PPC or Pay-per-click advertising continues to be a highly effective channel for businesses of all types.
That said, with the cost to compete increasing daily and competition fierce, it is imperative that businesses do everything they can to drive efficiencies and maximise results – ROI.
If you’re responsible for the success of PPC campaigns within your organisation but not getting enough out of this advertising platform, this post is for you.
When considering paid search, we are thinking about Google and Microsoft advertising (formerly BING). Microsoft Ads can be a great channel to use for B2B companies because of its recent LinkedIn integration feature.
Both search engines will improve performance if you consider and implement the below recommendations.
1: A Strong Account Structure
The account structure is one of THE most important aspects for getting a good performance. The right structure will allow you to effectively manage campaigns, identify trends, pause discontinued products and add new products with ease. The right grouping will allow you to implement seasonality changes across specific adtext. The fundamental areas I would consider when looking into a new clients account are:
- Does the campaign structure cover the main navigation of the website?
- The match type of the keywords in each ad group
- Are there the right amount of ads in each ad group
- The relevancy of the keywords to each other and the ads within each group.
2: Keywords
Now we have established that there are the right match types and number of keywords in the account, we need to confirm if these are the right keywords. We need to look at the historical performance of the keywords. Now, this may vary depending on your KPI’s.
Are the keywords high performers – high traffic drivers, low CPC, low competition, high quality score, or drive a high CTR or conversion rate? Once identified, are there similar keywords you can add to the account?
The keywords with a low performance need to be investigated and/or paused. When looking at keyword performance, if you identify one where the figures are not as strong, initially check your data. Does the keyword have enough data, and has it been live long enough?
Other scenarios to consider looking into are:
- Is the keyword bid too low for the keyword to be active in the auctions?
- Does the keyword have low search volume? Therefore it will gain no traction against some of the high volume keywords in the account.
- Consider the match type you have used in your account. Is this causing the keyword to be too restrictive or too broad and driving the wrong traffic?
A good way to keep on top of relevant keywords that have driven customers to your website is a regular search query report. There is also a dynamic search ad campaign that you can run in your ads accounts.