8 PPC optimization tips from a pro

Digital marketing, we like to say, is a combination of art and science.

Sure, there are rules, procedures, and steps to follow, but without a healthy dosage of imagination, your program is unlikely to succeed.

This is something that experienced paid search marketers understand.

They also understand the need for experimentation, analysis, and optimization in developing a successful and long-lasting PPC campaign.

Behaviors, competitors, and algorithms evolve at a rapid pace. To stay ahead of the game, you must notice something before someone else does. Allow these search optimization methods from pro to guide your efforts in 2022 and beyond.

1. Experiment with manual bidding.
Without the proper bidding strategy, no matter how good your PPC advertising is, you won’t get the desired results. Your bid strategy is determined by your campaign objectives.

The classic automatic cost-per-click (CPC) bidding technique can be used to achieve the largest number of clicks within your budget.

Allowing Google to perform the work for you, though, has a few drawbacks. One of them is the lack of a simple way to tweak your campaign if it isn’t working. This issue can be solved by using manual bidding.

This more personalized, hands-on bidding approach:

Ad visibility is improved.
Reduces the cost per action (CPA)
Allows you to prioritize keywords that are more likely to convert.
A more sophisticated method is to switch from automated to manual bidding.

It frequently necessitates paying particular attention to strategies such as:

Because the procedure might be time-consuming, focus on one campaign at a time.
Reduce your bids for keywords that generate a lot of impressions but no sales.
Increasing bids for conversion-oriented keywords to boost the position of ads featuring them and enhance conversions
Choosing a default bid in your automatic campaigns that is close to the average CPC
When you need more control over your bids, manual bidding is ideal. However, with this method, you’ll spend more time making sure you’re bidding the proper amount at the right time.

Setting up automated rules to pause poorly performing keywords, boost bids to the top of the page or first page, raise or drop bids at specific times of day, and more can help you save time.

When using manual bidding, it’s a good idea to run the campaign for a couple of weeks to check if it meets the goal of lowering CPC and increasing sales.

2. Use remarketing to your advantage

It’s common knowledge that nearly no one converts on their first visit to a website (i.e. makes a buy). Does this imply that your PPC advertising is a waste of money?

Obviously not.

Simply combine them with remarketing efforts to increase their effectiveness.

This method entails employing advertisements to track potential customers who have clicked on your ads or visited your website. Placing your ad in front of them acts as a subtle reminder of the action they may have intended to do on your website.

The key to enhancing your conversion rate is to create an ad group with people who have already visited your landing pages.

While recent data and privacy updates have brought some new challenges to remarketing, there are still ways to construct successful strategic campaigns.

3. Look into Microsoft Ads
Google Ads is the undisputed king of PPC advertising. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility of examining alternative options.

For some businesses, Microsoft Advertising could be the answer they’ve been looking for to boost their sponsored search ROI.

Non-Google search engines and platforms sometimes have less competition, which means lower CPCs, depending on your business.

While it’s simple to import a campaign from Google Ads and let it run its course, you may be overlooking some of these platforms’ most beneficial features.

Microsoft advertising, for example, includes:

Add call-to-action (CTA) buttons near your ad that connect to a specific landing page.
Review extensions — show reviews from other websites beneath your ad.
LinkedIn targeting – track how your advertising is being received by the LinkedIn audience to make modifications.
View how your exposure compares to that of your competitors who appear for the same search searches 4. Pay attention to
Amazon’s advertisements.
Another PPC optimization possibility is Amazon Advertising.

While Google, Microsoft, and Facebook Ads reach a large audience, folks who see your ad on those platforms aren’t always in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.

On the other hand, Amazon audiences are typically closer to the bottom of the sales funnel. Visitors to this retail behemoth are almost certainly ready to buy, greatly increasing your chances of conversion.

These are the several sorts of Amazon sponsored adverts available to you:

In search results, brand adverts appear as banner ads.
Product advertising as promoted relevant results within the search results for selected keywords
Branded videos that automatically play and provide an image, description, and link to the product.
E-book advertisements on the lockscreen
To take use of this advertising option, you don’t have to sell your products on Amazon.

