Abisola Tazanko | Nov 22, 2023
How can you increase ROI on your PPC campaigns?
Optimizing your advertising campaigns is more important this season than ever as various sales and marketing teams strive to make the most of their advertising budgets. Optimizing your pay-per-click campaigns is the most effective way to ensure your ads reach the right audience and get the best return on investment (ROI).
With Google search and competing ads that appeal to your target audience, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can bring in more revenue and new customers. This super couple can increase your ROI considerably. Google estimates that businesses can generate an average of $2 for every $1 that is spent on Google ads.
This is an excellent return on investment (ROI), but this advertising method allows businesses to reach a larger audience cost-effectively. It also makes it easier to funnel money into poorly performing campaigns accidentally. A wise approach is to leverage the power of paid advertising while actively managing your campaigns to ensure they don’t fail once launched.
To improve your ROI with PPC, you must adjust your strategy and ensure each campaign is fully optimized and tested. It will take some patience to do the necessary testing and analysis, but you can achieve higher profits by using paid advertising strategically.
Benefits of PPC Advertising
PPC advertising suits your business, especially if you want to save on marketing costs. You can control your spending and use precise audience targeting to reach people predisposed to buy your products and services. Ad results are easy to track and measure, providing insight into everything from impressions and clicks to conversions. Also, the built-in data analysis allows you to monitor and adjust your campaigns, which helps small businesses work on their approach and achieve better results when necessary.
PPC advertising helps increase brand awareness and drive relevant traffic to carefully selected landing pages on your site that are ready to convert customers.
How Analytics and Conversions Can Be Used To Increase ROI on PPC Campaigns
PPC advertising campaigns are easy to set up and run, with strategic targeting capabilities and flexible budgets. However, there are better strategies than simply planning and launching one campaign at a time, which can quickly deplete your budget.
By analyzing campaign performance data and continually experimenting with different advertising elements, you can understand what works and what doesn’t and improve your campaign performance over time.
With the strategies below, you can improve your PPC campaigns’ effectiveness and maximize your ad spend’s effectiveness.
1. Refine your audience targeting
You can adjust your audience. Refine your ad targeting by leveraging campaign performance data, which ensures that your advertisements effectively reach your intended audience. Although you can initiate the process with general demographics and interests, evolving and fine-tuning your targeting strategy is essential as you gather more insights from your campaigns. Feel free to get more specific as you progress.
You can target users based on search intent, purchase likelihood, and interest topics. Of course, the smaller the target group, the higher the cost. As that happens, adjust the parameters to stay within your budget.
Tip: Narrowing your focus may make other decisions easier as your focus is on a particular group, and your ad creation is focused on catering to that group.
2. Customize your ads.
Once you determine your target audience, create custom ads to target those consumers. First, determine what your target audience is interested in by considering their needs and pain points. Next, choose the appropriate keywords. Next, craft ad copy and creative assets that communicate your strategic message directly to that group.
Customization may include creating specific visuals for advertising campaigns, optimizing for particular devices, or experimenting with dynamic ads tailored based on user data. Ensure your creative is always on-brand to increase awareness when viewers see your ads and other sales and marketing materials.
Tip: Creating custom ads more likely to reach your ideal users allows you to narrow your targeting without increasing your ad spend.
3. Strategically use your campaign budget
Once you’ve selected your target audience and created your ad, you must plan your campaign budget. With careful management, you can continually adjust your budget to guarantee an optimal return on investment (ROI) from your marketing initiatives.
Experiment with manual and automated bidding methods to determine which yields the most favorable outcomes at the most cost-effective rates. Stay ready to adjust and pivot in response to shifts in the market and evolving consumer preferences.
Tip: Controlling your advertising costs allows you to optimize your return on investment and test different strategies to find your best approach.
4. Test advertising elements
Testing is an essential part of advertising because it helps you optimize your campaigns and allows you to get the desired results at a lower cost. By testing different elements, you can see what works and what doesn’t and optimize future campaigns with this information in mind.
You can experiment with various ad components, including headlines, ad copies, and visuals, to determine what is best and adjust your campaign accordingly.
Tip: Always use split testing or conduct A/B testing to evaluate diverse variations of your ad. Set clear test goals and change only one variable at a time. For example, switch ad copy or images, not both.
