Recently updated: August 13th, 2021
If you are not getting what you deserve from your pay-per-click marketing efforts, it’s time to keep up with trends and your paid search strategies for better results. It is important to regularly review your PPC practices to optimize and improve your paid campaign performance. It has become more crucial than ever in the continuously changing advertising world.
As business strategies and goals are evolving with each passing day, reviewing your marketing plan can create opportunities to align your strategies with PPC best practices and trends. It is a great way to find new features to incorporate in your paid campaigns and improve overall performance.
You can incorporate the following 7 PPC best practices into your pay-per-click program before launching your next campaign to achieve better results.
- Review and Optimize Your Ad Budget and Spend
Many advertisers don’t take it seriously and forget to review or reevaluate their budget for PPC campaigns and their distributions and spend during a month. It may result in spending more budget on low-performing campaigns and not allocating enough budget to a campaign that delivers more leads and sales during the campaign period.
Here’re a few tips to best utilize your paid media budgets in order to maximize your returns:
- Restore the balance between your planned vs. spend for each campaign in your ad account with regular evaluation. Set your ad spending for monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on your budget size to achieve your targets.
- Eliminate poor-performing campaigns to free up the budget for other campaigns.
- Look for opportunities to drive additional traffic to your winning campaigns to generate more revenues.
- Find out the best-performing paid media channels for your PPC campaigns and shift your ad budget there to grow results. It doesn’t make sense to allocate a budget on a media channel that is not delivering up to your expectations.
- Review and reevaluate your budget strategy to know if you can invest more in the positive campaign results.
This way you can adjust and plan for the months ahead to better utilize your ad budget.
- Keep yourself up-to-date with new features in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads
Paid search ad platforms like Google and Bing bring great new features all the time to boost performance value for marketers. For example, optimizing your audiences for all your campaigns and adding new ad extensions can help you improve your overall performance from paid search ads.
Make sure to combine incorporate these new features in your campaign to optimize your performance:
- Video Extensions
- Multimedia Ads
- Call Reports and Recording
- Dynamic Remarketing Lists
- Serving Ads on Google’s and Microsoft Search Partners
- Data Studio
- Microsoft Audience Network
Keep exploring new features in google and Microsoft ads to optimize your target audience and ad performance for better results.
It’s time to think beyond your comfort advertising platforms like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook; and test new paid channels as part of your ad strategy. You can consider the following advertising platforms for your business targeting using PPC ads:
- LinkedIn: It is the most appropriate advertising platform to target professionals and businesses.
- Pinterest: For female-focused targeting with your products, services, and consumer goods.
- Snapchat: To reach a much younger demographic (13 to 35) with your ads.
- Instagram:To create well-rounded multimedia campaigns for users to build brand awareness and driving conversions at the same time.
You need to know ad opportunities on various media channels to improve your overall marketing ROI with your ad targeting.
- Audiences Integrated with Search
It is very crucial to review and optimize the audiences you selected a few months back for your ad targeting. Google and Microsoft keep changing their audience network to add many more audiences to help users target customers who matter most to their businesses. There are unlimited ways to mix and match your list of audiences for optimized targeting based on interest or behavior online. For example, you can use detailed demographics to select a list of audiences based on marital status, parental status, education, home-ownership, and household income.
- Voice Search Preparations
Voice search is becoming a new trend among users to search and find things online using Google Assistance, Apple’s Siri, Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana. You may not be getting too many voice searches yet, but you cannot ignore this opportunity to optimize your ads for voice searches. You need to work on keywords and phrases that users use to talk or ask something to make yourself ready to respond to voice searchers with your campaigns. Preparing your PPC campaigns for voice searches is one of the most important best practices you need to work on in your marketing strategy.
Review voice search queries regularly to add valuable keywords to your ad account or campaign and respond to your audiences when they are asking something online relevant to your business. For example, if you are a restaurant owner and notice navigational voice searches like “biriyani restaurant near me”, consider optimizing your campaigns to target people who trying to find restaurants in your location using the mentioned voice query.
- Revisit Keyword Match Types
Google has made some changes to keyword match types recently for Google Ads managers. The company has discontinued the broad match modifier and expanded the reach of phrase match for audience targeting. Now you cannot add new BMM keywords to your account but it is not necessary to convert BMM keywords to phrase match keywords. However, it is the right time to revisit keyword match types for your campaigns considering the new changes introduced. Monitor any shift in traffic volume and review search term reports more frequently to eliminate irrelevant keywords from match type changes.
You can learn to use scripts to automate repetitive tasks in your Google Ads accounts. It will make things easier for you to manage your campaigns in the most efficient ways. There are plenty of resources and tutorials available online to get started with scripts.
In addition to these best PPC practices to improve your campaign performance, consider reevaluating your essential PPC key metrics and reports to add or replace data to measure success in your PPC campaigns. You can use overview pages with a few handy graphs in your Google and Microsoft Ads Account for actionable reporting. You can seek friendly collaboration, resources, and opinions on PPC management to incorporate best practices and trends in your campaigns to maximize the effectiveness of your efforts.
