getting off to a good start with PPC in our blog post, PPC for Startups: 10 Steps to Launch a Successful Google Ads Marketing Campaign.
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