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No one likes talking about costs. We’d much prefer to talk about our profits!
That said, cost plays a critical part in the marketing strategies you perform, especially your Google Ads campaigns.
You can’t accurately measure your marketing campaign effectiveness if you aren’t taking into account your budget.
With pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, there is a direct cost for every ad interaction. Even if the customer doesn’t convert, you’ve still paid for their click.
If you aren’t optimizing your advertising campaign by these costs, you could be hurting your returns.
In this discussion, we’ll look at how to optimize your costs in Google Ads and why you need the best PPC management software to do so.
Let’s get started.
Setting up your Google Ads campaigns is just the first piece of the puzzle. Any experienced PPC marketer will tell you that the bulk of their time and effort isn’t spent creating new campaigns, but managing existing ones.
If you want to generate good returns from Google Ads, you can’t be passive in your efforts. You have to spend a lot of time tweaking your campaign settings, changing ad copy, looking for new keywords, etc.
Unfortunately, all of these adjustments, no matter how small, require lots of time. Plus, the paid aspect of PPC marketing means that poorly optimized campaigns or wrong decisions can deplete your budget.
To stay on top of your PPC management (and your costs), you need to monitor your data constantly and look for potential risks, opportunities and other notable occurrences.
It’s a lot of work, which is why you need the best PPC management software.
This type of software for PPC alleviates many of the struggles and stresses you’ll face when managing your Google Ads account data. You’ll be able to consistently get the best results for the marketing budget you have.
Absolutely!
The Google Ads platform includes many features and tools to help make advertising easier, but they don’t solve many marketers’ struggles with their PPC data.
PPC data hold multiple challenges for marketers:
The culminating effect of these obstacles makes it impossible for marketers to effectively manage their accounts without the help of the best PPC management software tools.
Your PPC data is far too complex and dynamic to manage manually. The truth is that you can’t be there 24/7, monitoring your campaigns. You have more important things to do with your time!
Third-party software for PPC removes the most tedious tasks of the management process and allows you to more efficiently and effectively interact with your data.
You’ll spend less time agonizing over data changes and more time relaying those shifts into actionable, data-informed decisions.
The only case where you can get by without the help of PPC management software is if you operate a very small account – one or two campaigns and only a handful of keyword targets.
That said, you should expect your Google Ads account to grow in time, which means you’ll need a proper management solution before you know it.
Your budget plays a crucial role in your PPC performance. You don’t want to overspend on ads that don’t produce results. Similarly, you don’t want to miss out on valuable opportunities because your money is tied elsewhere.
Thus, budget optimization is an absolute must when managing your campaigns. This section will outline tips for getting your costs under control in Google Ads.
PPC search ads fit the marketing goals of a lot of businesses. However, it is not a 100% universal strategy. You may find display ads work better for your goals.
Before moving into the PPC tips for optimizing your costs, you first want to ask yourself, “Is this the right network for me?”
You have to think about the advantages of each network and the costs.
Remember, you can utilize multiple networks in your strategies. You may find some campaigns function better on the Display Network than Search.
PPC marketing is founded on keywords. The keywords you select will determine who sees your ads and how much each click costs.
There’s a lot to consider when selecting your keywords.
Finding the right keywords requires you to consider all of these factors. In a perfect world, you’d always discover cheap, popular keywords that are relevant to your business and that suggest high intent to convert.
In reality, you’re going to make tradeoffs, like choosing an inexpensive keyword that’s highly relevant and has good intent, but low search popularity.
It’s all about finding the right keywords that fit your budget and your business for this purpose you can use PPCexpo Keyword Planner to sort out keywords which best suit your campaign.
On the topic of keyword targeting, marketers need also to consider the search terms that don’t fit their business.
When you target a keyword, your ads will appear for a wide range of searches that relate to your target. Unfortunately, not all of these related searches will be relevant to your company.
