Quick Tips To Improve Your GoogleAds PPC Performance

Set goals

The first thing to do when you are launching a new PPC campaign is to set and understand your goals. What are you exactly trying to achieve with your PPC campaign? You need to make sure you are tracking the right metrics and statistics which correctly line up with your goals. Some goals may require more work and setup compared to others. For instance, a goal of increasing sales will require you to set up eCommerce conversion tracking on your website. A goal of selling within a set Return on Investment/Ad spend will then require you to fine-tune your conversion tracking to include the price & profit of each sale etc.

If you do not set goals at the start of your PPC campaign, you will have no way of evaluating whether your marketing was successful or not. 

Focus on the right keywords

PPC advertising is all about keywords. Well, at least it is when it comes to search campaigns.

As your campaign starts running, you want to keep an eye on which keywords are proving more successful. There is no universal determination for what makes a keyword successful – this is all dependent on what your goals of the campaign are. If your goal is just to drive more traffic to your website, then the keywords which are getting the most clicks will be successful to you. If you are focused on sales, then keywords with a higher conversion rate will be the successful ones.

One you figure out which keywords are working more towards your goals, you should then optimise for these keywords. You can remove keywords that are performing badly, increase bids on the best performing keywords, and ensure the best keywords are written in your ad copy if they aren’t already.

Negative keywords

Negative keywords are a fantastic feature which every PPC advertiser should take advantage of. Negative keywords are basically words and phrases which, when matched with the search query, will ensure your ad does NOT show. For example, if someone is bidding on the keyword “web design services” as a phrase match, this leaves them open to showing up for related search terms like “cheap web design services”, “bad web design services” etc. Obviously you don’t want to be showing up for those search terms, so you can use “cheap” and “bad” as negative keywords.

Negative keywords are a great way to bid for generic keywords that might have a variety of variations, but only showing for the actual relevant variation – without flooding your account with tons of exact match keywords. 

Optimise bidding

Another thing you want to do in your PPC marketing is to optimise your bids with bid adjustments.

GoogleAds gives us plenty of options and control when it comes to bidding. In total, we can increase, decrease or completely remove bidding based on options such as: device, location, audience, keyword, day, time of day, user age, user gender and user interaction (bidding more for a user to click on your phone number.)

Again, optimising your bidding comes down to your goals and specifically which users are helping you to fulfil those goals. For example, let’s say you are targeting England but are finding the conversion rates are significantly lower in London but the cost per click is a lot higher – you can optimising your bidding by completely excluding London from your campaign.

Another example is perhaps users on mobile users have a higher conversion rate but a lower cost per click compared to desktop users – you can choose to bid slightly more for users on mobile with the expectation that by driving additional users to your website you will be seeing even more conversions at a similar or higher conversion rate.

Optimised bidding is all about ensuring you are spending your money on the right clicks.

Ad extensions

Ad extensions are extra features that you can create for your adverts. These additional features all vary and you have no way of choosing which ones will show or when they will show etc – the use of these extensions are all left to Google’s AI which will determine which extension is best to use and when to use them.

Universally however, ad extensions can prove to enhance your click through rate on the simple basis that they allow your adver to take up more space on the SERP. By having a bigger advert your ad will stick out from your competitors and will more likely attract the user’s click.

There are a variety of ad extensions you can use each with their own uses and functions. These include:

• Sitelinks – this allows you to list up to 4 additional webpages on your advert.
• Callout – this allows you to show short, descriptive texts.
• Structured snippet extension – this allows you to highlight specific aspects of your advert.
• Image – this allows you to have a small image within your advert.
• Call – this allows you to have a direct click-to-call button/link on your advert.
• Lead form – this allows you to collect customer details directly through the advert, without them having to click through to your website.
• Location – this allows you to display your registered business location(s) within your advert.
• Price – this allows you to display the prices & direct links of some of your products/services.
• App – this allows users to find and download your app.
• Promotion – this allows you to display any current discounts, promotions and offers on your products/services.

Landing pages

The landing page is probably the most important factor in PPC advertising. The fact is, no matter how much you optimise your bids, regardless of how great your ad copy is, even if you’re generating massive traffic from PPC – if you are sending users to the wrong page, your campaign is going to suffer. The “wrong page” can be both literal and figurative here.

Let’s take a look at the literal sense: if I search “buy iPhone 7 in red” and I click an advert only to be navigated to a generic “here’s a list of every iPhone we have in stock” page, I’m not going to be a happy chappy, and I’ll probably leave the website and end up giving my money to a competitor instead. In this sense, it is literally the wrong page – the advert should direct me to the website’s specific product page for the iPhone 7, not to the product category for all iPhones.

Let’s take a look at the figurative sense: I repeat my search for “buy iPhone 7 in red” and this time I click another advert. This time I am indeed navigated to a page about the iPhone 7, but there’s 1,000 words of content about the iPhone 7, a massive gallery of different images for the iPhone 7, a tiny buy button and then another 300 words of content. As a customer who is ready to convert, this is the wrong page for me and I am simply going to leave the website. This is because the page is not optimised for conversions, there is no call to action or immediate and eye-catching “buy now” button. Perhaps this page works good for the business’ usual customer, but as a PPC customer looking to convert, this page is no good.

Since you are paying for every single click on your advert, it’s important to make sure you are getting what you want from each click – which means you need to get these users to the right page.