Paid Search Optimization Checklist: 10 Ways to Succeed in PPC Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) optimization is a marathon, not a sprint. Business owners and marketers of all types have discovered just how difficult it can be to achieve sustainable results when advertising online. One of the main reasons for this difficulty is the unpredictable nature of Google and its algorithms.

The specific formula for high performing Google Ads can change overnight, and often without warning. Leveraging the internet has never been more important for a business than today. Yet, having your sales, leads, and subscriptions dependent on Google’s fickle demands can present a dangerous situation.

The key to winning the PPC is to have a solid paid search optimization checklist. With this, you can structure your campaigns more effectively for a higher return on your investment. The following checklist will provide a great starting point for your company’s PPC campaigns. It includes proven strategies, while it remains flexible enough for any industry and changes that Google makes going forward. Let’s get started.

1. Start with SMART Goals

Too many marketers make the mistake of thinking they’ll “just figure it out” as they go along. The first step in any plan, let alone a paid search optimization checklist, is to know exactly what your goals are. Without goals, you won’t know if your campaign is a success or not, since you have nothing to refer to along the way.

You want to decide upfront if the main goal of your ad or campaign is to generate sales, leads, signups, fans, information, or something else. But not all goals are created equally.

If you use the SMART approach to setting goals, your Google Ads results will multiply tremendously:

I. Specific

As we mentioned, your goals need to be specific to be effective. There is a huge difference between the goal of “boosting conversions” and “achieving a 40% increase in conversions.” The first one has a million interpretations, whereas the second one is precise. In marketing, precision wins.

II. Measurable

It’s vital to ensure that your goals are measurable. You should be able to determine whether or not you met your criteria by using Google’s analysis tools (or your preferred tools). This keeps your team motivated and on target, week after week.

 III. Achievable

If it were possible, you would attempt a 1000% increase in conversions with every new campaign. And while big goals are inspirational, they need to be somewhat within reason. This way, you don’t lose motivation. Aim for a goal that will stretch your team yet still be within reach, given enough effort, consistency, and luck.

 IV. Relevant

Some goals might be specific and attainable. They might even be easy. However, if they aren’t relevant to the most important aspects of your business, they are only a distraction. The paid search optimization checklist is all about keeping you on track for better results. A relevant goal is something that you and your team genuinely want to accomplish soon.

V. Time-Bound

The goals you set should have a time element attached. This wouldn’t be a paid search optimization checklist if we didn’t discuss deadlines. You want to have clear deadlines that concentrate your effort during that period. Otherwise, your campaigns could be suboptimal because there is no time pressure for improvement. Without time-bound goals, you’ll find yourself spending through more ad dollars to get underwhelming results.

 

2. Team Selection

A large part of having success with Google Ads is leadership. Even if you are not the official project lead, you should be able to get the information and results you need from team members consistently.

So regardless of your role, evaluate your team on several fronts consistently.

For instance:

Does your team have the right skills?

Are there any skill gaps that need to be addressed right now to meet the needs of key stakeholders? Perhaps you have great ad copy, but your landing page design is poor. Or maybe your page speed is excellent (boosting your Quality Score), but your team lacks the expertise to implement an important new plugin that has speed problems.

Address these skill gaps before anything else. Since you will have already set great goals, it will be obvious which skills are needed most.

Does Your Team Have Adequate Support?

Your team needs the right tools, guidance, and resources to achieve your campaign goals. Do they need more human resources? Are there specific technologies that could boost productivity or eliminate time-consuming work to allow your team to focus on their key competencies? Remember that in the world of online advertising, you will need to invest in automation processes and applications to scale up your operations.

Does Your Team Know What is Expected of Them?

You can get the best team together with the best tools. However, if they don’t know what specific metrics need to be met, they can’t thrive. Be sure to define their roles and expectations of deliverable results. This way, there is less confusion and more fun for everyone.

3. Optimizing the Campaign Planning Process

Using optimization-based planning, you can drive better results for you or your client’s business. This is an essential step in the paid search optimization checklist.

In essence, optimization-based planning puts multiple tactics in competition to see which one meets your key performance indicators (KPIs) best. Your plan involves creating various angles and ideas with which to approach the market.

After a short period, such as a few months, you can create campaigns based on your findings that will last much longer.

Optimization-based planning is more of a framework to approach your campaigns. Due to this, you can customize your plan to fit a variety of regions, budgets, and products.