For example, let’s say your business sells clothing for pets. You target the keyword “dog sweatshirt.” While you’ll attract some clicks from people looking for a sweatshirt for their dog, you may also get attention from people that want a human-sized sweatshirt with a dog on it.
When the latter group clicks your ad and realizes that you sell clothing specifically for animals, they’ll return to the SERPs, but you’ll still pay the click cost.
Your negative keyword list is the answer to fix this. You can exclude certain search terms from triggering your ads.
This is a highly effective tool for reducing wasted spending and optimizing your budget.
If you’re a relatively new Google Ads marketer, you may be thinking of increasing your budget to get more results.
Google Ads will even show you a report of your impressions missed because of lack of budget.
At some point, you certainly want to scale your budget up, but don’t jump the gun on this move.
Once you set your monthly ad budget, stick to it for at least a few months. During this time, optimize your results as best you can.
This analysis approach will give you a more accurate baseline for what targeting settings produce the best results.
It will also give you time to establish your Quality Scores. We’ll discuss this topic in greater detail in the next tip.
Quality Scores are ratings that Google uses to assess the quality of your ad strategies. Google uses factors like clickthrough rates, ad relevance and landing page experience to evaluate how good your ad experiences are.
Google has developed many products over the years, but they are a search engine above all else. Quality Scores ensure the best experience for search users by only putting the best ads at the top of the results.
To this effect, Google rewards ads with above-average quality ratings by offering lower click costs. You may secure a top ad rank even without the highest CPC bid.
The impact that higher Quality Scores have on your costs (and also your ad ranks) means improving these ratings should be a top priority.
If you see keywords in your account with lower-than-average or decreasing scores, you should improve your ad experiences for these targets.
Successful marketing takes place when, where and how your customers prefer it. The same is true of advertising with Google Ads.
With your keywords, you answer what customers are searching and why (intent). Device targeting aims to answer how they are searching it.
The explosion of mobile smartphones and other devices has changed the ways that customers search.
A phenomenal ad experience on a desktop may not deliver the same quality and engagement to mobile users. Device types also change search behaviors and what keywords users are entering.
Some marketers create mobile-centric and desktop-centric ad campaigns to ensure the best experiences, no matter what device users are using.
You can think of device targeting as a two-step process. First, you have to consider which devices your customers commonly use. Then, you have to figure out how to optimize your campaigns for each unique device type.
Now let’s answer the where. More specifically, where is your audience of search users physically located?
By default, Google Ads campaigns advertise across the US. You may want to narrow this location setting to only include specific areas, especially if you exclusively operate locally.
Check out your campaign results by each location and look for areas that are hurting your returns. There may be specific locations where users often click, but don’t convert, which could be draining your Google Ads budget.
Instead, focus on the areas with results that match your marketing goals. You may even decide to create location-specific campaigns for these areas.
Timing remains key to marketing, even in the Digital Age. You could argue that it’s more crucial than ever because of how much media and marketing messages your customers are exposed to in a single day.
If your message doesn’t appear at the exact time that customers want that product, offer, service, etc., it will disappear into the background and not attract that crucial click.
This is actually one of the advantages of PPC marketing. You often know someone is interested in the product or service because they are actively searching for it.
That said, developing an ad schedule that controls when your ads appear throughout the day and week is still vital.
Not only do you want to consider the times when your ads perform best, but also when they have reasonable costs.
For instance, there may be times when competitors are particularly active and your costs spike. You may choose to ignore these times to preserve your budget.
When it comes to software for PPC marketers, you have a lot of options. This makes finding the single best PPC management software a bit of a challenge, especially if you don’t know where to look.
To help you on the hunt, this section will introduce the PPC Signal automated management system for Google Ads.
We’ll cover what makes PPC Signal the best PPC management software for all Google Ads users and how the tool works.
PPC Signal uses machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to offer a management experience that perfectly blends automation and human intervention.
On the automated side, PPC Signal’s AI-powered engine handles the monitoring, tracking and analysis side of things. This means that you always have PPC Signal watching your accounts.
