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Optimizing an advertising campaign shares many similarities with getting into shape.
Any fitness enthusiast will tell you that achieving health and wellness is an ongoing process. The same is true with campaign optimization.
Even the most in-shape people continue to hit the gym to improve their bodies. There is always a new diet or workout to try.
You should adopt the same approach with your PPC marketing. Your metrics may be increasing, but it doesn’t mean you have an excuse to become lazy and stop optimizing.
The moment you stop optimizing an advertising campaign is when you leave the door open for your competitors to edge you out.
This discussion will look at why campaign optimization is an ongoing process and how to keep your PPC strategies growing. You will also learn about the tool in the end of this blog which will help you to optimize your campaigns in a progressive way.
Let’s get started.
There is no such thing as a perfectly optimized PPC campaign. There are always emerging opportunities in the market and potential risks threatening to hurt your ad performance.
These omnipresent opportunities and risks appear for a variety of reasons that we’ll cover in this section.
Arguably, change is the biggest reason why optimization has to be an ongoing effort.
Change in PPC marketing is both constant and inevitable. No matter how much time and effort you commit to campaign optimization, some factors are beyond your control.
These factors will continuously play a role in your campaign performance.
Audience Behaviors: Understanding your audience is critical to advertising success. When you deeply know your audience (not just who they are but what they want, care about, expect, etc.), you can better serve them with messages, offers, experiences, products, services and more.
Unfortunately, audiences are fickle. What they like and don’t like this month may completely change the next. These shifts in audience behaviors will impact your campaign performance for better or worse.
Competitor Strategies: How your competitors approach PPC marketing will affect your own campaigns, especially when it comes to bidding strategies and CPC values. Additionally, who your competitors are will also change. New advertisers will enter the PPC space and old ones may depart.
To make the most of your time and budget, you need to watch competitor strategies and make adjustments to counter their efforts.
Your Own Strategies: While you keep your PPC account organized through different campaigns and ad groups, your own strategies will influence one another. A seemingly small and innocent change to one campaign may have a ripple effect that impacts other parts of your account.
Thus, it’s important to track each change you make and monitor the results across your account. You never know what unintended consequences may occur.
Google Ads Changes: Over the years, Google Ads has undergone many updates and changes. While these are not everyday occurrences, you still want to pay attention to any new features or policy changes that may impact your PPC results.
When optimizing PPC campaigns, some marketers focus on maximizing a single metric, such as impressions or conversions.
This is not a bad strategy, especially if the metric you focus on ties into your marketing objectives.
The problem is that PPC marketing doesn’t work that way. Metrics are so closely related to one another that you have to optimize multiple metrics simultaneously.
For example, if you aim to drive conversions, you first need to drive clicks to boost your site traffic. More site visitors means more conversion opportunities.
To increase clicks, you need impressions. More impressions mean more ad views, meaning more chances for clicks.
Moreover, you have to consider your budget. You may be driving conversions to your business, but if these activities come at a high cost, your ROI will be minuscule.
Campaign optimization requires you to look at all of your PPC marketing metrics to find weak spots. Once you remove these issues, your campaigns will be running like a well-oiled machine!
Successful marketing is about targeting the right audience, with the right offers, at the right time.
You may have a phenomenal product and intimately know your audience, but incorrect timing will hurt your results.
Campaign optimization requires you to consider when your audiences are most active and receptive to ad offers.
You can look at the days throughout the week that are most advantageous, as well as each hour of the day.
For example, your ad performance may peak in the early mornings and evenings. However, during the day, when people are at work, your results fall off. Similarly, you may have better ad results on weekends than weekdays.
Not only do you have to consider when your audiences are active, but also how your competitors approach the timing of their ads.
If you’re trying to advertise during a particularly popular timeslot, you’re going to experience inflated CPC amounts and it will be harder to reach your target audience.
Sometimes, it’s best for your campaign optimization to advertise in off-peak hours because there is less competition. While you may have fewer impressions, you’ll have a higher chance to draw clicks and at lower costs.
There are other dimensions aside from timing that you also have to consider. Device types and locations are two of the most significant ones to pay attention to in your campaigns.