5. Take use of responsive search ads.

Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) gained popularity immediately after their debut in 2019. This is largely due to the fact that these ads allow you to generate 15 various headlines and four alternative ad descriptions.

Google then tries different combinations of these pieces and chooses the best ones based on parameters such as:

Devices searched for keywords
Searching habits
Responsive advertisements allow you to reach your target audience faster while saving time and money on A/B testing.

Google is retiring extended text advertising, which means RSAs will be the favored ad format by June 2023.

6. Make your website more user-friendly.
If you don’t optimize your website to greet your target audience once they arrive, your PPC campaign results may fall far short of expectations.

Google has recently begun to include Core Web Vitals when deciding page rankings. These are essentials:

Page loading time – The page should load in less than 2.5 seconds.
Visual stability – When the user is reading the content, page elements should not move (this commonly happens when a piece of media loads), requiring the visitor to look for their lost location.
The delay between a visitor taking action (such as clicking a button or tab) and the website replying should be less than 100 milliseconds.
The Core Web Vitals illustrate how good of a user experience you should strive for. Improving them will assist your PPC ad clickers to convert as well as improve your search engine optimization efforts.

Pro tip: While you’re working on your website, make landing page SEO a top priority. When the content on your landing page is similar to the keywords you’re employing, the relevancy is increased, and Google may reward you with a better Quality Score.

7. Go over your keywords again.

When was the last time you looked at your keywords with a critical eye?

There’s never a terrible moment to think about increasing your present keyword lists, upgrading your negative keywords, and removing underperforming keywords.

Furthermore, a few keyword changes could yield significant results. Even small changes like adding an adverb, eliminating a term with low search volume, or looking up which terms your competitors rank for will help you get closer to more hits and a greater ROI.

Pro tip: Check your Google Analytics (GA) user search term reports for new keywords to add that aren’t currently in your account, then utilize Google Keyword Planner for more research.

8. Monitor your conversion statistics.

For conversion tracking, we recommend using GA and a program like Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Why? Assume you want to increase form completions. You can set up your tags in GTM, create goals in GA, and then import them into Google Ads.

It simplifies the conversion setup if you have the same aim for numerous channels, such as paid social and paid search or SEO and paid search.

Google Ads conversion tags can also be configured directly in GTM. (Because this works around GA, you’re simply tracking Google Ads conversions.)

You may also establish remarketing audiences in GA and import them into Google Ads once you link your GA and Google Ads accounts, which you must do before importing goals.

Need extra assistance in 2022 with your PPC campaigns? Contact us.

Summary:
The process of PPC optimization is never-ending.

When you consider the numerous new possibilities and upgrades that occur each year, it’s practically hard to succeed without periodically assessing your techniques in order to improve them.

At the end of the day, the finest PPC ads are those that are clear, consistent, target the proper demographic, and deliver on their promises.

TOP 10 WAYS TO REDUCE THE COST OF ADVERTISING IN GOOGLE ADS

There are several ways to reduce the cost of advertising in Google Ads, which can help not only reduce the cost per click but also optimize the cost of advertising and increase its profitability.

The best way to increase your return on investment in Ads is to take measures that help reduce your audience to the most important potential customers. Fortunately, there are many ways to do this in Ads, and you should definitely know them.

Below are 10 steps that you can use to immediately and significantly reduce your expenses.

VIEW SEARCH QUERIES AND ADD NEW KEYWORDS

The report you should pay attention to is search queries. Here you can find real user requests, in response to which ads are displayed.

In this report, you can find irrelevant queries for adding new negative keywords and effective undelivered queries for adding them to the campaign as keywords. When you select a query, you can add it as a new keyword or negative keyword.

The report does not have a “Keyword” column by default, but we recommend adding it, which will allow you to compare the query and the phrase for which it worked. Sometimes, several keywords correspond to a single query. If you notice that the query is not working on the same phrase as you expected, you can make a cross-backing between the groups to remove the intersection of keywords.

NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

Often, showing ads to non-interested users is quite expensive, since the ads are displayed in response to non-targeted search queries from users who also click on your ad. Use the Negative Keywords tool to filter out bad keywords that don’t convert. It is advisable to pay attention to this every week, repeating the process. By minimizing the number of unnecessary clicks, you will reduce your overall costs.

BID ADJUSTMENTS

When creating a new ad campaign in Google Ads or evaluating the effectiveness of your ads, it is important to understand the bidding process correctly. Regardless of whether you use manual or automatic bidding, whether you are already a Google Ad expert, or whether you use one of the flexible bidding strategies, it is important to understand how these models work and what impact they have on the end result your ad campaigns.

All strategies that are based on optimizing the number of conversions or ROI will not work until you have accumulated good statistics on conversions.

Try using manual strategies to improve your performance, and only then connect other strategies.

We recommend using different strategy options, testing, analyzing, and editing – all this will help you move towards the desired result.

CHANGING LOCATION SETTINGS

In the ad campaign settings, in the “Locations” section, there is an option “Location options”:

By default, the first option will be selected in Google ads – “People from target locations and interested in them”.

If you are focused, for example, only on Kyiv, but someone from Odessa is interested in your products or services, while specifying “Kyiv” in the request, then Google can show them your ads. You may not want people from countries/cities that you are not targeting to click on your ads. In this case, choose – “People in your target locations”.

If you have previously used the default location settings, you may notice an obvious improvement in the CPC.

LOCATION REPORT

The next useful report is by location. Using it, you will get a layout for different cities.

Add information about conversions and evaluate the effectiveness of advertising in different regions where the ad is displayed. Some regions may need to be disabled or bid adjustments made if achieving the goal is too expensive.

BID ADJUSTMENTS ON THE DEVICE

If you get 80 % of your clicks from mobile devices, and they convert at 1.5 times the average price per conversion, you should fix it. In this case, set the bid adjustment for mobile devices.

Also, don’t forget to make bid adjustments for the remaining devices. This will result in your average price per conversion, and your budget will be directed, for example, to high-performance computers and tablet devices with a higher conversion rate.

DISABLING INEFFECTIVE CAMPAIGNS/KEYWORDS

Analyze the accumulated data on Google Ads advertising campaigns. Try to constantly monitor conversion rates, and in the case of high costs, change the budget in favor of those campaigns that bring more desired results, and vice versa. Also, monitor keywords, adjust bids, or stop keys with a low conversion rate altogether.

GDN SITE FILTER

Regularly check the placement locations of your GDN ad campaigns and continue optimizing with bid adjustments and ad testing.

Lists of good and bad sites will be useful for all new campaigns, as well as allow you to optimize your work more effectively and bring your campaigns to the optimal level faster. And remember that it’s important to have enough data to analyze placements.

AD EXTENSIONS

Ad extensions are a handy tool that you can use to get more space in search results, as well as visually push your competitors’ results down. It is advisable to fill in all types of suggested extensions and add-ons for better effect and clickability.

Extensions add useful information to ads and help attract customers’ attention. Extensions usually increase the CTR of an ad by several percent, increase the number of clicks to the site, and increase the quality indicators.

QUALITY INDICATOR IN GOOGLE ADS

Quality metrics are the best way to reduce costs and increase productivity. Professional ppc agencies always take a look at this parameter.

A quality metric is how Google determines your quality and relevance, using factors such as ad quality, landing page performance, and your click-through rate. All of these factors tell Google whether your ad can be a good search result for users. Building your quality score is important, as those with high quality will have a higher ad placement at a lower price.

CONCLUSION

Follow the above-mentioned steps to optimize your advertising account, and you will surely get successful advertising campaigns, reducing unnecessary expenses. Analyze the data, make hypotheses, test them, and over time you will be able to see the expected result.