5. Make improvements informed by performance data
Continuously observe your campaigns to spot patterns and opportunities for improvement. You can adjust your targeting, improve your ad copy, and test different ad elements as you watch your results change. Take advantage of the opportunity to optimize bids for keywords and placements that generate the most clicks and conversions.
Learn what types of campaigns work for your audience and which styles can fail. This information helps you strategize future campaigns to achieve better results in the long run.
Tip: Please be patient with your ad. It is essential to collect data over a sufficient period to see results. So be patient at first.
Conclusion
Paid advertising has become an essential part of an effective marketing strategy, but you must actively manage your campaigns to ensure you get the return on investment you expect.
With active involvement from you and your marketing team, you could avoid overspending on underperforming ads, attracting low-quality traffic that doesn’t convert, or missing out on opportunities to take advantage of patterns. Without ongoing campaign management, they can degrade performance, lower your overall return on investment, and deviate from your original business goals.
Please note that this process may take some time. However, if you are patient and focused, you can achieve your campaign goals and improve your ROI over time.
By adjusting your strategy and continually testing and refining your campaigns, you can identify what’s working and what’s not. This allows you to use your budget more effectively, stay competitive, and achieve better ad results.
Running an advertising campaign that reaches your desired audience and effectively promotes your brand takes effort, but it can be a worthwhile investment. By paying close attention to your ad performance and making necessary adjustments, you can get the most out of every penny in your ad budget.
Abisola Tazanko | Nov 01, 2023
How do you manage spending on your PPC campaigns?
Running digital advertising for your business is ideal if you want to grow and increase your visibility and sales. However, you may also feel frustrated if campaigns eat up your budget before seeing a return on your ad spend (ROAS).
This is called daily Google Ads budget overspending and often happens to companies new to digital advertising. Luckily for you, you can prevent this from happening by following the tips and tricks below.
What is the daily budget for Ads?
Your ads daily budget refers to the maximum amount an advertiser is willing to spend on their ads campaign in a day. Google averages your daily spending; some days, it’ll spend over that limit, while on other days, it spends next to nothing.
How budget works in ad campaigns
Google Ads’ daily budget is the amount spent daily on average for an ad campaign. Your pay will solely depend on your (CPC cost-per-click) rate. The daily budget is the approximate amount advertisers are comfortable spending each day over a month.
For instance, if an advertiser sets an average daily budget of $50, Google Ads will ensure they spend around $50 per day on their campaign. Note that Google Ads interprets the daily budget as an average over time rather than limiting spending to an exact amount daily.
So, some days, it may go as high as $100, while on other days, it only costs $10. Over a month, it’ll average roughly $50 spent daily. This way, advertisers will control their ad budget and ensure their campaign doesn’t exceed the allocated budget.
What causes Ad budget overspend?
Now that the Google Ads budgeting system has been explained and understood let’s look at the top three reasons businesses spend more than they budgeted for on Google Ads.
1. Google algorithm
Google Ads uses its algorithms to decide when to spend more or less money on ads. It analyzes data, like how many people are searching for your goods and services and how those people are likely to purchase them.
If, on certain days, Google sees higher clicks and conversions, it may allow overspending. Sometimes, it will spend more money than usual, up to double your daily advertising budget. This can be a problem because it can cause you to spend more money than you intended.
Below are two instances where Google increases your daily ad campaign spend:
Increase in search traffic
When search traffic increases, specific keywords can be relevant to your Google Ads campaign, which means more people will be actively searching for products or services like yours. This increased demand can increase competition among advertisers bidding on these keywords.
If your campaign is set up to maximize viewability and reach, Google Ads may show your ads more often. It does this to capture the growing search demand. As a result, your ads may generate more clicks, leading to a higher spend on your daily budget.
For example, let’s say you set a daily budget, but because of a sudden increase in search traffic, your ad receives more clicks than usual.
Google Ads will continue to serve your ads to meet growing demand. This may cause you to spend more than your budget.
Tip: By analyzing search traffic trends and adjusting your daily budget to match demand increases, you can ensure that your ads continue to be effective without exceeding budget limits.
Conversion Rate Variations
When your conversion rate fluctuates, it can affect the overall performance of your campaign and, ultimately, your budget.
Here’s how it works:
You set a daily budget of $100, and your ads perform well with a steady conversion rate. However, if your conversion rate increases dramatically, your ads will become more profitable, and Google Ads can serve them more frequently to capture increased conversion opportunities.
