Improving PPC Campaign Performance – Top tips for getting a return on your PPC campaign

Creating, monitoring and analysing your pay per click campaign can be a pretty complex undertaking.  Often web owners get stuck in the “ppc bubble”,  fail to look at the wider picture, miss new technologies,  and end up finding they they cannot see the wood for the trees. So just to put things into a little context here are essential top tips to get your campaign back on track:

Calls to action!

One of the most important factors to integrate into your PPC ads is a sense of urgency. You may have done well in making your ad stick out from that bustling crowd on the search pages (i.e. use all space on the ad so it appears bigger; colourful relevant call to action language; engaging first lines etc.) but what will make the surfer click now.

There is so much choice on the search engines that decision-making for the time-strapped and cautious surfer is made even harder. What will motivate that click-through is an element within the ad to suggest an offer is on for a limited time. Also consider adding topical events (related to your industry or target market) that is hot news at the moment. It will make you look current and will add that extra dynamic.

However do not change your ad to fit in with topical stuff too many times as this can affect how Google quantifies your ad’s quality score.

Clear link between ad and landing page

The absolute minimum for great CRO in your PPC campaign is relevance between ad and landing page, but so often not enough thought is focussed on where your ad will lead your visitor to.  When creating a plethora of different ads within an ad group a great deal of time and effort is spent integrating keywords and coming up with those smart one liners and calls to action that engage and enthuse.  But as cool as that ad is, if it leads to a page which appears to have nothing to do with the ad spiel, the surfer – quite rightly – will instantly bounce.

Don’t live in a bubble of “PPC metrics” when creating ads. Always keep the website destination page as the framework for new innovations and as the ultimate test before it goes live.

Go global

There may be reasons why you are happy for your target market to be just the UK, but if you are genuinely a brand that can sell globally use the Google Geo tools. Google has developed so much in this respect now that you really can turn highly specific regions of the world (perhaps due to different time zones or areas where certain offers are not applicable) off from the comfort of your dashboard.

Don’t restrict ad group’s budget wise

This may sound a little odd – especially when you’re watching the pennies but the fact is unless you allow your campaigns full reign within an accepted budget you cannot really analyse whether they are doing well or not.  So if you have various ad groups running at the same time pause those which are not performing so maximising the output from those that are.

Track the whole of the visitor’s journey

As far as analysing the metrics for CRO is concerned you cannot form a complete picture by click-throughs alone.  The point here is the click-through is not the ultimate conversion as far as sales is concerned.  What journey did the visitor take once on the website? Where did they drop off? Did they return? If they came back on different occasions did they use other devices or other gateways (such as organic search; social media etc.).

Google Analytics allows you to follow all these variables. You can use ‘click event trackers’  to highlight links and buttons to show milestones in visitors journey.

Use remarketing

Finally don’t forget remarketing! This is the cool new kid on the block as far as internet marketing is concerned. Very powerful, but perhaps not used as often as it could be. It is especially useful for those visitors who have successfully clicked-through but do not actually buy.

The fact that they clicked shows there is an interest in what you have to offer. They are likely to be your target market. Now by tagging these visitors on various pages of the website you can display appropriate ads to them as they visit other sites.