Performance review

Before you begin

Before you begin optimizing your paid campaigns, you should understand what the guidelines and goals are for your optimization. What is the purpose of your campaign? What type of offer are you promoting? Who are you promoting your offer to? Once you answer these questions, making optimizations naturally follows. Your changes should be made with your ultimate purpose in mind. When you optimize your campaigns, concentrating on converting qualified contacts should be your core objective. To complete this objective, there are numerous elements to keep in mind. 

Budget, Structure and Searcher Intent

If you’re running paid ads, more than likely you have a budget, so the whole point behind optimizing your campaigns is maximizing the value you generate within that budget. Ultimately, attracting more visitors is great, but that should not be your core focus. The end goal isn’t more sessions — it’s more customers progressing through and closing at the end of your funnel. Making decisions based on this mindset is imperative to success. Next, ensuring you have a logical set up is extremely useful when optimizing campaigns. A lot of the ways we optimize paid channels here at New Breed directly relate to the structure of the campaigns themselves. Basically, the more you narrow your focus, the more ability you will have to manipulate your budget as you recognize the nuances associated with different campaigns, ads and terms. You might find some keywords that people would tend to search for when they are seeking awareness about a topic. Many of these terms will take on the form of questions. “What is Demand Generation?” is a great example of this. Alternatively, you might find terms that are more typical of searchers in their decision stage like “Best HubSpot Agency.”

Making Adjustments

One of the most important elements to consider in optimizing your campaigns and ads is the cost per conversion of each keyword. In trying to maximize your conversions within the confines of your budget, this will be the best place to start, as it can help inform many of your decisions. 

Pausing keywords

As you search through your terms, try to find keywords that are significantly more expensive than the others. Essentially, you want to ensure you’re not allowing one term to eat up your entire budget — especially if it’s converting at a low rate. A low-converting, high-cost keyword could be taking away impression opportunities from other terms. Normally, if a keyword is inefficient, it’s best to evaluate how closely related that term is to the campaign. A higher-volume, less-specific term can often be a culprit. Sometimes opting for more concentrated terms can relieve these issues. 

Testing your ads constantly

It’s also wise to conduct the same exercise on the ad level. If you find that one ad has a much higher cost per conversion, you should pause that ad to put more budget towards the others. On the ad level, we also always advise running at least two ads per ad group. The ads should be very similar to each other with only one detail that’s different between them. In this way, after letting the ad group run for a while, you can determine which individual ad has a higher conversion rate. Then, you can clone the better performing ad and change one detail about it. Even with no major changes being made, you can gradually improve your conversion rates. It’s best to start with the most noticeable changes, like headlines, and then make smaller changes as you go. 

Re-evaluating searcher intent

If pausing your high-cost keyword doesn’t seem like the right move, Rider suggests reconsidering searcher intent and potentially trying to use the term at a different point in the buyer’s journey. Switching a keyword to a different offer and stage in the buyer’s journey can dramatically reduce the cost per conversion. One potential indicator that this is the right move could be if a term has a high number of clicks without many conversions.

Lowering a term’s max cost per click

If you identify a keyword that you’re overspending on, another option is trying to lower that term’s max cost per click (CPC). Your max CPC is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click on a specific term. If you are overspending on a term but don’t want to pause it, lowering the max amount you are willing to pay can help you spend less, while still generating visibility for the term. Of course, also keep in mind that if you lower your max CPC too much, your keyword might not be displayed. 

Improving quality score

Another consideration when you have a term that you are spending too much budget on is to evaluate the quality score of that term. Really, improving quality score on the keyword or ad level is one of the all-around best optimizations you can make.

Segmenting keywords

If you have an ad with many keywords, it can be difficult to improve the quality score for each of those keywords. This might once again cause you to overspend on clicks for these terms or might cause your ad to slip in auction rankings. You can solve this problem by segmenting more keywords into their own ad groups. Basically, you can create ads and landing pages focused around a specific term. This will help you to boost the term’s quality score, reduce your spend on a CPC basis and help your ad climb the rankings.

Shifting ad schedule

Another way to optimize your campaigns is by looking into what days and times searchers are converting. You can find this information under the Ad Schedule tab in Google Ads. Rider says, “Go into each campaign and alter that ad schedule, allocating the budget to the times of day that people are converting.” He also explains that using good judgement in altering when your ad displays is wise. You don’t want to allocate all budget to after a certain time period if only 65% of your conversions occur during that period. Also, look for substantial trends before making this shift; you don’t want to make unfounded assumptions that hurt your account.

Making changes based on location

You can also adjust your spend based on the location the conversions are coming from. You can do this from the Locations tab in Google Ads. Rider explains his strategy for location adjustment with an example. “Basically we’ve got six conversions between country A and country B. Country A has two thirds of those conversions and country B has one third, so I’ll make a bid adjustment. I’ll bump the bid for country A up by two-thirds because we are willing to pay two-thirds more for clicks there. I’ll also bump up Country B by 33%,” he says. Essentially, if high-fit contacts are converting at higher rates in one region compared to another, you are probably willing to pay more for clicks in those regions. On the other hand, you would probably be less willing to pay for clicks in regions that generated low-fit contacts or had lower conversion rates. Overall, this kind of optimization isn’t a science, so changes should be carefully considered.

Modifying bids based on devices

Using the Google Ad’s Devices tab, you can also adjust your bidding strategy based on the number of conversions occurring on different devices. Once again, such budget changes should be carefully considered and based on data.

Building audiences

To narrow the focus of your ads, you can target specific groups based on lists you’ve created in Google Analytics. For example, you can build a paid campaign targeted at people who have already downloaded one of your offers. 

Considering demographics

Besides creating lists in Google Analytics, you can also narrow your audience to the highest-fit individuals by leveraging demographics. Consider whether there are any demographics you are currently targeting that have produced a much higher cost per conversion than the others. Ultimately, you want to spend your budget on better demographics who are more likely to become customers.

Improving Your PPC Ad Performance: Common Errors

Data collected from the AdWords Grader Plus has helped us discover the major markers that determine the success or failure of advertisers in dealing with PPC ad performance. We’ve found that many struggling PPC accounts make the same mistakes. These errors include:

• Inconsistency: Only 1% of small business advertisers log in and do work in their PPC accounts each week. Our research has shown that PPC account activity plays a huge factor in determining ad performance. Don’t abandon your account at the wayside – treat it with care!
• Wasteful Spending: 20% of small businesses aren’t using any negative keywords. Negative keywords are absolutely essential when it comes to cutting down costs and preventing wasted spend that results from unqualified clicks.
• Improper Account Setup: More than 50% of small businesses aren’t implementing conversion tracking, which makes means they aren’t able to see how keywords and ad performance lead to sales. Conversion tracking is essential for properly measuring your ad performance.