12 PPC Marketing Tips for an Optimized AdWords Account

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is the best way to drive more qualified leads to your website. By displaying your products or services at the first page of Google and Bing on relevant search queries has the potential to increase your conversions and revenue multifold. ROI (Return on Investment) is the key to manage your PPC campaigns. Targeting right audience, at the right time, in the right place and device is crucial to achieve your digital marketing goals.

Below 7 Tips can help you optimize your PPC campaigns for maximum ROI-

1. Optimize the AdWords Account Structure

AdWords account must be structured keeping the relevancy in mind. The ad-groups, ads and keywords should be highly relevant to each other if you want to lower your advertising costs and increase conversion rates. Segment campaigns by their niche and theme.

For example- If you sell stationery items, create separate campaigns for ‘Books’ and ‘Pens’.

Under the Diaries campaign, create Ad-groups such as diaries, note pads etc. Each of these ad-groups should have atleast two ads. It helps in ad rotation and AB testing. Similarly, create different Ad-groups for ‘Pens’ according to their attributes.

To simplifying the planning and set up process for PPC AdWords account use Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush PPC Keyword Tool to identify and organize keywords at the campaign and ad group level.

There is also an option to import your competitor’s organic and advertising keywords directly into your ad groups to stay one step ahead of your competitors. You can set negative keywords, remove duplicate keywords and easily export the optimized campaign plan to import directly into AdWords Editor.

2. Create Relevant Landing Pages

The success of a PPC campaign is judged by sales and not just by clicks. It is important that the landing page is well designed to convert qualified leads into paying customers. Landing page relevancy is highly important for good quality score of Ads. The Ad position or Ad rank depends on quality of your computer and mobile landing page experience. The message displayed in your ad copy should closely align with the message on landing page.

The keywords, CTA and offers on your landing page should be similar to your ad copy. It is not a good idea to simply direct the ads to your homepage without any thought. Even, if the homepage is a landing page it must be tailored to meet the requirements of a perfect landing page with all the information the customer needs to take the appropriate action.

By crafting well-thought landing pages, you reduce the effort required by customers to search a product or relevant information on the website. Create separate landing pages for each product, with helpful descriptions and information, and a clear call-to-action button such as “shop now” or “free trial”. The ad copy should then use this information to generate curiosity into customers, which helps increase click through rate (CTR).

3. Bid on Competitor’s Keywords

Create a separate campaign to bid on competitor’s keywords and brand name. It is a legitimate technique to steal the leads and acquire potential customers. You must research on your competitor’s unique selling points and current offers. Try to beat the competitor by offering a better deal in your ad copy.

While creating Ads that target your competitor brand names and key phrases, be wary of using Dynamic Keyword Insertion in your ad copy. With Dynamic Keyword Insertion, your keyword is automatically inserted into your ad based upon the search query. It is illegal to use a competitor’s name in your ad copy. Sure, you can bid on competitor’s keywords, but adding their name is a big no-no and can get you in trouble with Google’s trademark policy or a legal action from competitor. So, with Ad groups that has competitor names as keywords don’t use DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion).

SEMRush Advertising Research

SEMrush Advertising Research allows you to have a bird eye view of the competitor’s PPC marketing techniques. You can see competitor’s best keywords, ad copies, SERP, and landing page URLs on single screen.

Use PPC Keyword Tool to organize keywords at the campaign and ad group level, set negative keywords, and easily imports the results into AdWords Editor!

4. Optimize Negative Keywords

This cannot be stressed enough. Optimization for negative keywords is of utmost importance to maintain the integrity of AdWords account. It can save you money by not showing your ads on irrelevant search terms. For example, if you are a medical supply company selling new wheelchairs, ensure you receive qualified traffic by excluding search terms like “rent”, “second hand” etc. Avoid clicks at places where the user intent don’t match with your business goals.

It is best practice to add negative keywords at the campaign level, but you can also add specific negative keywords to ad groups if required.

5. Use the Right Keyword Match Types

The keywords and the type of modifiers can be the game changers of PPC campaign. Using the right keyword modifier not only reduces cost but also help bring most qualified leads to your website. There are four kinds of keyword modifiers.

Broad Match: This is meant to give most impressions and reach the widest audience. It is the default match type. Broad match displays your ad whenever a user’s search query includes any word in your target keyword, in any order which includes its synonyms. For example, if you use broad match on “fast bikes,” your ad might be displayed if a user types “luxury bikes,” “speed bikes,” or even “fast airplane.” Using broad match results in highest number of irrelevant clicks and cost and therefore must be carefully used.

Broad Match Modified: It is signified by a (+) sign in front of your keyword phrase. The broad match modifier will only display the ad if the keywords are in the order specified by you.

Phrase Match: The Keyword phrases are contained in quotation marks. The phrase match will only show your ad copy when the search query contains the exact keyword phrase specified by you. The order of the keyword phase might be changed.

Exact Match: The keywords are placed in brackets.  It is similar to phrase match, with the difference that the target keywords should exactly match user’s search query. Exact Match has the lowest impressions but the leads are highly qualified. It is also most cost effective.

SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool

SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool helps you discover new keywords. You can organize the related keywords by match types and group them by topic and other relevant statistics. Keyword Magic Tool is integrated with other tools, which allows you to quickly discover new keywords and launch an optimized AdWords campaign.

