Time is money. So what are the key things to look for when we need to improve the performance of a Google Ads account and get results fast?
Often, when we begin work on a PPC account or campaign, it comes with some history.
In this post, you will learn about seven areas to optimize in order to improve PPC campaign performance. Even an account that you have worked on for a while can benefit from an intentional check over these important opportunities.
1. Performance by Location
One often overlooked but obvious way to segment the performance by the audience is to look at where you’re existing and prospecting customers are located. You will likely see patterns for different states, regions, and even postal codes. This seems to be quite simple if we consider that demographics can be entirely different from place to place.
Strong differences in performance by location might even suggest splitting the campaigns and structuring them so that ads and ad text can be aligned and tailored accordingly.
2. Performance by Device
It’s a given that despite the increasing convergence between experiences on different platforms and devices, user behavior is still (more often than not) considerably different. It’s not just a matter of screen size and resolution, but also about context and the reasons why we use a device (i.e., mobile), instead of another (i.e., desktop).
In the digital world, it is important to understand our customers and their behaviors. If we can figure out how they convert on a device, then we won’t be surprised if one device outperforms another. It is best to use data to see which strategy works best and adjust accordingly.
3. Performance by Network
From time to time, we still see PPC campaigns that are targeting all networks (Search, Search Partners, and Display).
We could argue for hours about how many impressions and clicks on the links of our partners generate. But most of the time, these only generate so little traffic that in the wider context of an account, the spend can really be negligible.
First of all, search advertising is a pull medium, whereas display advertising is a push. Even when highly targeted, display ads are a disruption to the user experience and we must always acknowledge that in our creativity and messaging.
We should use both networks to target customers and prospects at different stages of their user journey because users are likely to be in different places when they are searching for answers. We should have different strategies, KPIs, and targets aligned to that.
4. Audience Performance
Search engines often drive a significant amount of traffic from existing customers. These navigational clicks, if proper measures are not in place, can be quite costly when they come from PPC ads.
Navigational clicks are clicks on links, which are generated by paid search ads. These clicks are more expensive than regular search terms because they usually convert to sales at a lower rate.
To avoid paying for ads that won’t drive additional conversions, add suppression lists to your campaigns.
Other logical uses of audience targeting include the segmentation of the user base into clusters defined by behavior (i.e., page visitors), and/or engagement (high consumption of content) for remarketing purposes.
5. Negative Lists
Keywords are still the strongest signal, but today’s search engines rely on a much more complex set of signals. In addition to keywords, Google considers things like location and time of day in its results. While machines can understand these signals in isolation, when they combine together into a single query it becomes much harder for machines to fully understand the intent.
Therefore, it’s as important as ever to narrow down the chances that keywords might match unwanted search queries. You must continually review and mine the search query data available.
Even though there are still limitations, search query reports can really help you understand what Google thinks a website or a page is about. It can help us reduce costs for unwanted searches that aren’t relevant to the site and potentially increase the quality score (QS).
6. Features Available in the Platform
Continuing from the point above, one of the reasons to use additional features like ad extensions is that they can have a positive impact on QS.
Additionally, when considering the cost of advertising on search engines, wouldn’t it make sense to try to maximize the on-page real estate?
If we are paying a lot of money to be there, we want to ensure it is worth it. Besides, the more space we can take up, the less will be available for competitors and other advertisers!
Additional features such as the capability to add offline conversions or run experiments and A/B testing are also available.
7. Conversion Tracking
However, it is also essential that we are tracking conversions and ensuring that we are tracking the right goals.
In digital marketing, everything should be measurable so marketers can know what works and what doesn’t. Conversion tracking should always be at the cornerstone of planning and executing media buying.
However, we often see examples of PPC accounts and campaigns that are either missing conversion tracking altogether or are tracking the wrong endpoints.
Provided we have our conversions firing and recording correctly, some expert tips are to:
- Use of Segmentation option from within Google Ads
- Set the right conversion goals for each campaign
- Set Up and make us of Custom Columns
In an ideal world, marketing practitioners would have all the time needed to focus on the analysis of the data and work on the fixes.
But in reality, Marketers have to analyze each and every point in the campaign which is time-consuming and the constant pressure of getting results is always round the corner. We at AI Advertisment believe in easing the workload by our AI PPC services where we use AI to analyze Google Ads Campaigns.