Higher conversion rates are usually a positive result. But it can also lead to overspending. As more people convert, your ad spend will increase as Google Ads tries to capitalize on your campaign’s success. If you don’t closely monitor your search, social, and shopping campaigns, your daily budget could be depleted earlier in the day than expected, leading to overspending.
Tip: Track and analyze your campaign performance. If you see a significant increase in conversions affecting your daily budget, adjust your daily budget to stay in control of your spending. And optimize your campaign success while respecting the budget limits allocated to you.
2. Miscalculating your budget
Every advertising campaign starts with a set budget, or at least it should. If you budget wrong, you will pay the price. The root cause of overspending is most likely due to poor everyday budget management and poor budget planning accumulated throughout the month.
For instance, if the cause of overspending is a highly increased budget to compensate for low spending at the beginning of the month, then increasing your budget by more than 20% at a time can cause fluctuations in your strategies.
Tip: Use historical data and consider your business and advertising goals when setting your advertising budget
3. Mid-month campaign changes
Found inspiration to improve your mid-month ad campaign performance? Please don’t do it because Google has changed how advertising budgets are calculated and charged.
Instead of viewing the last 30 days, it now considers the current month. So, if you change your budget mid-month, Google will start calculating it again from the beginning of the month.
Ways to avoid overspending your daily Ad budget
Here are some ways to avoid overspending your daily Google Ads budget.
Create an accurate budget at the beginning of each campaign month
If you’ve been running a campaign for a while, you have access to historical performance data that can guide your bidding strategy. Use this information and your business goals to set a realistic monthly budget.
It’s straightforward; Google works on a monthly budget schedule. So, take the amount you want to spend each month and divide it by 30.4 (the average number of days per month) to get the daily budget number to put in your account.
Once you have this daily number, assign it to each campaign based on your strategy and priorities. Then, you will be okay with monthly overspending.
Monitor your campaigns daily.
Do you want to know how much search engines spend daily on your campaigns? Then, monitor them closely to see what is being consumed daily. Use this data to adjust your budget accordingly to optimize your ad spend.
For example, if you notice your campaign is underperforming, you can increase your daily budget to compensate. Then, when you see your campaign is spending too much, you can reduce your daily costs to avoid running out of budget.
Use automated bidding strategies to control budgets
If you want to “Set it and forget it, ” you need automation to reduce costs. You can create campaigns using automated bidding strategies with maximum budgets. This way, your ads will spend within your desired range and stop showing when you reach your maximum budget.
Try to structure your campaigns so that search engines don’t label them as ‘limited by budget.’ This may involve having a structure with fewer campaigns if you have a lower budget to maintain a higher level of data flowing through the account.
Optimize landing pages for better conversion rates
Overspending can happen when you run monthly campaigns with Google Ads. However, you can maximize your campaign by optimizing your landing page to increase conversions and sales.
This way, you’ll increase your return on investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Tip: Continue improving your ad campaigns to improve your Quality Score by using relevant keywords, optimized landing pages, and ad extensions to provide additional information. Supplements can help searchers make conversion decisions.
Leverage negative keywords to exclude irrelevant traffic.
If you plan to spend less on Google Ads on certain days, ensure your spending is targeted at the right audiences. Adding negative keywords to your campaign can save advertising dollars on clickers who will never convert.
For example, if you sell air mattresses, you want to avoid your ad appearing in pillow searches. So, you need to add the phrase (mattress topper) to your negative keyword list.
Conclusion
Note that you don’t have to worry too much about going over your monthly budget.
While going over your daily Google Ads budget may seem problematic, Google does a great job averaging your ad spend so you stay within the budget.
However, if you don’t like the way it distributes your coins daily, you can take some steps to control it. Consider learning about ad scripts to avoid overspending and manage your budget. If you lack the time or resources to implement these strategies, consider working with a team of experts who live and breathe this every day.
Abisola Tazanko | Oct 25, 2023
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising offers a potent opportunity to ensure your goods and services are in front of the right audience, helping you build brand awareness and increase sales.
The average cost of PPC campaigns depends on a number of factors as well as your goals. Companies as large as Apple and as small as your local bakery can invest a portion of their annual marketing budget in paid advertising. Your costs, platforms, budgets, and return on ad spend vary by size, industry, and even time of day.
How much does online advertising cost?
