Regardless if your just starting out or have been running your google ad campiagns for a while, Shoogle PPC are here to support you and make sure your doing the best you can to get the most out of your campaigns. There are plenyt of articles, blogs, books and podcasts to guide you through the jungle that is Google Ads. the point of this article is to touch on some of the most important factors and elements to consider to optimise and maximise your ROI.
Treat our article as a checklist and go through it making sure your doing all we can. This check list has been created by our in house PPC Managers at our Essex PPC Agency. these are some of the checks we carry out on all client accounts to bring those results in!
Its not secret that we are not a fan of automation, it just can not replce manual optimisations to maximise your profits. Part of this checklist is to go through those automations and see how they are performing for you. While each account and each individual will benefit from different checklist items, the list below includes those that we have found to be especially impactful.
Performance
When creating your ad types in settings you would have selected a goal, alternatively you will have account level goals. These should be checked at least weekly to make sure your campaigns or ad groups are meeting or exceeding those goals. The two most stand out metrics are spend and conversions. If you are spending a lot and not seeing many conversions, you know the account needs work. On the other hand if your spending a lot and the conversions are flowing maybe its time to increase your budget or create additional campaigns to further boost your revenue. Another thing to consider is comparing campaigns side by side and see which are giving the best ROI and moving budgets accrodingly. Our Chelmsford PPC Agency tend to check and measure these metrics every other day to weekly.
Bid Changes
Bid changes are very important. As a general rule of thumb for things like shopping ads we use enchanced cost per click. This means google will automatically adjust our bids if they think the click will lead to a conversion. In this ad type google will provide projections against ad groups on what will happen if you icnrease or decrease spend, this is a good metric to consider but also even better if you divide down to product ID so you can monitor each ID individaully. If you are using manual bidding for search ads, adjust bids on keywords that are generating the most of your daily spend, converting but in lower positions, spending without converting, converting above CPL. If you are using automated bidding then pause any keywords that have high spend but no conversions.
Check Budgets
Check to see if your Ads are being stopped due to low budget, Google generally advise you if this is the case in recommendations but, it is worth checking the last 7-14 days in history to see if your hitting budget. If your campaign is performing really well and your hitting targets and getting conversions you dont want to be stopped due to not having enough budget. Consider increasing this. Depending on your Agency they may charge more if you spend more. With our PPC Packages we dont charge based on spend.
Pause Underperforming Keywords and Search Terms
Look at both your keywords and search terms. For keywords in search ads and other ad types, if they are not converting or converting at a very low level it may be wise to pause these Keywords so that your budget is not being used by a keyword that wont convert for you. Search terms are more targetted at shopping ads but if your getting a high click volume and low conversions consider excluding these at campaign or ad group level.
Negative Keyword Lists
As above, check through all of your campaigns and look at negative keywords that are not performing or bare no relevance. This is especially important for Shopping Campaigns. Correctly applying negative keywrod lists and filtering out pointless search terms can save you up to 40% of your spend! Eliminating these keywords will increase CTR by preventing unqualified traffic from seeing or clicking your ad. You may want to do this weekly for newer accounts until you build up a solid negative keyword list. Once you have this review it every two weeks. Our Essex PPC Agency will go through search terms, any relevant but low converting search terms will go to their own list. At this point, we build out a cacth all campaign were we target those search terms at a much lower cost per click (usually a couple of pence) to get additional conversions at a much lower cost.
Keyword Expansion
Make the msot of what Google offers and use their Keyword Planner. This will give you opportunity to add keywrod additions.
Ad Review
Look at the ads your currently running, you will most likely have multiple ad sets for each keyword, dig in to these and see how each ad is perfroming. From there you can pause or push certain ads to allign with your goals and budget to maximise conversions. With the Keyword Expansion in mind, this is your opportunituy to write new ads to test. You should be testing at least three extended text ads per ad group at all times. Make sure you have gathered enough impressions data to truly evaluate performance.
Landing Page Review
Whilst this generally falls in to on site seo, you can run a Final URL report to see if you have any weak performing landing pages that can be removed in order to devote more traffic to top-performing pages.In addition this gives you an opportunity to run some on-site optimisations to improve your ad rank and landing page experience so google rewards you with higher ad rank and a lower PPC. Our SEO Packages include this all within the monthly cost.
Geotargeting
If your not already doing this, you should be. On all of your campaigns segregate them by town or region. This will give you a great amount of data allowing you to see where in the country you are converting and where you are not. Even better is it will show how much you have to spend to get a conversion at each location. This is a great way to both save money and maximise conversions.
Ad Scheduling
Same as above, once set up allow 30 days for data to be collected, you only want to optimise and monitor this once a month as making to many changes will confuse the data. Our Chelmsford PPC Agency generally set up two types. We run 4 ad schesudles Monday-Friday and then 4 for Saturday-Sunday.
Device Targetting
On all Ad types (apart from automated) you can make adjustments based on device type. By looking at this data you can see wether mobile, desktop or tablet is brining you in the lowest or highest cost per conversion and make adjustments based on that.
Wrapping Up
This checklist is certainly not exhaustive but gives you a good ground to start properly optimising your campaigns to maximise your conversion and reduce spend in areas that are underperfoming. Shoogle offers a free audit of any campaign so feel free to get in touch today so we can take a look at yours and get it optimised. Our Witham PPC Agency are ready when you are.