Spring Clean Your PPC Accounts in 5 Simple Steps

It’s apparently spring (we haven’t had snow in a month so guess it must be!), so what better time to give your paid search campaigns a good ol’ spring clean?! But, “where do I start?” I hear you ask… these few pointers might just help:

1 – Pull the Plug on Under Performing Keywords 

As much as we’d like to see all keywords convert well – it just doesn’t work like that. Once you’ve optimised your keywords as much as you can by adding negative keywords, tailoring ad copy to match and testing different landing pages, if you still can’t get the keyword to convert then it’s time to pull the plug. It’s like breaking up a relationship really – you really don’t want to do it but once you do, it will be the best thing you’ve ever done and you can start to move on with your life….. or something like that!

Sort your under performing keywords into two categories – the ‘no hopers’ and the ‘last chance’ keywords. Bin off the no hopers and optimise the last chance ones to do all you can to revive them. They’ll either turn into ‘no hopers’ or the ‘survive for another day’ers’ – a tad dramatic?!

2 – De-Clutter Your Accounts

Is your account full of paused keywords, ads or ad groups? If you have no intention of reactivating them, then you don’t need them cluttering up your account. Identify what you don’t need anymore and don’t be afraid to press that delete button!

3 – Review your Landing Pages

Landing pages can often be overlooked in optimising PPC accounts, but no matter how good your selection of keywords are or how great your ads look if you’re sending traffic to the wrong pages then they mean diddly squat.

Does the traffic your send to the homepage actually do anything? Is there a more relevant page you could send users to? Are you using all the possible pages? If you don’t know the answers to any of these questions, set up some A/B testing between different landing pages. Analyse the results then test another page.

4 – Add Negative Keywords

If you don’t already regularly look through your search query reports, then take the time to do so now! Search query reports show the exact queries used which trigger your ads. They are the most useful tool showing where you’re wasting your spend on keywords that are not relevant to you. Conversely, they are also useful to add the keywords triggering your ads on phrase, broad match and near exact terms as keywords in your accounts.

Plus, let’s face it, it’s always amusing to look at what people use search engines for!

5 – Look for Missed Opportunities

The opportunites tab in Google Adwords shows you where you are missing out on extra clicks and conversions either through budget constraints or by not having enough keywords in your account. This is a great tool to identify areas you can expand in, but that only tells you so much. When you work on the same accounts every day you can sometimes become blind to what is right in front of you and not spot opportunities that others may do. Ask a colleague to take a look at the account and provide any feedback on how it could be improved. You never know, you might just get some useful pointers that you hadn’t thought about – whether that’s tidying up an ad group, adding new keywords or restructuring a whole campaign.

Got any tips on spring cleaning your PPC accounts? Feel free to share them below!

Thanks for reading 🙂

Laura

PPC Time Management Tips

Time Management is one of the skills that everyone likes to boast about on their CV’s/resumes, but once you start working in PPC that’s when your time management skills really come into their own! Different clients, different demands and never ending optimization you could do on your PPC accounts means every minute you have is precious! Here are a few tips to help you manage the time you spend on your paid search activity more effectively:

1 – Establish Your Priorities

We’ve all had days where we have an overflowing to-do list and feel like no matter how much time there is in the day, you wouldn’t be able to get all your tasks done. Sometimes, it’s simply not possible, in which case you need to establish what needs to be done first rather than doing half jobs of everything. No-one wants to let anyone down by not completing things that you should but by clarifying exactly what the priorities are by either someone senior to you or directly to a client, you’ll be less likely to ‘let anyone down’.

2 – Don’t Drown in Data

It’s no secret that us PPC Marketers love data, give us 10,000 rows of data, a pivot table & a V-lookup to do and we’ll be amused for hours. But as tempting as it is to get as much data as you can to analyse, you need to step back and question if you really need it. Data is only useful if you can turn it into something which you can actually do something in response. Do you really need information on what browser, operating system or screen resolution users are on? Probably not if you’re going to be able to do in response to the results.

