This post is the second of two parts that shares even more quick wins to improving your campaign performance.
Having already shared 6 quick wins for PPC within our free guide, in this post we thought we’d share even more… unfortunately not all are so quick.
This post concentrates how to approach your PPC campaigns if performance is poor. See this as a checklist on how to dig into your campaigns and ensure you have the best possible setup and approach. Following this process should help you discover any issues and fixes for your campaigns and at the very least better understand why performance is recently down.
Campaign Setup
Account structure is crucial to any PPC account. As accounts grow and new campaigns launch over time it is possible that consistency across live campaigns can be loosened. This is why it is important to ensure you have got the basics of a best in class setup correct.
Download all live campaigns to Google Ads/Microsoft Ads Editor and run a health check on your account setup. Ensure the following:
Consistent structure & setup
Check campaign settings
Review any issues flagged by Google/Microsoft
Check for full ad extension coverage
Beyond a solid setup and structure other opportunities will arise. Within Google Ads review the recommendations they provide for each campaign as well as the given optimisation score. Please do remember, not all recommendations are best for your business performance!
Keyword Bidding
Bids should be reviewed frequently
Ensure the high spending keywords warrant to be high spenders
Review keywords gathering no or few impressions having little chance to perform
Circumstance depending, may be best to be ruthless and pause poor performers
Search Term Management
Often keywords perform poorly due to the broader terms being captured. Especially as Google’s Exact match type is becoming anything but exact with the introduction of close variants. Review the search terms being captured and exclude any irrelevant/poor performing terms.
Build out search terms captured as new keywords to manage separately and improve ad relevance. This data can be found under ‘Search Terms’ within the Keyword section of Google Ads.
Ad Copy Review & Refresh
Using Responsive Search Ads, review the headlines & descriptions performance. Find this report within the Search Campaigns of Google Ads, clicking on ‘Ads & extensions’ and then ‘Assets’. This report helps rate which assets of your ad copy is best and low performing. Using this data will help shape the focus of your ad copy. Alongside this, review Click Through Rate (CTR) performance over time that the current copy has been live. If you are noticing a decline in CTRs than it may be time to refresh the copy.
Landing Page Review
Review the landing pages being used across campaigns starting with the highest traffic drivers and working down the list. When reviewing these pages check whether there is a more relevant page available for specific keywords/ads. If not and you feel the relevancy can certainly improve look to create a new landing page to be used for PPC.
Once you have checked for relevancy, next it is important to review the actual landing pages being used to send traffic to your website. Are there too many distractions on the pages being used? It is vital to make it clear what action it is you want the customer to complete. Avoid too many call to actions on a given page.
We hope these tips help with campaign performance, check out the second part of this post - PPC Wins When Performance Is Down: Part One
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