It changes a lot. This may be the most unprecise answer possible, but it’s the most honest. The cost of a PPC ad campaign is usually based on average CPC (cost per click) on Google Ads, Bing, or social platforms like Facebook. Remember that CPC can vary significantly depending on your target keywords, competition from industry competitors, and seasonal changes. You’ll need an in-depth eye across all your platforms to optimize your Google Ads costs.
Average PPC advertising cost
Finding the proper budget for your PPC campaigns requires careful consideration of the costs associated with successful campaigns. On average, companies with effective advertising campaigns invest between 9,000 and 10,000 USD monthly. However, it’s important to remember that these numbers can vary depending on the company size, industry, and campaign goals.
Industries like finance and insurance allocate significantly higher budgets to PPC advertising, outperforming other industries. These industries together invest a total of $1.2 billion in PPC campaigns. Retailers are also investing heavily in online advertising. Individual businesses spend around $40-50 million annually on Google AdWords alone. Amazon allocates more than $50 million yearly to its PPC advertising strategy.
These significant investments demonstrate the potential returns and effectiveness of well-executed campaigns with sufficient resources. However, businesses should analyze their industry, size, and marketing goals to determine the appropriate budget for their PPC efforts.
Google Ads Costs – Averages and Variations
The average CPC on Google AdWords is between $2 and $4 for search. The industry with the highest CPC costs is legal services, with an average cost per click of more than $8. Home deco advertising is also consistently higher than other industries, averaging over $6.
Industries with longer sales cycles and higher service costs require larger budgets. You’ll get the most out of every click with an experienced paid media team.
Why Google Ads?
Google Ads has been one of the most profitable digital marketing strategies for decades. Even when factoring in paid media management fees, the cost of Google Ads is far less than what the business benefits regarding revenue and brand awareness.
Market Share: Google Search accounts for around 85% of the global search market, meaning the majority of internet users start their journey with Google.
User Intent: Targeting the right keywords will ensure quality clicks among qualified users. Unlike roadside billboards or ads in your local newspaper, Google ads are only shown to users actively searching for information about specific products or services. These users also click on ads; Google Ads results get 65% of the clicks on the search results page, compared to 35% of organic results.
Manage spending: As your priorities and goals change, so does your budget. Google Ads offers excellent flexibility to adjust your ad spend based on specific keywords, placements, and scheduling to maximize your paid media budget and ROI.
Paid advertising costs across social media
Google dominates display and search advertising, but the paid social media environment needs to be consolidated. Big players like Meta (i.e., Facebook and Instagram), Twitter, and Pinterest face increasing competition from TikTok and other small, growing platforms.
Social media advertising is based on two metrics: CPC, which makes it easy to compare performance with Google, and CPM (cost per thousand), which is the cost of 1,000 impressions. CPM is typically more about awareness because it measures how many users saw your ad and whether they took action.
Cost of advertising on Facebook
The average CPC on Facebook is about $0.44, with an average CPM of $14.40. This makes it one of the most affordable and cost-effective social media platforms for advertisers, which is why it is the most popular social media channel. Brand used.
Cost of advertising on Instagram
Instagram has fewer users than its big brother, Facebook, but Meta is Instagram’s goldmine of steady paid revenue. While there is a lot of demographic overlap, Instagram tends to have a slightly younger audience and has many features that influence user behavior on the platform. Instagram doesn’t give a specific average but says the average CPC is between $0.20 and $2, with a CPM of $6.70.
TikTok advertising costs
TikTok’s ad revenue has exploded since 2020, growing 139.9% year-over-year in 2022 and with an expected increase of 36% in 2023. That’s more than double LinkedIn’s revenue growth, ranks second, and is expected to reach another 16.3% by 2023. Although TikTok only accounts for 2.3% of social media advertising spending, this number could double by 2027 to exceed $36 billion.
Much of this will depend on its competitive pricing. TikTok reports an average CPC of $1 and an average CPM of $10, although it is slightly less flexible than other platforms. ‘Tok is the only major social media platform that requires a minimum budget of at least $50 per day and $50 per campaign. Ad sets on the platform must cost at least $20. For large companies, this is fine. For small businesses, this level of spending can be prohibitive.
Conclusion
When implemented effectively, a well-designed PPC campaign, combined with the right pricing package, can produce exceptional results and contribute greatly to the success of your online advertising efforts. By continuously optimizing your PPC strategy and taking advantage of the right pricing plans, you can connect with your audience, outperform your competitors, and propel your business to lasting success.