Device types include desktop, mobile, tablet and even smart TV devices. The two most critical are desktop versus mobile.
What works for a desktop user may not perform as well for mobile devices because screen sizes and functionality differ greatly. Mobile and tablet devices use touchscreen navigation, which is far different from clicking on a desktop or browsing your smart TV with a remote.
To overcome these differences, you may find yourself creating separate campaigns for each device type. This allows you to optimize an advertising campaign based on customers’ devices.
User location is another important dimension to consider. First, you need to think about the areas your company services, since you don’t want to advertise to users outside of those locations.
Once you have your geographic targets set, you need to analyze the performance of each location. Believe it or not, different areas will produce dramatically disparate results.
You may have one city wasting your ad spend, while surrounding areas are producing excellent ROI.
Part of optimizing an advertising campaign is selecting the right locales to market affordably.
The persistent nature of optimizing an advertising campaign can quickly become exhausting. You always have to pay close attention to your campaigns and scout new opportunities to improve your ad performance.
That said, there is plenty you can do to make your campaign optimization process run smoothly.
With any project, you want to tackle the most substantial tasks first. If you are planning a wedding, you pick a venue before the napkins, right?
The same is true with campaign optimization. You have to establish the big picture before you start fussing about the finer details.
The best way to approach optimizing an advertising campaign is to resolve your biggest faults first. Correcting these problems will produce the most significant improvements to your overall performance.
Look for the weakest campaigns and ad groups across your account to get started with your advertising optimization. These are the campaigns with little or no activity (no impressions, clicks, conversions, etc.).
You can also look at it from a cost perspective. Which areas of your account are costing you the most money and does the expense justify the returns?
Essentially, you’re looking for smoking guns — the most obvious detriments to your PPC performance.
A fast and effective way to evaluate your PPC performance and find weak points is to look at your Quality Scores.
Google uses Quality Scores as a way to rate your ad performance for each keyword target on a scale of 1-10. The higher the score, the “better” Google finds your ad experiences.
Quality Scores are based on many factors, including:
Looking across your keywords for below-average scores is a great way to start your campaign optimization process.
Not only are low Quality Scores an indication of a poor ad experience, but improving your ratings holds major benefits for your performance.
Google is heavily invested in providing the absolute best search content to its users, including paid results. If your ad experiences have high Q-Scores, Google will reward you with better ad ranks and even lower click costs.
That’s a great way to improve your ROI!
The other reason that Quality Scores are a great optimization tool is that they work at the keyword level.
Keywords are the lifeblood of your PPC campaigns (and many of your other marketing strategies).
As you’re looking at Quality Scores, pay attention to keywords that aren’t generating good clicks or conversions. These keywords may not be relevant or valuable enough to your business.
Targeting irrelevant keywords with limited value for your business wastes your time and ad budget. It may also hurt your Quality Scores.
Your budget is a crucial element in campaign optimization. You want to ensure that you are only investing in keywords that produce desirable returns.
If you identify terms that aren’t delivering these results, it’s often best to pause those keywords. This will preserve your budget for profitable activities.
The more you work at optimizing an advertising campaign from the keyword level, the stronger your overall foundation.
Ultimately, your ad copy will be the difference between an impression and a click. If your messages and offers aren’t enticing enough to draw attention and clicks, you need to revise them.
Crafting new ad copy, like campaign optimization, is an ongoing process. You never know what small change will result in better results. Even a single word could make all the difference!
The best way to develop stronger ad messages is through A/B testing. This is a simple technique where you simultaneously test two almost identical ads.
For instance, you may have the following two call-to-action messages in your ads:
These two messages are the same except for “learn” versus “discover.” By testing these two ads side-by-side, you can definitively tell which call-to-action word attracts the most attention.
The more you perform these tests, the stronger your ads will become over time.
When your ads start drawing substantial clicks, the next hurdle is to convert this web traffic into conversions and new customers.
This task falls on the shoulders of your landing pages. A landing page is the designated spot on your website where users arrive after clicking an ad.
Not only is this a significant component of your Quality Score ratings, but it is also the final gate between a click and conversion.
