5 Ways to Optimize Your PPC Campaigns

Optimizing your PPC campaigns helps with ensuring you’re implementing the right keyword strategy, the right messaging and CTAs well into landing page CRO. Aside from this, ensuring you capture KPIs to track and measure the progress of your campaigns will be critical to knowing what’s working and what’s not.

Also, remember to maintain realistic expectations such that, although you’re able to see quick results from PPC, the process of refining and optimizing your campaigns take time. No overnight success here, so be persistent.

To start off, here are 5 ways to optimize your PPC campaigns:

1) Day-Parting

Pay attention to the performance of your campaigns during certain seasons and holidays well into the specific times during the day where you may be seeing an influx in sales or leads. For example, if you ran a ski shop then you could run a Winter campaign that shows ads for ski gear in August; whereas, if you’re pushing promotions to clean out old inventory for the ski season, you would then want to run ads towards the end of Winter.

From a time perspective, monitor the times in which you receive more activity and engagement. This will give you a good indication of how running your ads early in the morning compare to mid-afternoon and evenings.

2) Ad Text

As a rule of thumb, set some baseline benchmarks to help you decide whether or not you should continue running certain ad texts. That said, you may want to allow for 200-300 impressions per ad text and delete ad text that have a CTR lower than 1%.

Other items worth testing could be punctuation at the end of your headline or the body of your ad text and also the display URL.  Know that each ad group should have anywhere between 2-4 ad text variations at all times. This will help you not only test multiple messages but also CTAs to best understand what incurs engagement, i.e. clicks.

3) Display Network

Make sure you separate display and search traffic. This is important due to the fact that these traffic sources perform differently and they need to be optimized separately to see optimal results. For instance, with display, ad text and banner creatives aim for high CTR and constantly optimize by adding variations and new creatives. Review your automatic and managed placements and remove sources that don’t hit the 1% CTR, don’t convert, or are just undesirable.

4) Landing Pages

Per PPC Hero, your landing pages are the one part of your campaign that you have 100% control of. They also make or break your campaign’s success. If you can increase your landing page conversion rate by even 1%, how would that affect your campaign’s success? Further, there are a number cost effective tools and services you can use such as Optimizely or Unbounce.

Track any landing page test by ad group, you’ll be surprised at how different landing pages perform with different ad groups. If you have the traffic you can get more granular and target by keyword or site. Once you find some successes continue to refine and increase conversion rates by testing slight variations, and again, build on what works.

5) Keyword Bidding and Matching

Bidding on the right keywords only account for a portion of your efforts. Rather, make sure that you test out different keyword matches as well.

Per Wordstream: For example you might bid on “snow clothes rental” like so:

  • Exact: $6 CPC
  • Phrase: $5.75 CPC
  • Modified Broad: $5.50 CPC
  • Broad: $5 CPC

Why bid the highest on exact? The ROI is typically much higher because you are aware exactly what the searcher is looking for, as compared to broad match, which is much more open to interpretation since it includes close variants. However, with broad match the volume will be much higher.

Have more recommendations? Share them below.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe now

Tips on digital marketing and business growth hacks. Read, learn, grow, repeat. 

Popular Posts

Let's connect

Schedule a call with me to identify the right digital marketing mix that will foster your revenue goals.

Related Posts