Here are some points to consider:

• Get upfront agreement from stakeholders – Get consensus on your goals and criteria for suspending a campaign or continuing it. Once this is accomplished, you can purchase ads with confidence that you know what to measure and have an adequate budget.
• Create a firm deadline – Decide when you will do your first round of optimization. Ensure that you stick to this.
• Determine your dashboard – Have a platform that will serve as your primary campaign reporting module.
• Set aside some of your budget for the creation of high-quality design assets – This includes web pages, photos, and videos. These can help your campaigns generate better conversions.
• Establish the primary project manager – This person will ultimately take full responsibility for the campaign’s production and results. Without a specific person taking responsibility for the outcome, your chances for success are low. A PPC specialist knows what is expected by clients and what to deliver.
• Communicate with clients and teams consistently – This might be the most crucial point to remember. Better communication can help eliminate problems before they ever happen.

 

 

4. Budget Optimization

You don’t need millions of dollars in advertising budget to achieve profitable results. But you need to define the scope of your budget based on how profitable your business is at this moment.

If you can afford to generate a conversion for $100, and that conversion makes you $500 of profit, you’ve got a great system wherein your advertising pays for itself by a magnitude of 5x.

However, if your business makes $100 from each conversion, and you spent $100 to acquire the conversion, you are breaking even.

Your campaign should be able to deliver conversions (leads, sales, or otherwise) for less than $100 to be considered as a real contender. But, preferably, it would cost far less than that.

That’s where the ability to access data quickly becomes important by knowing how to calculate the budget of your campaign.

5. Look at Data in Context

With the paid search optimization checklist in hand, you’ll be looking at a lot of data. Take frequent looks at your reports to ensure you’re staying on target. You can see which events might have caused a spike or a loss in traffic or conversions. This is crucial for cutting out underperforming aspects of your campaign, such as assets, landing pages, ads, and keywords.

But data is only useful when it is relevant to your goals. You should focus only on the points of your campaign that need to be cut off or improved if you have too much data without much insight. This narrows the context of data you have to analyze daily and saves your team valuable time.

6. Attention-Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA)

AIDA is a four-step process to quickly evaluate your advertising funnel from top to bottom, to see which aspects need improvement.

Let’s break down the four steps and how to apply them when analyzing your campaign:

I. Attention

Your words are the most powerful way to get attention with Google Ads. You need to virtually “call out” to your prospects using words that are on their mind.

This is why keyword analysis is so important. Open up Google Keyword Planner or your preferred platform for managing keywords. Become familiar with the feedback and what it means. This approach helps to ensure your headlines, subject lines, and descriptions generate sufficient clicks to keep your costs down.

II. Interest

Once you have the initial attention of your audience, you can create more interest. You might have found that your initial ads were getting high clickthrough rates (CTRs), but then your funnel stalled once visitors reached your landing page. If you’re not generating enough interest, you need to convey more information, add visual elements, or rephrase your copy.

 III. Desire

If you have adequately created interest in your product or service, you are ready to build desire. This is an important step. Whereas the “interest” stage is about logic, this step of the AIDA process uses emotion. You want to help your prospect visualize themselves using your product to achieve a positive feeling. Preferably, you have great product photos or videos that can stimulate your visitors’ visual senses and drive them to want to own your product right now. If not, be descriptive as you can about describing exactly how great an impact your product will have on your customer’s lives.

 IV. Action

The real goal of any marketing campaign is to get people to take action. The action you target might differ depending on your client, product, sales cycle, timing, and more. Regardless, you don’t have a successful campaign if no one is taking action. Make sure you are using calls-to-action (CTAs). Even simple, tried and true CTAs like “buy now” or “sign up today” are consistently effective across multiple industries. If your landing page doesn’t have a prominent CTA, it could confuse visitors and cause you to miss out on countless conversations. While our paid search optimization checklist can’t write your webpage for you, there are many resources online about improving your marketing from a copywriting perspective. You may have a situation in which you may be getting clicks but no conversion, in that case, you have to find the reason and touch your audience pain points enough that they go for conversion.

7. Driving Conversions

There are multiple aspects of your campaign that could be costing you conversions. Understanding which ones you need to improve will help you create more robust campaigns that meet your goals. Here are some aspects to evaluate:

Landing Page

Your landing page will have an effect on your Google Ads in more ways than one. You need to ensure that the content matches up with what you have in your ads. If not, it could have a negative effect on your Quality Score.

Also, make sure that your landing page is easy to use, fast, and professional looking. Consumers today expect a lot of out of websites, and if yours lacks quality, they might not be interested in your offer.