It’s like having a 24-7 babysitter. Whenever your data acts abnormally, the PPC Signal system instantly analyzes the change and notifies you.
This allows you to pay attention to significant shifts, trends, outliers and other occurrences, instead of toiling over every minor fluctuation.
Every change that PPC Signal discovers is packaged as a convenient insight ready to be unpacked. These “signals” appear on the tool’s main dashboard.
Each signal on the dashboard includes all of the information you need to understand the change. PPC Signal does an excellent job at displaying this data in an easy-to-digest format.
In minutes you know what’s changing, when the change started, how significant the change is, what parts of your account are affected and more.
In the above screenshot, you see that there are 21 active signals. There are also 2 signals that have been bookmarked and two actioned, meaning some action has been taken in response to the data.
This screenshot is from a relatively small account, so there isn’t much action going on. A larger Google Ads account may have hundreds of new, active signals available to explore.
That’s a lot of PPC marketing insights to sift through and not all of them may be useful to your business and goals. Luckily, PPC Signal includes filtering options to remove less-important insights from the list.
For instance, let’s say the sample account owner wanted to focus on one campaign in particular. They can select the Campaigns filter and then choose the one they want to investigate.
Alternatively, let’s say that you want to optimize your costs. You could use the Metrics filter and opt to filter your insights by clicks, cost-per-conversion, etc.
PPC Signal’s filters allow you to approach your data and insights any way you want. That’s the ideal blend of humans and AI working together!
Marketers strive to improve their marketing campaigns every day. Sadly, the complexities of modern big data make this problematic. It may take multiple days of analysis to secure one complete and actionable insight.
The PPC Signal is designed to remedy this workflow clog and streamline the process to make daily improvement a reality.
With PPC Signal automating the extremely tedious data side of management, you’re free to commit all your time and resources to enact positive changes to your account.
How do you do this? It’s as simple as opening up a signal on your dashboard and taking action.
Remember, each signal on your dashboard is a packaged insight waiting to be opened. The Explore feature allows you to dive into the data and see an expanded view of the information.
This menu gives you a more detailed view of the data, complete with an interactive chart. You can add other metrics to the chart to see how one change in a metric correlates to others.
For example:
Adding additional metrics to the chart allows you to better understand what’s happening and how to resolve it, whether it’s a risk you want to mitigate or an opportunity you’re hoping to seize.
There are multiple ways you can edit and interact with this chart. However, the most vital feature in this menu is the Take Action button.
With this feature, the AI system will recommend an action you can take to resolve the insight. Thus, PPC Signal even helps you make data-informed decisions for your PPC campaigns!
Google Ads management services are tools and software that help you run your account more efficiently. With so much data and time required by your various PPC management tasks, these tools are critical to your success.
By investing in the best PPC management software, you can overcome data challenges and actively discover new ways to optimize your accounts based on the latest metrics.
Yes. Anything that Google touches seems to turn into gold and that includes their advertising networks. PPC ads offer a great workaround to traditional SEO strategies, which can take months to develop. With a small investment and the proper targeting settings, you can be on top of search results pages in no time.
Google Ads tools include features on the ad platform itself, like smart bidding, responsive search ads and more, as well as third-party software solutions. There are tools that will help you with your bid and budget management, tools to find better keywords and many others.
Essentially, Google Ads solutions help you manage your campaigns and accounts with less stress and better results.
The best PPC management software for handling the costs of your Google Ads account is an automated one.
Given the challenges of data analysis, especially in the marketing setting, automated software for PPC works faster and more effectively than manual analysis.
If you often feel bogged down in the never-ending data generated by your PPC campaigns, you need a solution like PPC Signal.
PPC Signal manages all of the tracking and data change analysis for your campaigns, leaving you more time to act and make positive growth a daily occurrence.
It’s a simple matter of choosing an insight, exploring the data and taking action. Suddenly, the complicated PPC management process is reduced to three easy steps.
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