We now have our Google ad campaign live so it's time to maintain and optimise these ads to ensure we are getting the best results possible. Checkout my top 5 tips to optimising your Google ad campaign.
Don’t forget to check out the full PPC guide taking you right from keyword research through to remarketing – click here.
Limited budget
As your ads start running you might see a note against your keywords saying limited budget. Not everyone can just increase their budget and you might have a fixed amount you are looking to spend. Instead of increasing the budget look at how you can spend the budget more wisely.
Review the days and times your ads are running. If you are running your ads for 24 hours 7 days a week you might find that certain days and times you get plenty of clicks but no conversions. Or your budget is being spent early in the day and not getting chance to run later.
Here we can try running the ads on set times and days to use the budget more wisely. For example, if you see the budget being spent by 7am every day but no conversions try running them after this time. If you have a B2B audience, think about the hours they may be working and just run during this time.
You might also look at your keywords to see which keywords are getting you the most conversions and pause others. You can also try lowering the max CPC on those keywords that perform in the middle range – so they are bringing you conversions but not as well as others.
Search terms report
The search terms report is a great feature that allows you to see what search terms your ad appears for. In here you might find search terms that you don’t want your ad to display for, these can be added to the negative keywords list.
You can also add new keywords to your list from this report that you had maybe not previously thought of. If you are not sure about certain ones try Googling the term and check what results appear. If you think this is a good match for your ad you can add it to the keyword list or if not add it as a negative keyword.
The search term report can also give you ideas for new content on your website outside of this campaign. If you find search terms users are looking for that you could assist with you might want to add additional pages to your website and promote it.
Audiences
When you created your campaign you might of added audiences that can be monitored. Reviewing the audiences to ensure you are targeting the right people and right interests. If a particular audience is doing well, you might increase the bidding for that particular group.
Adding remarketing audiences can also help with conversions. These users have already visited your website and have been shopping around so they will be further down the sales funnel than a new audience. Reminding them of your offering through remarketing can then result in a conversion if they had not previously made a purchase.
Ad content
As you setup your campaign I would recommend 3 to 4 ads per ad group with slightly different messages. Remember you are still focusing on one set list of keywords. Once the ads have been running a while you can start to compare the ads and see how they are all performing.
Google will naturally serve the ads with the highest conversions and lowest cost more than others so at this point you might want to pause the ad that’s performing the least. You can also try creating new ads from combinations of content in the other ads to try different angles.
If you have multiple landing pages available, you might try alternatives to see if one converts better than the other. For example, if it was an eCommerce store testing a category page against a filter page or subcategory page.
Ad extensions
Ad extensions can provide the user additional information about your offering. They can provide additional content, links, promotions or encourage users to call from the ad.
Test out different extensions to see what works best for your audience with different messages and approaches. Like a lot of the other features, you can see which ad extensions gets the most clicks and conversions and performing the best.
PPC optimisation summary
In this PPC guide we have now covered keyword research, landing page optimisation, ad creation and ad optimisation. You should be able to use techniques to optimise your ads for higher conversions without increasing your budget.
To do this you might look at the search terms report to enhance your keyword list, check you are targeting the right audience, add extensions to your ads providing additional information and tweak the ad content.
The last article in our PPC guide is remarketing. Take a read now to complete the full set - click here.
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