Ad Copy

The words you use in your text, photos, and videos should relay a message that persuades visitors to take action. This can come in the form of signing up for an email list, buying your product, sharing something on social media, calling your company, and more. Use the AIDA framework we covered earlier to address any copy issues that seem to be costing you conversions.

Creative

Sometimes, a great campaign can be derailed by poor creative assets. This could be due to the planning, execution, or relevance of your photos, videos, music, and overall design. There are two points to consider regarding your creativity.

Firstly, make sure that they appear high quality and professional. Don’t cut corners, but instead invest as much as possible in eye-catching photos, beautiful product videos, or other visual aspects of your campaign to create more attachment to your brand.

Channel

The channel can also make a big difference in your campaign. Perhaps you convert more on search engine ads than on YouTube ads. Or maybe you find that dynamic remarketing is more effective after users have interacted with a certain channel. Drill down into these details with Google Analytics and understand your most profitable channel to put more resources and ads towards it. Refer to your paid search optimization checklist and make sure your channels are paying for themselves, or make some cuts where necessary.

8. Optimization in Terms of Marketing Funnel

You can optimize your marketing funnel in a variety of ways. Firstly, you can segment your list. This involves automating different messages and responses in your email software.

For instance, someone who clicked on a promotional ad might receive more emails about that promotion to lead them through the buying journey.

 

9. Visualize Your Products and Services

The visual aspect of your product and service will always increase conversions if done right. People respond to visuals, and you can dramatize your offering with great photos or videos.

Consider a product video that shows your product in action. If you offer a service instead, have a short video on your landing page that introduces the brand and otherwise communicates your value proposition.

If you don’t have great images at the moment, be sure to set aside a budget for them in the future. It’s one of the most critical aspects of the paid search optimization checklist. Better the landing page with high relevance more chances to have a better position for your ad in search results.

10. Geo-Targeting Feedback

Look for key locations where your clients, customers, or other leads live. It might make sense to turn up your ad spend in these areas and turn it down in others based on feedback. You must understand well geo-targeting based digital marketing strategies to boost your business.

6 Additional Considerations When Optimizing Google Ads

Schedule your time for review in advance. That way, you have a guaranteed time to sit down and make the right changes to your campaigns.

1. Report Optimization

If you can optimize your reporting, you won’t have to get lost in the details. You can quickly analyze your most important metrics in seconds. Be sure to set up your workstation to be as easy as possible to use. Ideally, you will have your paid search optimization checklist handy while optimizing your reports.

2. Automated Reports

You’ll probably have a lot of reports generated if you manage PPC campaigns. You need to set up automated reports so you can run your campaign from your inbox most of the time. You can find different reports with the best visualization in PPCexpo Reports.

3. Google Ads Scripts

Google Ads Scripts can be used for a lot of scenarios to save your time. Consider using one to automate Excel data transfer or implement third-party tools.

4. Competitor Analysis

Knowing what your competitors are doing is key. You can look at how often your ads overlap with competitors and how often your ad is appearing at the top of the results. You need to spy on your competitor’s digital marketing strategies from different sources and remain vigilant on it.

5. Measure the Right Things

There are numerous aspects of your campaign that you could measure. However, the key to having success with Google Ads is choosing the right ones to focus on. After all, you and your team only have so much focus and time. Therefore, selecting a few KPIs that will generate favorable results for your business or client is the first step in getting a grasp on all the data you have available.

Most marketers don’t suffer from a lack of information. In fact, it is the opposite. They try to take in too much at one time. This causes confusion and overwhelm. So to avoid this, ask yourself: “does this really need to be measured for a good reason?”

6. Ask Your Stakeholders Good Questions

Ask your team and your client good questions. Ask them what they want, need, and don’t want. By simply checking in with them occasionally, you can strengthen the relationship while also getting in sync faster. Learn to anticipate the needs of your team with the right questions. As already mentioned above, reporting is very important, you can build your questions and even answers if you have studied your campaign well. You have to generate result-oriented reports, analyze them, and share them with your stakeholders. In this way, you all will remain on the same page regarding your PPC performance.

Wrap Up

Every business today needs to be running PPC campaigns to stay competitive. They can help you reach more customers, convert them, and find out what your market truly wants.

However, achieving this is easier said than done. With so many tools, settings, and marketing strategies out there, it can be difficult to nail down the right steps and strategies. This is especially true considering how often Google likes to make changes to their platforms, including Google Ads.

So what is the best path forward to get more conversions, leads, and sales? The answer is to use a paid search optimization checklist. The list above gives you a head start on your competitors. If you implement it and keep your campaigns running smoothly, you could see an incredible increase in your paid ad results.