The Best Ways to Freshen Up PPC Campaigns

The Best Ways to Freshen Up PPC Campaigns

Remember that superb pay-per-click (PPC) campaign you launched six months back? The one that sent your conversion rates through the roof? It did some spectacular business, but that was a while ago. Take a look at it now.

Oh dear.

Conversions have dropped off the scale and your finances are suffering as a result.

With PPC you can’t risk taking your eye off the ball for too long as they won’t run themselves. Instead you need to make sure campaigns are kept fresh to keep bringing in the cash.

Let’s take a look at the best ways to freshen up PPC campaigns.

Keep Track of Negative Keywords

You want the right people looking at your content, but keywords can sometimes be a little misleading e.g. a site which sells paper for printing may bid on “paper”, but this will also show your ad to people searching for “paper towels”.

This is bad news for your return on investment (ROI).

Wouldn’t it be good if you could make sure printing press companies were the only people viewing your ads? And the people who need paper towels? Well, they could go and dry their hands elsewhere for all you care!

You’re in luck as there’s a way to pull this off and it concerns negative keywords. These are keywords that you add to your campaigns to avoid serving your ad to people who aren’t searching for your product.

Where they become really interesting is when you begin to analyze trends within negative keywords.

Say you’re in the paper game and you’re doing some research on negative keywords. You could discover that duck egg blue is rapidly becoming very popular, but you’re currently investing all your PPC efforts on white, yellow and green. It’s time to reassess this investment and put more money into duck egg blue.

You wouldn’t have found that without checking your negative keywords.

Optimize your ads with negative keywords

Examine Those Search Terms Reports

Want to find out which campaigns are pulling in the dollars? And which are likely to leave you on skid row?

You can’t go far wrong with search terms reports.

Understanding the click through rate (CTR) for your ads can show you how often people are clicking your ad. The higher the CTR, the higher the chance of conversion. A decent CTR is usually around 2%, but you should always be aim a little higher.

By using Google’s DoubleClick Search reports you can analyze how your ads are performing.

If you have a number of ads/keywords bringing in a CTR >2% then it’s time to get ruthless and scrap them. This allows you to start work on more effective campaigns which maximize your revenue.

Google Quality Score

“Low” and “quality” are two words you never want in close proximity to each other. Especially when they’re being used to rate the quality of your ads.

Google’s quality score measures the relevance of your keywords and ads against your landing page. It asks the vital question of “Is this website useful for the person searching?”.

And you want the answer to be a huge YES!

High quality scores are associated with lower costs per conversion, so you minimize losses on your ROI which is great news for your finances.

Why does is it result in a lower cost per conversion?

Well, Google loves to give its users the best experience going, so if you can provide this then there’s less costs levied on your marketing ads.

Any quality scores below 5 are likely to increase your cost per conversion, so you need to take any campaigns falling below this back to the drawing board.

A/B testing can come in very handy here as you seek to optimize your campaigns and improve ads. Keyword research is essential and tying this in with improved landing pages can boost your quality score.

When Google see that your ads are highly organized, and giving the consumer exactly what they want, they won’t be able to resist giving your full marks.

Keep up to Date with Trends in the PPC World

The world of PPC evolves rapidly and methods quickly change, so make sure you keep up to date with the latest trends. For example, a new year is coming up, so you want to know what’s going to be hot in the world of display trends.

If you don’t keep your finger on the pulse then your competitors will step in with state of the art ads which blow your dusty old ads out of the water. Along with potential clicks, conversions and revenue.

There’s More to Life Than Google Ads

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket by concentrating all your capital on Google Ads.

Take a look around and see what other avenues there are for your PPC needs.

Bing Ads is a relative newcomer to the world of advertising, but they’re finding impressive growth year on year.

Facebook is currently the number one website in the world, so that means there’s an even bigger audience available than through Google – sounds pretty tempting, right? They’re also bringing in phenomenal revenue from ads and this is only set to increase.

Setting aside some cash to invest in these new advertising networks is essential to keep you competitive.

Get to Work on Optimizing Those Campaigns

I’ve shown you a number of methods which can really freshen up your PPC efforts. They may take some time to implement and see results, but investing the time now means that you don’t fall behind to your rivals.

Keep your campaigns relevant and you’ll see a big change in your ad revenue.