Abisola Tazanko | Sep 26, 2023
Should you audit your PPC campaigns?
Auditing your PPC campaign is an essential part of any advertising strategy. They help you identify your ad’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities that can position you to create better campaigns.
Auditing PPC campaigns is becoming increasingly essential as marketing budgets are cut down, and marketing teams are expected to do more with fewer resources. With regular PPC audits, the odds can be beaten down, and an above-average ROI (return on investment) can be achieved.
Despite the benefits of PPC audits, only a few publishers/advertisers perform them regularly.
- Only 10% of advertisers optimize their Google Ads accounts every week.
- About 20% of Google Ads managers keep their campaigns the same for a month.
40% of organizations want to increase their PPC advertising budget. Unfortunately, this may not be feasible in the current economic downturn. Instead, you can make the most of your budget by regularly auditing your PPC accounts.
Why perform a PPC audit?
In addition to maximizing ROI, a PPC audit provides other valuable insights, such as:
- Identify performance issues: A regular audit helps you detect performance problems and issues early, so you can fix them before they drain your ad budget.
- Identify areas for improvement: auditing your PPC helps you find out where and how you can optimize your campaign performance.
- Understand your performance over time: auditing your PPC helps compare your performance from one period to the next.
- Learn more about your audience: Through a PPC audit, you eliminate ad fatigue and increase conversions by understanding which ads best performs with your audience.
- Benchmark yourself against competitors: During the PPC audit, you can compare your results with other advertisers who bid on keywords like you using Auction Insights.
You can audit your PPC campaign at least every six months, but ideally, it should be done every three months so that you consistently get the best results from your advertising campaigns. Let’s walk you through a step-by-step method of conducting a PPC audit.
Preparation before you audit your PPC campaigns
Before you begin with your audit, determine your PPC audit measures. This will give you an understanding of what success looks like and give you a baseline for future assessments. Here’s what you need to prepare before starting your PPC audit.
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Goal Setting
First of all, understand what your campaign is designed to achieve. There are many potential PPC goals, including:
- To improve brand awareness
- To increase website traffic
- To boost sales
- To increase revenue
- To generate leads
Everything about your PPC campaign, such as keywords, campaign structure, and bidding strategies- must be aligned with this goal. So, it’s important to establish this from the beginning.
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Determine KPIs
Decide which KPIs will be used to measure campaign success. Common advertising KPIs include:
- Conversion rate
- Click-through rate
- Return on ad spend
- Return on Investment
Ensure that the KPIs you choose are directly related to your campaign goals. Below is a table that provides a quick overview of the best KPIs to measure each goal:
Target | KPIs |
Improve brand awareness | Impressions, reach, and engagement rate |
Increase website traffic | Click-through rate, number of visitors |
Lead generation | Conversion rate and bounce rate |
Boost sales | Conversion rate, number of conversions |
Increase revenue | Cost per conversion, return on ad spend, return on investment |
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Select date range
Choose a data set large enough to give you an overview of your results. This will last a minimum of three months.
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Determine budget allocation
See how much you spent on campaigns within your date range and how it’s distributed across campaigns and ad groups. Knowing the allocating process of your budget can help you make informed adjustments to your budget and bids in the future.
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Check out conversion tracking
Most importantly, you want a PPC audit to determine whether your campaigns deliver results. Conversion tracking is the best way to find this out. Watch out; it’s easy to make mistakes when setting up conversion tracking, and inaccurate conversion tracking can also give you a false sense of success (or failure) if:
- You measure low-value conversions, such as the number of newsletters that are signed
- When your conversion tracking is measuring visits to the wrong page
- You don’t track offline conversions, like phone calls.
- No conversion tracking code is implemented.
Before you analyze your campaign’s performance, always ensure that your conversion tracking code is a) installed, b) in the right place, and c) appropriately configured. Ensure it’s only added to relevant post-conversion pages (like order confirmation pages).
Evaluating campaign performance
In this step, you will determine which PPC campaigns and ad groups perform well and which are performing poorly. Your PPC goals and KPIs are at the heart of this, so keep them in mind when auditing your PPC account. Using a PPC checklist tool like Analysis or tracking campaign performance in a spreadsheet can be helpful.
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Understand the PPC account structure
You can skip this step if you initially set up your campaign and are happy with your structure. However, if you inherit an ad account from another Google Ads manager, it’s essential to understand how their campaigns are structured.