Dealing With Life With Enhanced Campaigns

Now we’ve all had time to take in the changes from the Enhanced Campaigns, the reaction has shifted from disappointment/anger to acceptance and trying to work out the best plan of action to make the most out of the change. I’ve even stopped writing Enhanced Campaigns as “Enhanced Campaigns” – that’s acceptance for you, right there! For most of us the change is huge and will require hours of work on a lot of accounts and a change in strategy, leaving us with some very important questions to answer:

Should We Roll Out Now or Wait Until June?

The advantage of not waiting until June is that you can get a really good idea of how to make the change work. Rolling out a small number of campaigns to enhanced can teach us some valuable learnings before rolling out to all campaigns. Campaigns which target just mobile will be in no rush to upgrade, while those who could benefit from geographical bidding and site link extension scheduling will be more inclined to upgrade now.

Do We/How Do We Change Our Structure?

For accounts that split out mobile, tablet and desktop are naturally the ones who are left with a lot of questions on how to adapt the structure. Split high performing mobile keywords into their own campaigns and increase the bid modifiers by 300%? Take poor performing mobile keywords and bundle together to turn bids down/off? What to do with the keywords that convert on mobile but not desktop? Keep the curent structure and adjust mobile bids by a campaign average? The list of questions goes on!

What Bidding Strategy Shall We Use?

While we are no longer able to have separate bids for tablet and are really restricted to mobile bidding at just a campaign level, there are some benefits to enhanced campaigns in geographical bidding. How do you change your bidding strategy to best target people in your location? Turn down bids in locations where you don’t have a physical presence, or increase bids when people are near a store/dealership or try target areas where you see better conversion rates?

The Winners and Losers Of Enhanced Campaigns

Okay, so it’s still a little too early to be declaring the winners and losers from the recent Enhanced Campaigns announcement by Google but it’s still clear to see who will benefit from this change, who will lose out and who will have to work extremely hard in the next months to find a campaign structure(s) which works best with the changes.

Winners

• Businesses who have never bothered to target mobile devices and create mobile friendly landing page – They’ll now be able to automatically opt in to targeting mobile without ever spending the time to build an account which is optimised for mobile performance
• Marketing agencies and PPC specialists – One thing that this change has highlighted is that you need the best PPC experts handling accounts to be able to adapt to these changes best.
• Businesses with lots of physical locations – Arguably one of the best parts of this update is that you can now adjust bids based on geographic location. So if you own a retail store in the city centre you can raise bids to people on mobile devices within a few miles of your store. Free call tracking is also a bonus. Call extensions and phone numbers can be automatically replaced by sitelink extensions out of office hours.
• And the biggest winners?….. Google! There might be a nice video and explanation on all the Google blogs to make it seem that Enhanced Campaigns are the best things since slice bread, but it’s pretty transparent to see their intentions. CPC’s on mobile devices were around 50% lower than desktop ones and with an ever increasing volume of mobile searches, how do Google increase revenue from mobile? Make everyone opt into mobile and make it more difficult to adjust mobile bids, easy!

The Good, Bad and Ugly Of Google’s ‘Enhanced Campaigns’

After Google’s reps doing the rounds to give a ‘heads-up’ that a change was about to happen, they have now publicly announced their ‘enhanced campaigns‘, so we can now talk about this huge announcement that is going to affect every single one of us PPC marketers. Enhanced campaigns are set to completely disregard device types to attempt to focus on the person rather than the device.

Google will be automatically changing campaigns to run on all devices rather than splitting them out by mobile, tablet, desktop meaning ad-targeted capabilities are extremely limited. They will now be split into mobile and desktop & tablet.

Google are claiming that consumers behaviours on devices are becoming the same, but are they really?! I don’t believe so. Many people use their phones on the commute to work or just during the day to browse on the internet, not really looking to purchase until later on when they get home. At which point they (including me) use a computer/tablet to have a quick check on Google again before being ready to purchase. People DO use devices for different things and that’s why we need different messaging, URL’s and bids.

So, here’s the good, bad and ugly of this latest announcement (in reverse order):

Ugly

Most PPC accounts are now set up to to treat mobile, tablet and desktop as completely different entities (rightly so) whether that’s by using different landing pages, ad copy, keywords or bids. The ‘enhanced campaigns’ now mean that it is much more difficult to target devices differently. Bid multipliers will mean that you can change bids by a certain %, similar to how hour of the day bid management is set up. Campaigns will now have to be merged into one with no real targeting capabilities.

