If you’ve been following our series of articles about PPC advertising, you should feel pretty confident that you know how to build and launch a well-structured pay per click ad campaign. If you want to check that your ads are appearing without creating extra impressions (which could skew your analysis of the effectiveness of the ad), use Google’s Ad Preview Tool to search under your keywords.
Happy that your carefully thought out ad campaign is live? Ready to put your feet up and wait for the sales to come rolling in? Well, if you want to get the best results from PPC (and spend your precious budget wisely), you can’t just launch your campaign and forget about it – you’ll need to keep on top of it. So, here are a few things to think about when managing your campaign.
Pruning
Once your campaign’s been up and running for a little while, you’ll be able to figure out which of your creatives and keywords are doing well and which aren’t. Go through your campaigns and look for keywords which have generated a cost but no sales/leads and put them on ‘pause’ to stop you burning money on keywords which don’t result in a conversion to sale/lead.
Take a look at the performance of your creatives and pause anything which has a very low Click Through Rate (CTR) and/or conversion rate. If the CTR is low, it means that for whatever reason that creative is just not grabbing the attention of the people who see it – so, time to rethink. If you’re getting the clickthroughs but the conversion rate is poor, people were interested in what your ad said but not persuaded by what they found on your website. Put your brutally honest hat on and ask yourself a few questions: are you overpromising in your ad so that people are arriving at your site and finding out the tempting offer isn’t so tempting after all? is your website as clear as it could be? have you made sure that the creative links directly to the relevant page rather than tipping them in at the home page and making them rummage? do you need more of a feel of ‘you can trust us’ about your website (e.g. clear design, recognisable partner and/or payment provider logos, a postal address and phone number, testimonials, clear delivery/returns/privacy policy information, etc)?
Expanding
Now that you’ve paused the things which aren’t working, you should have a bit of budget freed up to push towards the things which are. So:
- Where keywords are generating leads at a good price, bid up and see if you can grab a bit more of the traffic
- While you’re at it, if you’ve got keywords which are generating cost-effective leads, think about how you can expand upon them. Can you create new keyword phrases which are similar? Perhaps consider relaxing the match type from ‘Exact’ to ‘Phrase’ or even ‘Broad’ if you’re confident your budget can cope and you want to expand your reach?
- You’ll have some creatives that are working well and have good CTRs and conversion rates, which should give you a feel for what entices your potential customers to both click on your ad and, crucially, make the purchase. Try writing new variations of your creative using these as a guide.
- Use the Search Query Report (here’s Google on how to set that up) to identify possible new keywords to add to your campaign. You can also use it to identify negative keywords that you can add.
Negative keywords?
Yep! As well as adding keywords for which you do want your ads to appear, you can stipulate keywords for which you don’t want your ads to appear. Why would you do that? Well, imagine that you sell clothing but only stock womenswear and your footwear range doesn’t include trainers. There’s no point in your ad appearing to people interested in trainers or menswear as you’ll just be racking up clickthrough costs when you don’t stock the product the searcher was after and so won’t make a sale. If you add ‘trainers’, ‘menswear’, ‘y-fronts’ etc to your negative keywords list, you’ll guard against this and thus make your campaign more efficient.
Here’s a bit more from Google about negative keywords.
Interested in more about PPC?
And that’s the end of our walkthrough for setting up and managing a pay per click advertising campaign – I hope it’s been helpful for you! But, it’s such an important (and sometimes mysterious!) subject that there’s plenty more I could talk about. I could happily waffle on about random aspects of PPC, but this is the perfect opportunity for you to direct what I talk about by asking those niggling questions. So, do you have any burning questions about PPC? Is there something which has been confusing you since you first logged in to Google AdWords? Leave a comment and we’ll use your questions as the starting point for the next PPC article.
Previous articles in this series:
An Introduction to Pay Per Click Advertising
A little about PPC match types
