Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising remains a cornerstone of effective digital marketing strategies.
Often, when we begin work on a PPC account or campaign, it comes with some history.
Whether it’s because we inherited it or have been asked to conduct an audit, the goal is always the same: to look at it with fresh new eyes, making use of our expertise and hard-earned skills.
We need to make sense of it to fix issues and improve performance.
In my original post dated October 2021, I highlighted seven key areas to optimize in order to improve PPC campaign performance.
But as we move through 2024, the advent of AI tools and intelligence has significantly disrupted the landscape, necessitating continuous refinement and adaptation.
Additionally, the proliferation of privacy regulations has profoundly impacted data collection and insights gathering.
In this updated guide, we now explore nine proven ways to enhance your PPC campaign performance, considering these new dynamics.
By leveraging the latest tools and insights, you can ensure your campaigns are optimized for maximum impact and return on investment.
Nine Key Areas For Improving PPC Campaign Performance
1. 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.
Screenshot from Google Ads, July 2024
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 optimize performance.
2. Performance By Device
It’s a given. Despite the increasing convergence between experiences on different platforms and devices, user behavior 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.
3. Performance By Network (Search Vs. Search Partners Vs. Display)
Targeting the right network can significantly impact your campaign’s success.
We could argue at length about the quality of impressions and clicks from partners’ websites. But most of the time, these generate such a small amount of traffic that in the wider context of an account, the spend can be negligible.
Screenshot from Google Ads, July 2024
And considering that there is no way to target Search Partners alone, whether we keep the Search Partners on or off is a different matter.
However, that cannot be said for the Display Network — you should always split Search and Display campaigns.
While Search Network delivers high-intent traffic, Display Network excels in brand awareness, and while the end of third-party cookies and a cookieless future are upon us mean that personalized and targeted ads will be more limited, we are likely to see a revival of contextual advertising.
But even when highly targeted, display ads are a form of disruption of the user experience, and therefore we must always acknowledge that in our creative and messaging.
Additionally, we should likely use the two networks to target customers and prospects at different stages of their user journey and have different strategies, KPIs, and targets aligned to that.
4. 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.
Add suppression lists to avoid (where possible) incurring any extra costs that won’t drive additional conversions.
Per my previous point, the third-party cookie ban will limit your ability to target specific audience members and personalized ads, including retargeting.
So other logical uses of audience targeting include the segmentation of the user base (first-party data) into cohorts based on a shared attribute or identifier, and therefore defined by behavior (i.e., page visitors), and/or engagement (high consumption of content).
With the growing importance of first-party data due to privacy regulations, nurturing customer lists is crucial.
Screenshot from Google Ads, July 2024
But audiences can also be used for observation rather than targeting, as in the above example.
Since these won’t affect the campaigns’ performance, it is strongly suggested that as many relevant audiences as possible be added.
Once the data is collected, it will provide valuable insights into which segments are most valuable and which audiences are underperforming. This will enable you to make the right adjustments.
5. Negatives And Negative Lists
Keywords are still the strongest signal. But due to the complexity of natural language and the different (often unique) ways people search, even with the most sophisticated machine learning, machines can still struggle to fully understand the intent.
Therefore, it’s as important as ever to narrow down the chances that keywords might match unwanted search queries. You must continually review and mine the search query data available.
Even with the current limitations, search query reports can really help you understand what Google thinks a website or a page is about.
At a time when Google is encouraging advertisers to move to using more broad match and keyword themes, this can help reduce costs for unwanted, less relevant searches and exclude terms that don’t align with your campaign goals.
This ongoing process also helps improve your quality score and overall campaign efficiency.
6. Features Available (And Applicable To The Account/Campaign) In The Platform
Continuing from the point above, one of the reasons to use additional features like the ad extensions is the benefit these can have on the quality score.
It goes without saying that QS alone should be a compelling enough reason.
Additionally, considering that ad listings on search engines can be quite expensive, wouldn’t it make sense to try to always maximize the on-page real estate?
If we are paying a large amount of money to be there, we want to ensure it’s worth it. Besides, the more space we can take, the less will be available for competitors and other advertisers!
Additional features also include less-used options, such as the capability to upload offline conversions (more on that in a moment) or run experiments and A/B testing.
With the push for automation by platform owners, manual adjustments are becoming more limited.
Leveraging machine learning and AI for actionable insights and optimization options is now more critical than ever.
7. Conversion Tracking
Accurate conversion tracking is the bedrock of effective PPC campaigns – and this is one of my favorites – and it’s essential that we are tracking the right goals.
In digital marketing, everything should be measurable, and marketers should be accountable for the performance of their advertising campaigns. Conversion tracking should always be at the cornerstone of planning and executing media buying.
However, we often see examples of PPC accounts and campaigns that are either missing conversion tracking altogether or are tracking the wrong endpoints.
Provided we have our conversions firing and recording correctly, some expert tips are to:
Use the segmentation option from within Google Ads to easily and quickly see a breakdown of the conversion types by campaign (see example below). In fact, the segmentation view is an extremely useful, yet massively underrated, tool!
Screenshot from Google Ads, July 2024
Set the right conversion goal(s) for each campaign when using Target cost per action (CPA) or Target return on ad spend (ROAS) bid strategies.
Set up and make use of custom columns to add the different conversion points and/or performance metrics such as CPA, return on investment (ROI) or ROAS.
Besides, the importance of conversion data has increased exponentially as it informs machine-driven optimization, so importing offline conversions and using enhanced conversions are now essential practices.
8. The Role Of Automation And AI
The role of the marketer has evolved significantly with the advent of AI and automation.
It’s now crucial to maximize the effectiveness of these technologies.
Automated systems can mine and provide actionable insights from vast amounts of data, which manual methods cannot match; only understanding and leveraging these capabilities will help marketers stay ahead.
9. First-Party Data and Privacy Regulations
We probably cannot stress enough about this; with increasing privacy regulations, third-party data is becoming less reliable, so nurturing first-party data has never been more important.
Building and maintaining comprehensive customer lists in full transparency allows for targeting with greater accuracy and personalization while ensuring compliance with privacy laws and campaign effectiveness.
Conclusion
In the dynamic world of PPC advertising, continuous improvement is key.
By regularly updating and refining your strategies across (some of) these nine areas, you can achieve sustained success and drive better results for your campaigns.
Back in 2021, my recommendation was to embrace the Pareto Principle and focus on where you can make a difference right away:
“Look for those campaigns and terms that are responsible for the majority of the ad spend.
It is likely that 20% of those are accountable for 80% of your outgoing costs.
If those campaigns or keywords are hitting your targets, improving their performance might really help you to take things to the next level and become the company CFO’s best friend.”
Now I still think your job is to focus on the 20%, but the grunt work, the 80% is likely to be best left to the machines.
The advent of AI tools and the push for automation have transformed the role of marketers, making it essential to leverage these technologies effectively, while privacy regulations underscore the importance of first-party data.
Like never before, it is important to stay informed about the latest tools and trends and not hesitate to adapt the approach to meet the evolving needs of your audience.
Key Takeaways for 2024:
Prioritize data-driven decisions by leveraging the latest performance insights.
Regularly update and refine your strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
Utilize the full range of available features and tools to maximize campaign effectiveness.
Adapt to the evolving role of automation and AI in PPC advertising.
Focus on first-party data to navigate the challenges posed by privacy regulations.
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