6. Build Exquisite Ad Copies Using Expanded Text Ads

The ad copy should list the key information about the product or services offered on the landing page. It is best to check out the competitor ad copies and offers on display. Adjust your ad copy to match the competitor’s deal. It can be free shipping, special deals or promotions or loyalty rewards. Your ad copy must stand out from the rest of the competition. Use strategic call-to-actions such as “free consultations”, “Call Now for best deal” to encourage customers to click on your ad.

Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) offer additional space to convey important information about your product or service. Make the maximum use of ETAs by strategically filling all information fields.

Expanded Text Ads Fields

Final URL: The Display URL populates automatically from Final URL. The final URL can be a unique and highly relevant landing page.

Headline 1: The 30-character headline can be used to include the brand name and the unique selling point of products or services.

Headline 2: The 30-character headline should include vital information and description of the product or service along with a captivating offer or CTA.

Path 1 and Path 2: The two optional 15-character path fields can be used to provide context of your product or service. It can be used to include the most important target keywords of your landing page.

Description: The 80-character description field can be used to empathize with your customer needs and aim to provide solution to their pain points. The description can end with a strong CTA or a statement or question to generate curiosity that would trigger the customer to know more about your products or services.

SEMrush Ad Builder-

To maximize the benefits of extended text ads you can use SEMrush Ad Builder which allows you to build extended text ads based for your advertising campaigns. The build-in Ads research function makes it easy check latest competitor’s offers on ads and use them as templates.

7. Edit/change Existing Low Performance Ads

Doubts and hesitation prevails regarding editing or changing the old ads due to fear of losing historical data. One of the important factors in determining the Ad position or Ad rank is quality of Ads or ‘Quality Score’ which in turn depends on Ad relevance, landing page experience and expected CTR. The third component “CTR” is a minor pie in the component compared to first two. Google looks at older CTR (ad’s historical clicks and impressions) to determine how well your ad matches somebody’s search and accordingly assign Ad rank.

It is recommended to change existing Ads and create new effective and engaging Ads. If the CTR is below 1.0% for existing Ads you can safely remove it and create a better Ad.  The new better Ad would generate higher Ad Rank and quality score rather than being pulled back due to low CTR of old Ad. Any Ad with low CTR is considered bad by google. The CTR depends on your industry and product type, but it is safe to assume that any ad with below 1% needs to be reviewed. It is better to pause the Ad and create a new one. The historical data would be available for view in “removed ads” section. The best converting ads naturally have high CTR and should not be changed.

Since every time you edit an ad, the new ad is created and the statistics resets to begin a new ad history. If you wish to edit the ads in bulk without losing the historical data, use ad customizers. You can add parameters that go within braces { } to dynamically change its value. This will not create a new ad. Ad customizer will allow a single text ad to have multiple variations specialized for each potential customer.

SEMrush Ad History Tool

SEMrush Ad History Tool allows you to see the Ads that competitor’s used over the years, along with the Ad positions. If the competitor is running a particular ad and offer continuously for many months, it is understood that the Ad is performing well. You can tweak your ad copies and offer to match the best performing competitor’s ads.

8. Use Every Relevant Ad Extension

Ad extensions can significantly improve your CTR by capturing the user’s attention. Currently there are 10 different Ad extensions available in Google AdWords. Google recommends using all the extensions necessary for business goals. You should use atleast four extensions in each campaign to boost the performance of ads. The Ad extensions currently available are Sitelinks extensions, Callout extensions, Structured snippet extensions, Call extensions, Message extensions, Location extensions, Affiliate location extensions, Price extensions, App extensions and Review extensions.

9. Employ Geotargeting

Adjusting Geotargeting bids help divert your marketing dollars to the specific geographic locations which brings the most customers or revenue. It also offers the opportunity to optimize PPC campaigns based on weather, seasonality, special festivals etc.

For example, if you sell snow coats then you should negative bid in warmer areas like Florida and Texas and increase geotargeted bids for cities that have experienced snow fall to improve the chances of conversion and minimize the spend.

10. Target Customers Based on Day and Time

To optimize the performance of your AdWords account, target the potential customers during the time and days when they are most active. From the historical data or google analytics report, you can easily determine the time and days that results in most conversions with least spend.

Most importantly you can use the Ad Schedule feature of Google AdWords to stay one step ahead of competitors. You can either increase the bids during the time of the day or days of the week when the search queries related to your business is most searched. Alternatively, you can decrease the bids during time or days when your expenditure is high but conversions are low. Adjusting the bids according to time and days is the secret to achieve maximum ROI.

11. Optimize Mobile Campaigns

Mobile devices can’t be ignored when it comes to PPC Marketing. Advertising on mobile and tablets is more important now than ever before. It is vital to have separate campaigns optimized for mobile users to drive more qualified clicks.

Seeing the engagement and conversion trends by devices, you can easily determine the campaigns that have the potential to do well with mobile-only component. The easiest way to go for mobile-only campaigns is to copy an existing campaign. Negative bid mobile for the original campaign and at the same time negative bid desktop for the newly created mobile-only campaign.

CPC for mobile ads are generally lower compared to desktop-only campaigns. With mobile optimized campaigns you can also take advantage of click-to-call extensions.

12. Make Use of Google Recommendations on Opportunity Page

AdWords Opportunity Page can definitely help you improve the performance of your campaigns and make informed decisions about future growth. It makes it easy to understand overall performance and efficiency of your advertising campaigns. The recommendations page works best if you have an established account history. It suggests the changes and estimates the performance based on historical data.

A properly optimized PPC campaign can take your business to new level. Ensure to take all available opportunities to optimize the user experience and drive conversions. Above tips and techniques will help you optimize cost to sale ratio or ROI of your PPC campaign. Make every dollar spent on advertising count.