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Check campaign settings
Review high-level campaign settings and verify that they are optimized for your campaign goals:
- Are campaign goals defined? If so, does manual campaign optimization give you more control over your targeting and bidding?
- Which network do you use? You can reduce costs and improve results by showing ads only on the Google Search Network.
- Are your targets in the right locations? Make sure you’re not serving ads in places that aren’t your target.
- What bidding strategy are you using? Automated bidding strategies like maximizing clicks and maximizing conversions can quickly deplete your advertising budget if left unmonitored.
- Is your ad rotation optimized so that it shows the best-performing ads? Updating your ad rotation is a quick way to improve results.
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Ad group analysis
Once your campaign-level settings look good, it’s time to get down to business. A well-optimized ad group should do the following:
- Have a reasonable and specific name that is easy to understand.
- Target up to 20 keywords (and ideally fewer keywords).
- Only include keywords that are highly relevant to your ad group name. More targeted ad groups will help you create better ads.
Analyzing these three factors makes it easy to determine which ad groups should be worked on. First, check the number of keywords in each ad group. Ad groups with many keywords may need to be divided into smaller groups or sections. Ensure the ad group title is specific to its target keyword.
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Keyword optimization
Once your keywords are in the right ad groups, you can start refining them. Check for the following:
- Match type: Using phrase match and broad match gives you less control over when your ad is shown more than the match needed.
- Negative keywords: The search terms report always shows all the uncertainty your ad is showing for. Add any unrelated phrases to your negative keyword list.
- Keywords vs. campaign goals: Ensure your keywords are related to your goals. If you want to generate revenue, choose high-intent keywords like “buy wedding cake” instead of informational queries like “how to frost a wedding cake.”
- Keyword relevance: Ensure your keywords are highly significant to your ad group.
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Evaluate your ad creation
Even with the best campaign structure across platforms, your ads must resonate with your audience. Check the following details when analyzing your ads:
- Messaging – Your ad copy should include your target keywords, have a catchy CTA, highlight your value proposition, and differentiate yourself from direct competitors.
- Offers – Make sure all advertised offers and prices are still valid. You don’t want to put up an offer that isn’t valid.
- Display URL: Make sure the URL you choose correlates to the keywords in your ad group.
- Ad relevance: Ensure your landing page is relevant to your ad and vice versa. (This can also improve your Quality Score, increase your ad rank, and lower your average CPC.)
- Ad approval: Edit or remove any disapproved ads.
- Ad extensions: Ensure your ad extensions are optimized for each search ad. If you’re not already using ad extensions, plan to add them.
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Check offers and budgets
In general, you should invest more money into your best-performing ads. So remember to adjust your budget, so your best-performing ads get the lion’s share.
Remember that making positive, data-driven campaign changes (like removing irrelevant keywords and using manual bidding strategies) will eliminate unnecessary ad spend. Any significant changes will take time, so remember to test their performance during your next PPC audit.
Conclusion
Regular PPC testing is essential to getting the most out of your online advertising campaigns. They allow you to reduce unnecessary advertising expenses, help to improve ROI, and grow your business without increasing your budget. Use this step-by-step PPC testing guide to ensure your advertising campaigns are highly effective.
Abisola Tazanko | Jul 26, 2023
Do you have a love-hate relationship with household cleaning? You love it because you will finally get a clean space but hate it because, yeah, it is cleaning, and it is a chore.
You may feel the same way, merely entertaining the idea of cleaning the data on your PPC campaign platforms. However, after a long season of paid ad payments, you must clean up your campaign data with great intent.
If you do this, you may realize the increased clutter on your account.
This article will discuss five essential ways to clean up your Google ads account and focus on what matters. Grab your cleaning tools, and let us run through the five easy ways to clean your Google account.
How to clean your PPC campaign Platform (Google ads)
Here are five easy steps to get the most accurate data from your Google ads.
Remove low search volume keywords
The first way to clean up your ad account on Google is to attack the LSV (low search volume) keywords. Google marks any keyword with little or no search as having ‘low search volume’ until that keyword’s search volume increases.
These keywords can sit pretty in your account, taking up space and hindering filtering and optimization decisions. Your ad account will function optimally when it is managed in such a manner that you can accurately and quickly identify optimization opportunities.
Cleaning action
Here is how you go about cleaning:
- Put filters for low search views (LSV)
- View as far back as 12 to 18 months. Note that you should avoid getting rid of seasonal keywords.
