Reading Time: 7 minutesIf your PPC campaign isn’t delivering the ROAS you would like to see, you need to audit it and check for underlying issues.
Typically, lack of proper management and ignoring trends are key reasons for why a PPC campaign underperforms. These issues can manifest as wrong keywords, disorganized ad groups, and non-optimized landing pages, among others.
Such problems often reduce your ROI from your ads. For instance, competing offers on a landing page can lower conversions by 1.5%.
Conducting regular PPC audits is the only way to identify these issues before they eat your budget. But what do you do once you fix these issues once you find them?
This guide discusses common fixes for making PPC campaigns better. These tips can even help your business even if you haven’t conducted an audit in a while because they are universally applicable. Let’s dive in.
How to Make Your PPC Campaign Successful
Understanding your target audience, just like for anything else in advertising, is key to your PPC campaign successful.
Focus on providing them with value through relevant ad copy, landing pages, and CTAs (calls to action) for best conversion rates. Use the right keywords and targeting methods to capture prospective and returning consumers.
Here’s how to apply this in practice:
1. Optimize Keywords
You should properly research keywords to identify promising long-tail terms and restrict negative phrases that are wasting your ad budget. This ensures your ads show for relevant searches and excludes users who may not convert.
Some of the best tools for PPC keyword research are Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs.
For example, Ahrefs can help you establish terms with a low CPC but decent search volume. These are often long-tail keywords that are more specific than general, and therefore have less competition and traffic but better conversion potential than short, broader terms.
For instance “affiliate marketing software” is a broad term. “Affiliate marketing software under $500” is more specific.
Additionally, assess your keywords and remove low-performing ones. You can establish underperforming terms in Google ads dashboard itself.
Delete those with the least impressions, conversions, clicks, and other poor KPIs (key performance indicators).
Finally, generate a negative keyword list to avoid wasting your budget. To do this, check which terms trigger your ads. Reports like “Search terms” in Google Ads can show you irrelevant keywords that attract impressions and clicks.
Add such phrases to your negative keyword list.
2. Optimize Landing Pages
A great landing page prevents bounces and hasty exits, making it more likely for visitors to convert. You can optimize your landing page for effective PPC campaigns by ensuring it matches the messaging of your ads and is user-friendly.
Use tools like GA4 to identify underperforming landing pages. Metrics like “Session” (number of visits) and “Session conversion rate” (percentage of sessions with conversions) can help you identify unsuccessful pages.
Tend to pages with significantly lower session conversion rates. You can turn off ads that lead users to such pages or optimize them to meet visitor needs.
Let’s say a user clicks your ad after searching the term “Amazon marketing services” and lands on one of these two pages:
They’re more likely to click the CTA on the first page than the second. That’s because the first is a dedicated landing page specifically for that service, and therefore better aligns with the searcher’s intent. It tells the reader why they should trust us for Amazon marketing services and not just what we offer in general.
The next step to improve your conversion rate is providing a great user experience. Optimize landing pages to ensure faster loading, seamless navigation, and mobile friendliness.
A study found that enhancing navigation boosts conversions by up to 18.5%. Likewise, faster speeds attract more conversions: improving landing page speed from five to one second can triple your conversion rate.
3. Manage Your PPC Budget
If you fail to monitor your campaigns, your costs may skyrocket, lowering your ROI. Meanwhile, spending too little may cause you to miss potential customers. Strategic keyword selection, pacing, and ad scheduling can ensure effective PPC budget usage.
The first step towards effective budgeting is selecting keywords with decent search volumes that’ll earn you considerable traffic. Afterward, feed your keyword data into a reliable budget calculator to estimate your spending.
Once you have monthly ad spend predictions, it’s time to set up budget pacing. This technique involves optimizing elements within your campaign to control your expenses within a given duration. For instance, you can set your Google ads daily limit to as little as $5 so your monthly spending doesn’t exceed $152 (30.4 times the daily limit).
Since traffic levels vary depending on the time and the seasons, introduce ad schedules to maximize ROI. Most PPC platforms offer hourly performance breakdowns. Schedule your ads with these benchmarks so they appear when they are most likely to earn clicks.
Additionally, PPC expert Rick says, “Bad Location targeting is one of the most common things I see when auditing ad accounts from other agencies. This is an easy way to save 25-50% of your budget with just a few clicks.”
So, how can you get this right?
4. Master Location Targeting
Location targeting is a technique that lets your ads appear to users based on their geographical location. It can help you resonate with consumers and reduce irrelevant clicks, maximizing your budget. For effective targeting, identify relevant locations, filter audiences by attributes, and customize ads per location.
