5 tips to boost your PPC results on Google
As costs of PPC campaigns are increasing, internet marketers are
more than even under the pressure to deliver positive results.
The performance of PPC campaigns is dependent on following
factors:
- The impression rate
- Your ad position
- Click thru rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
Finding the right balance between impression rate, ad position
and clicks is the starting point to successful PPC advertising.
Before exploring tips to help your campaign perform better,
let's quickly sum-up the concept how Google displays your ads in
its sponsored results:
* Daily budget controls frequency of your ad display
The frequency is expressed by number of impressions. If your
daily budget is not high enough, your ad may not show all the
time (meaning you don't have enough impressions per day).
* Ad position depends on the Rank Number
The higher the rank number, the higher is your ad's position on
the page. The rank number is calculated based on the following
formula:
Rank Number = CPC (Cost Per click) x CTR (click through rate) x
(Ad quality)
Now we're ready to explore what practices are more likely to
help us improve PPC campaigns performance:
1/ Improve Ad Delivery
If your ad does not show up every time when searches are
performed under your keyword, it may be a sign that your daily
budget is not high enough. As you now know, how frequent of your
ad display is controled by the daily budget. If you would like
your ad to be shown more frequently, please consider to increase
your daily budget in order to receive a maximum exposure for
your ad.
Normally, you have 50% margin for your daily budget. For
example, if your desired daily budget is $10.00 per day, you can
set your actual daily budget on Google to $15.00 per day,
because your actual spending is based on your click thru rate,
by setting the daily budget higher will allow your ad to get
more exposure, but your actual spending may still be in your
desired daily budget range.
However, be sure to monitor your daily advertising costs and if
they are rising too high, decrease the budget on the safe level.
2/ Improve Ad Delivery per Keyword
Each campaign can have one or more adroups. An AdGroup is a
group of keywords and ads that will display when those keywords
are searched for on Google. You may have experienced a situation
when only few keywords out of the whole AdGroup trigger your ad.
The explanation lies again behind the daily budget that controls
a number of impressions for your campaign. These impressions are
distributed between individual AdGroups and further between
individual keywords. So it may happen that some keywords in a
particular Adgroup have more impressions than the others,
meaning some keywords trigger your ad more frequently than
others.
If you want to improve the ad delivery for your targeted
keywords, you can consider splitting your keywords and creating
a new campaign for keywords with low impressions. This should
improve the frequency with which they will trigger your ad.
3/ Optimize your Adgroups
As mentioned above, each campaign has one or more adroups that
all share campaign's impressions. Often, the impressions are not
divided evenly between adgroups. So it may happen that some
adgroups have more impressions and show their ad(s) more
frequently than others. It is a very similar scenario as with
keywords we just described above.
To improve results of your low-performing adgroups, you can
consider to create a new campaign for them in order to increase
the frequency with witch they show your ad on Google.
4/ Analyse your Clicks
Make sure the clicks are made for specific, targeted keywords.
If you're getting lots of clicks on non-targeted keywords,
consider reducing Max CPC and/or your ad position in order to
improve your ROI. Similarly, you can raise bids for targeted
keywords that are performing well.
5/ Optimize your Ads
Make sure you bid on targeted keywords, create compelling ads
and link them to relevant content on your website. The keywords
you chose will segment the market and target your desired
audience. If you won't chose wisely, you'll finish targeting the
wrong market and wasting your advertising budget. The ad you
create needs to attract attention of your prospects. It needs to
communicate your unique selling feature - in other words, what
makes your product/service different from others and why a
visitor should visit your website. Be specific about your offer
and include call to action. Lastly, guide visitors to the
content on your website where they can access more information
about the offer advertised. The landing page should also clearly
state what is the next natural step to make - buy your product,
download the white paper, sign up for a free trial, etc.
PPC management requires lots of work and testing but if you
stick to the basics you can make money instead of losing them.
Remember, the only measure that matters on the Internet is the
profit you make.