As costs of PPC campaigns are increasing, internet marketers are more than even under the pressure to deliver positive results. The performance of PPC campaigns is dependent on following factors:
- The impression rate
- Your ad position
- Click thru rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
Finding the right balance between impression rate, ad position and clicks is the starting point to successful PPC advertising. Before exploring tips to help your campaign perform better, let's quickly sum-up the concept how Google displays your ads in its sponsored results:
* Daily budget controls frequency of your ad display
The frequency is expressed by number of impressions. If your daily budget is not high enough, your ad may not show all the time (meaning you don't have enough impressions per day).
* Ad position depends on the Rank Number
The higher the rank number, the higher is your ad's position on the page. The rank number is calculated based on the following formula:
Rank Number = CPC (Cost Per click) x CTR (click through rate) x (Ad quality)
Now we're ready to explore what practices are more likely to help us improve PPC campaigns performance:
1/ Improve Ad Delivery
If your ad does not show up every time when searches are performed under your keyword, it may be a sign that your daily budget is not high enough. As you now know, how frequent of your ad display is controled by the daily budget. If you would like your ad to be shown more frequently, please consider to increase your daily budget in order to receive a maximum exposure for your ad.
Normally, you have 50% margin for your daily budget. For example, if your desired daily budget is $10.00 per day, you can set your actual daily budget on Google to $15.00 per day, because your actual spending is based on your click thru rate, by setting the daily budget higher will allow your ad to get more exposure, but your actual spending may still be in your desired daily budget range.
However, be sure to monitor your daily advertising costs and if they are rising too high, decrease the budget on the safe level.
2/ Improve Ad Delivery per Keyword
Each campaign can have one or more adroups. An AdGroup is a group of keywords and ads that will display when those keywords are searched for on Google. You may have experienced a situation when only few keywords out of the whole AdGroup trigger your ad. The explanation lies again behind the daily budget that controls a number of impressions for your campaign. These impressions are distributed between individual AdGroups and further between individual keywords. So it may happen that some keywords in a particular Adgroup have
more impressions than the others, meaning some keywords trigger your ad more frequently than others.
If you want to improve the ad delivery for your targeted keywords, you can consider splitting your keywords and creating a new campaign for keywords with low impressions. This should improve the frequency with which they will trigger your ad.
3/ Optimize your Adgroups
As mentioned above, each campaign has one or more adroups that all share campaign's impressions. Often, the impressions are not divided evenly between adgroups. So it may happen that some adgroups have more impressions and show their ad(s) more frequently than others. It is a very similar scenario as with keywords we just described above.
To improve results of your low-performing adgroups, you can consider to create a new campaign for them in order to increase the frequency with witch they show your ad on Google.
4/ Analyse your Clicks
Make sure the clicks are made for specific, targeted keywords. If you're getting lots of clicks on non-targeted keywords, consider reducing Max CPC and/or your ad position in order to improve your ROI. Similarly, you can raise bids for targeted keywords that are performing well.
5/ Optimize your Ads
Make sure you bid on targeted keywords, create compelling ads and link them to relevant content on your website. The keywords you chose will segment the market and target your desired audience. If you won't chose wisely, you'll finish targeting the wrong market and wasting your advertising budget. The ad you create needs to attract attention of your prospects. It needs to communicate your unique selling feature - in other words, what makes your product/service different from others and why a visitor should visit your website. Be specific about your offer and include call to action. Lastly, guide visitors to the content on your website where they can access more information about the offer advertised. The landing page should also clearly state what is the next natural step to make - buy your product, download the white paper, sign up for a free trial, etc.
PPC management requires lots of work and testing but if you stick to the basics you can make money instead of losing them. Remember, the only measure that matters on the Internet is the profit you make.
About the author:
Ivana Giardi is Marketing Director at Apex Pacific, the leading developer of Internet Marketing and Web Promotion solutions. Apex Pacific helps organizations of all sizes increase their online marketing presence leading to stronger business results. If you would like to learn how to improve your website performance, visit Apex Pacific at www.apexpacific.com.
Written by: Ivana Giardi