You can identify relevant locations based on the areas where you provide your services and your target audience profile. The best places are those with the highest sales, order value, and strongest leads.
Platforms like Google Ads offer filtering options such as state, country, and zip code. You can also define audiences by parenthood, income, hobbies, education, interests, and business size. Use these features to zero in on the most profitable consumers.
Afterward, customize your ad copy to suit their locale, as 80% of consumers demand personalization. Personalized ads can enhance your spending efficiency by 30% and lower consumer acquisition expenses by 50%.
5. Optimize CTAs Based on the Temperature Scale
Your visitors come from different locations, each with a distinct threat temperature. Some want to know more about your offers, while others are aware and looking to get them. Infusing urgency into offers based on temperature may earn you higher conversions. That’s because you’ll appeal to customers at different points in the purchase journey.
The best CTAs for customers based on their sources include:
| Temperature | Source | Suitable Offers |
| Cold | Display | Checklist/cheatsheet
Coupon Calendar Toolkit Podcast Swipe File Email course Infographic Industry stats Whitepaper |
| Moderate | Video | Coupon
Quiz Ticket Video Course Live Demo Giveaway T-shirt Ebook Case study Webinar Trial Demo |
| Social | ||
| Warm | Search | Quote
Consultation Trial Demo |
Personalizing CTAs to suit cold and warm visitors can help you convert up to 42% more.Moreover, introducing a sense of scarcity betters your PPC campaigns. Users tend to feel more confident about purchases and want to acquire things before they run out. For instance, marketer Marcus Taylor increased sales by 332% through urgency.Track Micro-ConversionsBreaking down large conversions into micro-conversions helps you identify customer problems along the way. You can improve your conversion rate by establishing and addressing shortcomings along the conversion funnel. Assess your bounce rates, scroll depth, CTR, session durations, and checkouts for a holistic campaign view.Check your conversions (purchases, downloads, email signups, etc) against clicks. Higher clicks and bounces may indicate your landing page doesn’t match your ads or your targeting is off. A/B different changes to find reliable solutions.Use heatmaps to check your scroll depth. If visitors are hardly making it halfway through your landing page:
- Consider shortening it.
- Place CTA icons above the fold.
Do you have a good visitor count and session durations, but few are clicking your CTAs? Consider making them bolder, more urgent, or more visible.Also, look at how many users complete your forms and checkout pages. If your CTA clicks are decent but few are completing purchases, your checkout page may be the issue.
6. Use Ad Extensions
These are extra details in your ads, such as CTAs, site links, contacts, etc. They are an excellent way to increase your ad space, attract more clicks, and boost conversions. Nevertheless, picking the right extensions that fit your industry and appeal to users is important.You should write compelling ad copy and track the performance of your ad extensions, as they won’t always show. For instance, Google Ads extensions only appear if you meet these conditions:
- The platform approves them.
- The algorithm predicts extensions will boost your performance.
- You have a high ad rank.
There are various ad extensions, including:
- Call extensions: These are excellent for service-based businesses like PPC management, roof repair, relocation, etc.
- Location extensions: These are ideal for local businesses as users may want in-person visits.
- Price extensions: These are excellent for brick-and-mortar and e-commerce stores to highlight deals and attract users willing to pay stipulated prices.
- Sitelink, app, callout, structured snippet, message, and promotion extensions: These are superb for most marketers to give users more details and entice clicks.
Ad extensions typically improve CTRs by 10-15%.
7. Try Manual Bidding
This approach allows you to establish your cost-per-click (CPC) threshold. Manual bidding is better than automated bidding as you can respond faster to performance issues. It allows better targeting to reach the right audience, lower CPC, and enhance ROI. Manual bidding can help you achieve your PPC goals if you:
- Do comprehensive keyword research to establish the right bid amounts based on competition and the term’s traffic potential.
- Track your PPC performance against each keyword and alter bid amounts based on success.
- Use reliable bid management tools like Marin and Acquisio.
8. Fine-Tune Your PPC Campaigns for More Clicks and Conversions
An effective PPC campaign begins by understanding your goals. Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Are you aiming for more sales?Afterward, use relevant keywords, targeting, ad extensions, ad copy, and landing pages to attract suitable users and get them to execute your desired actions.Most importantly, track your performance to identify where to focus your budget and what changes result in the most gains.
At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our status as a Google Partner, along with our PPC Management, Google Shopping Ads, Social Media Advertising, Amazon Advertising, and other Paid Media services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.