Bad

Without separate bid targeting per device, tablets and mobile devices which have seen considerably lower CPC’s will now be increased along with competition. Despite the huge reach in mobile and tablet devices, lots of businesses were still not targeting by mobile and tablet but will now be forced to, meaning competition is increased and therefore so are CPC’s. As I was typing this I just realised how bad this could be so it should really be under the ugly category too!

Quality scores will now be rolled into one, so you will not have different quality scores by device type. This could actually increase or decrease overall quality scores dependent on if an account had high or low quality scores for mobile and tablet devices.

Good

It is not expected to be rolled out until June, so it gives us all some time I guess.

Oh, and the best news to come out of this announcement….. sitelinks are finally getting sorted (woohoo…). We will now be able to see stats on each individual sitelink. Reporting will also be improved with the ability to still report on device,

There are many questions that still remain to be answered (other than, why Google, why?!) but at least we have a few months to think how it affects us and how we can make the best of the situation.

How will it affect your PPC campaigns?

Laura

5 Common Misconceptions About PPC

PPC / Paid Search Marketing / Pay-Per-Click can be a funny old world and one that can be a bit of a mystery to some people. Here are some of the most common misconceptions about PPC and why they’re complete rubbish!

Your Work Is Done Once Someone Clicks On Your Ad

Wouldn’t that be nice?! But no, sadly it doesn’t quite work like that.  The ad copy you write plays only a small part in determining the success of your paid search campaign. The landing page needs to be relevant to both the keyword and ad. You might have a fantastic clickthrough rate on your ads, but if you’re not getting a good conversion rate then you’re work is far from done! Arguably on site optimisation is just as important as the set up and delivery of your PPC campaign.

You Have to Be Number 1 To Succeed

Unlike in natural search rankings, it is not always best to be number 1 for PPC. Number 1 rankings mean you pay a higher CPC (cost per click) and more people will see your ad but not necessarily click on it just because it’s top. Not all your keywords will be keywords that convert well or that are completely relevant to what you’re offering/selling, so you don’t want to be spending higher costs just to be at the top of the page. Your ads will still get clicked on when they’re not in poll position and you’ll still be able to achieve a ROI.

5 New Year Solutions for Your PPC Campaigns!

Happy New Year to you all! Forget giving up eating junk, trying to quit smoking and generally making resolutions you’ll never stick to, this year why not focus on your paid search strategy and instead of not doing things, create solutions for your PPC and make it work even harder this year! Here are just a few solutions to get 2013 off to a good start and optimize your PPC campaigns straight away.

1. Turn Off What Doesn’t Work
Are you spending money on keywords/ad groups/campaigns that doesn’t give you a return? If a certain ad group or keyword isn’t converted then do you want to be using your budget on it? Probably not I’m guessing (that’s if you are targeting conversions). Looking at historical data to determine what works and what doesn’t is the best place to start. It can sometimes be a little too easy just to pause/delete something that doesn’t appear to work though, so try to optimise in these areas to see if you can improve conversion rate. The below might help with this.

2. Review Your Landing Pages

Landing pages have arguably the biggest influence in conversion rates. You may have the best ad copy in a well structured ad group, but that means squat if you’re not landing them onto the best page possible. Take the start of the year as a good time to review all the landing pages you link to. Do you have custom page pages for certain keywords? Or are you using generic pages that were set up to people already on your website? Use common sense to think if there is a better landing page and analyse your conversions results for a certain period.

Landing page A/B testing is the best way to establish which landing page is best. Use the same ads and make the only variant between them the destination URL. Remember it doesn’t have to stop after one test, you can take the top performing landing page and test that against another and keep going until you think you’ve optimised enough (not that it can ever be enough in paid search marketing!)

3. Test Your Copy
Does the perfect ad copy exist? Arguably not if you ask me. Okay, so you may have found a certain ad(s) give you really good clickthrough rates (CTR) and a conversion rate you’re happy with, but is this the best ad copy possible? Ad copy should be reviewed and tested constantly. Again A/B testing can be used to establish the most effective headlines, description lines and even display URL’s. Never stop testing!