- Look out for low and zero impressions
- Put a pause on all low search volumes that enter your filter
Remove low-impression keywords
Another step to take is to focus on low-impression keywords, that is, keywords that have little or no impression volume. We have people hold on to these keywords with low impressions because they believe someday these keywords may, in fact, turn out to be converting (revenue) traffic. Sadly, the truth is that they won’t. If they have not converted for you before, why should they now?
It is time to sweep out these keywords to focus on the ones working. When going for low-impression keywords, you must ensure you don’t over-exclude those not showing for different reasons. Before you apply a filter, you have to check for the following:
- Is the bid for these keywords too low? Or do they need to be boosted to get more impressions?
- Are there other ads running in the group the ad belongs to? Are the keywords live, limited in reach, or/ and disapproved?
Cleaning action
Here is how you go about the cleaning;
- Every keyword with less than 50 impressions in the last 18 months should be filtered. Ensure the filters go beyond one year to avoid getting rid of seasonal keywords.
- Select a new filter, ‘keywords under first-page bid’.
- Raise bids to about 15 percent higher than the first-page bid and allow the keyword to run for a few weeks.
- Put a pause on all low/ no impression keywords if you don’t want it to go live.
Remove no impression ad groups
Another way to clean up your Google ads is by cleaning your Ad groups. Some Ad groups are purposeless and take up space -those without a single impression. Look out for these safety checklists before cleaning out your Ad groups.
- Why is the Ad group paused? Is it because the ads are not running? Should that be the case? Then go ahead and re-enable ads that were enabled previously and performed successfully.
- Is the ad group paused because there is no targeting? Should there be? Or are they just paused because they are all LSV keywords?
- Was this ad group newly added and needs more time to ensure traffic?
Cleaning action
Here is how you go about cleaning;
Once you have done your due diligence and answered the above questions, as usual, start from at least 12 months to 18 months (you can go longer to avoid getting rid of seasonal ad groups) and filter by the following.
- All enabled ad groups.
- All enabled campaigns
- Paused ad group in view
- Zero impressions for your timeframe
- Ensure to double the running ad group to avoid accidentally pausing something important.
Get rid of low-volume, high-work campaigns.
Going through this next category will require more strategic planning, but it might be the exact thing that makes your ad account management easier. You need to determine if the low-traffic campaign can be moved into other ad campaigns so you can manage all your campaigns in a more straightforward account.
For instance, if you have similar product manufacturers’ campaigns and you divide them into separate campaigns to specifically optimize the ads, if they have low traffic and the work is high, you could bring all the campaigns together as a single ad group. Instead of several low-traffic campaigns, you can still access these campaigns through bid modifiers and negative keywords.
So if you have campaigns with less than 10 percent traffic, adding them together with another drive with Broad Match Modified Keywords is best.
Cleaning action
Here is how to go about cleaning:
- Check your current ad campaigns; if you have a couple of drives that account for less than 10 percent of your traffic,
- Consider adding them to one campaign group. This process prevents clutter and helps you make smarter decisions.
Delete unused labels
This is relatively easy to apply. While cleaning your Google ad, consider going through your labelling system and cleaning it out.
Instead of spending so much time digging through your labels, when you next run your ad analysis, take some time to clean off unneeded and inactive labels.
Unfortunately, to do this, you will have to go back to the old UI since the new UI doesn’t have a way to easily manage your labels (with the new UI, you can create and assign new labels, but it doesn’t have the label management page currently). In the old UI, label pages can be navigated; that way, you can determine labels that are actively or not actively assigned to any ad campaigns, keywords, ad groups, etc.
Disclaimer: If you are unsure about navigating between the old and new UIs, please skip this step.
Cleaning action
Here is how you go about cleaning;
- Remove labels that are not assigned to anything. However, as usual, you need to verify if the label is not seasonal to avoid getting rid of it.
- Find out if the labels are still in use. (This applies, especially if you manage your Google ad account with others.) You should take your time confirming what labels they want to retain and those they are okay getting rid of.
- Get rid of any label not in use
A clean PPC campaign platform is a gold mine
If you have followed the steps above, congratulations! You have successfully cleaned out your Google ads. Now you can be laser-focused on the ad campaigns that matter and make more precise and better decisions.
Regularly clean your Google Ads account to maintain an organized and orderly account.