Good PPC campaign management is the difference between a successful digital marketing strategy and paying money to just occupy space and not see any return.
If you are lucky enough to have the budget you’ll be amazed at the results you get for just a little bit of work. PPC management is all about knowing how your campaign is running and giving it nudges to get that little extra bit of profit out of them.
Great PPC campaigns never start or stay that way — they’re meticulously maintained with pay-per-click management best practices. The following tips will help you maintain and manage your marketing efforts.
- Check-In on Your Goals
For each of your ad campaigns, review and confirm its ultimate goal, how it’s doing, how it fits in with your marketing strategy, and what primary metric you’re using to measure its success.
Having these goals and metrics at the top of your mind gives you a focus for your campaign optimization. You’re not making drastic changes to your long-term PPC plans and advertising strategies during your day-to-day campaign management. However, you want to flag these issues as early as possible so you can address them in your regular PPC audits.
- Update Your Negative Keyword Lists
Updating your negative keywords lists every month is a time-effective PPC advertising technique that directly affects your return on ad spend. While it’s important to select relevant keywords that you want your ads shown for, it’s equally important to stop them from being displayed for the wrong keywords. Negative keywords tell Google what searches you don’t want your ads shown on. Keeping your negative keyword lists updated will save you money because your ads won’t be shown on irrelevant search queries that won’t lead to conversions.
You can select negative keywords both at an ad group level and a campaign level. None of your ads from any ad group will be displayed for campaign-level negative keywords. For ad group negative keywords, only the ads in that group will be prohibited from being displayed.
Like regular keywords, negative keywords come in three varieties. They share the same names as the match types of regular keywords, but there are slight differences in how they work.
- Broad Match: This includes all variations of your negative keyword. As long as the search query has all the words in your negative keywords, in any order, it will not show your ads.
- Phrase Match: This allows you to not display your ads when a user includes your negative keyword as part of a phrase.
- Exact Match: Your ads will not display if a user types your exact keyword or close variations. Otherwise, your ads will show for any other variations.
Managing a list of negative keywords takes time and experience. Too few and you risk wasting money; too many, and you’ll get too few chances to display your ad.
- Adjust Your Bids Based on Performance
One of the basic things you need to do while running a PPC campaign is setting a maximum CPC bid. This is the highest amount of money that you’re willing to pay for a single click. In the day-to-day management of your PPC campaigns, experimenting with your bid amounts represents opportunities for big gains.
Your goal is to find a sweet spot between how much you pay and how much relevant traffic you get. If your top-performing ad group is doing well, raise your CPC bid and check-in after a week. When you increase your bid on a winning ad, you can bring in even more traffic, leading to more conversions at a similar price point, which is a big win for you. If it doesn’t, you can always change it back.
Likewise, lowering your bid on poorly performing ads will stem the bleeding while you tweak their settings to find a better combination of ad copy, landing pages, and targeting. Once you see a turnaround, you can always start to raise it back up.