The Who, What, When, Where & Why of Paid Search

If you’re setting up a new paid search campaign or even just want to make your existing one work that little bit harder, you can use the old school ‘Who, What, When, Where and Why’ to define your objectives and get you started. Here are just a few questions you should be asking yourself about your paid search campaign.

Who

Who do you want to target? Who you decide to target is predominantly based on the paid search keywords you select. Keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool is a good place to start.

Who is your target audience? While with PPC it’s difficult to pin point who the typical searcher is, knowing a bit about who is clicking on your ads certainly helps! Okay, so I don’t mean knowing the middle names and shoe sizes of your potential customers, but knowing their buying habits and trends can help you define your strategy. Are these people searching on mobile devices or tablets? If so, make sure you’re showing your ads on mobile and tablets devices! Are they on social websites? This is more difficult to know, however if you know the type of person you are targeting are ‘hanging out’ on social networks then this can be a perfect paid (or non-paid) opportunity.

What

What do you want people to see? Do you want them to see an ad with offers or one highlighting your USP? Your ad copy is the only thing the user sees about your campaign, so your ad copy needs to make people click! It doesn’t matter how well your account is structured and managed if your ad copy isn’t getting clicked on!

What do you want people to do once they’ve seen your ad? Do you want them to buy a product? Make an enquiry? Share content?

The ‘what’ part is really all about strategy, strategy, strategy!

Increasing Your PPC Productivity

With pay-per-click (PPC) it’s easy to spend hours on end optimising your account. There are literally endless amount of things you could do, so how can you increase your PPC productivity? Check out these few tips for starters!

Excel – Don’t underestimate the power of excel. You can use Excel for all types of things -Bid management, keyword ad analysis, adding new keywords and ads etc. This can save you loads of time sifting through data on Adwords and you can upload your changes back to Adwords Editor in minutes!

A Good Old Fashioned To-Do List – Sounds simple, but I’m shocked by how many people dont work from one. With a to-do list you can establish your priorities and the order of your tasks. In PPC it’s sometimes very easy to do the tasks you enjoy first and ignore the more mundane ones so a to do list can help to show your priorities for the day/week/month.

Don’t Waste Time on Things You Can’t or Won’t be Able to Influence – It’s very easy to get caught up in stats, but there are few stats that you can actually act on or simply have the time to be able to analysis fully so use your time analysing wisely!

The A-Z of PPC

• Analytics – Analytics is an extremely useful tool for a huge number of things – conversion data, on page stats, user information. Link your analytics account up to Adwords to make sure you’re looking at the same data
• Bids & Budget – The question on all clients minds… how much is it costing me! Review the cost of your bids regularly. Do you really want high CPC’s for keywords that don’t convert? A review of bids can a big influence on the overall spend.
• Conversions – Not seeing as many conversions as you’d like? Are your ads performing? High bounce rates on landing pages? Are you targeting the wrong keywords? Find out why and optimise your account.
• Display – Google’s Display Network (GDN) allows you to place visual ads across the web to people who you want to target.
• Editor – Adwords Editor is a must have tool for PPC, which makes multiple changes really easy to make. Exporting data and importing data from Excel is really easy too.
• Finding the right ad – The right ad does exist, but it takes a lot of testing to get there. Use A/B testing regularly. Once you’ve found an ad that works, don’t be afraid to keep on testing though! The perfect ad can always be improved on.
• Goals – What do you want to achieve from your campaigns? 50 conversions a month? 100 clicks? Set yourself goals and monitor these regularly. This will help with optimising the account.
• Headline – If you’ve ever judged a book by a cover, then like most people you’ll judge an ad by its headline. Make sure yours is catchy and relevant to what the user has searched for.
• Impressions – The number of times your ad is shown. If you want your ad to be shown every time someone searches for a certain keyword, increase your bids to make sure you’ve got a 100% impression share.
• Keywords – The keywords that trigger your ads to be shown. There are three different match types – phrase, broad and exact. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool allows you to see search volumes for your chosen keywords and recommends related ones.