9 Proven Ways To Improve Your PPC Campaign Performance

Enhancing the performance of your PPC campaign is essential for staying competitive in today’s dynamic digital landscape.

In the ever-evolving world of pay-per-click advertising, leveraging the latest tools and strategies can make a significant difference. Below, we explore nine proven methods to boost your PPC campaign performance.

Performance By Location

One often overlooked but obvious way to segment the performance by audience is to look at where your existing and prospecting customers are located. You will likely see patterns for different states, regions, and even postal codes. This seems to be quite obvious if we consider that demographics can be entirely different from place to place. By segmenting your audience based on geographical data, you can tailor your campaigns to target specific areas more effectively. For instance, higher transaction values in affluent suburbs may justify increased spending to acquire those customers. Ensure your campaign settings reflect these nuances to optimise performance.

Performance By Device

Despite the increasing convergence between experiences on different platforms and devices, user behaviour can vary significantly across different devices. While mobile continues to dominate traffic, desktop often leads in conversions for many industries. It’s not just a matter of screen size and resolution, but also about context and the reasons why we use a device instead of another.

It’s crucial to regularly review device performance data to better understand your audience and the context in which they operate. This understanding allows you to align your messaging and user experience accordingly. Furthermore, aligning this data with other marketing channels can enhance the overall effectiveness of your campaigns.

Performance By Network (Search Vs. Search Partners Vs. Display)

Targeting the right network can significantly impact your campaign’s success. While Search Network delivers high-intent traffic, Display Network excels in brand awareness. This distinction is crucial as the end of third-party cookies is upon us, leading to personalised ads being more limited. Traditional targeting methods are evolving.

Even though display ads are highly targeted, they do disrupt the user experience. We must always acknowledge this in our creative and messaging. Using the two networks to target customers and prospects at different stages of their journey requires distinct strategies, KPIs, and targets. Combining these approaches can optimise overall campaign success.

Moreover, considering how search partners generate a small amount of traffic in the wider context of an account, the spend can be negligible. However, you should always split Search and Display campaigns to maximise efficiency and align them with your unique goals.

Audience Performance

Often, we see search driving a significant amount of traffic from existing customers who use the engines to quickly navigate to a website to access their account. If appropriate measures are not in place, these navigational clicks can be quite costly when they come from PPC ads.

Adding suppression lists to avoid incurring extra costs that won’t drive additional conversions is essential. With the third-party cookie ban, your ability to target specific audience members with personalised ads, including retargeting, will be limited. Logical uses of audience targeting include segmenting the user base (first-party data) into cohorts based on shared attributes, such as behaviour and engagement.

But audiences can also be used for observation rather than targeting. Since these won’t affect the campaigns’ performance, it is suggested to add as many relevant audiences as possible. The data collected will provide valuable insights into which segments are most valuable and which audiences are underperforming, enabling you to make the right adjustments.

Negatives And Negative Lists

Keywords are still the strongest signal. Due to the complexity of natural language, it is important to narrow down the chances that keywords might match unwanted search queries. Continually reviewing and mining search query data is crucial.

Even with current limitations, search query reports can help you understand what Google thinks a website or page is about. Reducing costs for unwanted, less relevant searches and excluding terms that don’t align with your campaign goals is fundamental. This ongoing process also helps improve your quality score and overall campaign efficiency.

Features Available In The Platform

Using additional features like ad extensions can benefit the quality score. Considering the expense of ad listings on search engines, maximising on-page real estate is essential. By taking up more space, competitors have less available space.

Additional features include uploading offline conversions and running experiments and A/B testing. With the push for automation by platform owners, manual adjustments are becoming limited. Leveraging machine learning and AI for insights and optimisation options is now more critical than ever.

Conversion Tracking

Accurate conversion tracking is the bedrock of effective PPC campaigns. In digital marketing, everything should be measurable, and marketers should be accountable for the performance of their campaigns.

However, many PPC accounts are either missing conversion tracking altogether or are tracking the wrong endpoints. Using the segmentation option within Google Ads helps to see a breakdown of conversion types by campaign quickly. Setting the right conversion goals for each campaign and using custom columns for different conversion points are expert tips.

Importing offline conversions and using enhanced conversions are now essential practices. These measures inform machine-driven optimisation, making accurate conversion data more important than ever.

The Role Of Automation And AI

The role of the marketer has evolved significantly with the advent of AI and automation. It is now crucial to maximise the effectiveness of these technologies. Automated systems can mine and provide actionable insights from vast amounts of data, which manual methods cannot match.

Understanding and leveraging these capabilities will help marketers stay ahead.

First-Party Data and Privacy Regulations

With increasing privacy regulations, third-party data is becoming less reliable. Nurturing first-party data has become more important than ever. Building and maintaining comprehensive customer lists in full transparency allows for more accurate targeting and personalisation.

Ensuring compliance with privacy laws while maintaining campaign effectiveness is crucial in the current landscape.

In the dynamic world of PPC advertising, continuous improvement is the key to success. By regularly updating and refining your strategies across these nine areas, you can achieve sustained success and drive better results for your campaigns.

Staying informed about the latest tools and trends and adapting your approach to meet the evolving needs of your audience is more important than ever.

Source: Searchenginejournal