This is crucial because you’ve paid for the click at this point in the ad process. If you fail to convert that click into action, it will negatively impact your return on ad spend.
Optimizing your landing pages takes place outside of Google Ads. It will require you to look at your website analytics. You may even need to involve your web developer in the conversations.
Ideally, you want to look for landing pages that aren’t engaging site visitors. You can measure engagement through metrics like dwell time, bounce rates and others.
If you have landing pages where people are frequently bouncing and failing to spend much time on the site, it’s a problem that needs to be resolved promptly.
Load times, page elements, site copy and other elements are all crucial components of a good landing page experience.
Even with the above tips, optimizing an advertising campaign can be a tiring and overwhelming task.
Not only do you have to contend with the ongoing nature of the process, but campaign optimization also involves a hearty amount of data analysis.
PPC data is complex for several reasons. If you operate a full Google Ads account, you may have tens of thousands of keywords to monitor and analyze. That’s too much to manage on your own.
Plus, PPC marketing involves several different metrics that you need to consider when optimizing an advertising campaign.
Due to these challenges, many marketers only perform campaign optimization occasionally, when they should be committing time to this task daily.
To overcome the constant pressures of campaign optimization, you need one of the best PPC optimization tools: PPC Signal.
PPC Signal is a Google Ads tool by PPCexpo that harnesses the power of marketing artificial intelligence and machine learning. With this sophisticated technology, the system automatically detects, analyzes and presents complete insights right to your inbox each day.
When you access the PPC Signal tool, you see every active insight on the homepage.
Each active signal on this page includes every detail you need to understand the insight and take action.
Let’s look at a sample signal.
Here are all of the details you can pull from this signal.
You can Explore any signal to investigate the data further.
In this detail of signal you can see the expanded detail of this signal here it allows you to add other metrics to make a contrast or comparison together.
Thanks to this feature, you can see how one metric change affects others, which is a crucial element of campaign optimization, as it allows you to see the bigger picture of each shift or trend.
In this menu, you’ll also notice the Take Action option.
This feature helps you quickly act on active signals. Even if you aren’t sure what to do, the PPC Signal system will recommend a follow-up activity.
Let’s recap:
PPC Signal automatically provides complete insights on the latest changes affecting your PPC campaign performance.
Complete insights require no additional effort or work to analyze. All the information you need is there and ready for action.
PPC Signal even suggests how you can resolve each signal.
This system simplifies campaign optimization. Instead of digging through your data to find performance changes yourself, the system does it for you.
Optimizing an advertising campaign is as simple as selecting the signals you find most interesting and taking action. If you commit to this each day, your campaigns will grow exponentially.
It’s that easy.
Google Ads is effective because search engines are effective. Any time you want to discover a new product, business or answer a question, you turn to Google. The top results of a Google search results page will always garner the most clicks.
More clicks equal more site visitors, which is a precious commodity in the Digital Age. With Google Ads, you can pay to place your business ahead of even the #1 organic result.
Google search ads only work if a prospective customer actively searches for terms that fit your business and products. With Google display ads, you can target relevant audience profiles while browsing millions of websites across the Internet.
Display ads also drive results through remarketing. You can engage past visitors to your site using the Google Ads remarketing tag. This will encourage them to return to your website again.
Optimizing an advertising campaign on Google Ads, or any other ad platform, should be performed as often as possible. If you are good enough to make a plan weekly, biweekly, monthly that would be good but In a perfect world, you would optimize your Google Ads daily which no doubt make it hectic. Thanks to tools like PPC Signal, daily campaign optimization is simple.
Optimizing an advertising campaign is never done. As soon as you think you’ve got the right recipe, something changes and your performance shifts unexpectedly.
Campaign optimization starts with your Google Ads account and ends with your website optimization.
When everything works correctly, it’s easy to secure your marketing and advertising goals.
However, reaching this point is rarely easy, especially as your Google Ads account grows to include more campaigns, ad groups and keyword targets.
PPC Signal transforms campaign optimization into a simple process that you can perform daily, with only a few minutes of effort.
It’s as easy as opening up the tool and selecting a risk to avoid or an opportunity to seize.
Your campaigns will always be heading in the right direction (up) with PPC Signal!
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