(PPC) Advertising Audit
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How to Do Your Own Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Audit A Hands-On Guide Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a moving target. A pay-per-click (PPC) advertising audit gives you a competitive edge in a dynamic environment. You’re competing to attract well-targeted visitors who will convert to leads, sales and ROI in a constantly changing environment. To meet customer’s search expectations, your products, promotions and marketing strategies need to evolve, requiring the creation of new campaigns. Your limited PPC budget needs to have the most impact. And, of course, search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! regularly move the goal posts to keep offerings fresh and thwart marketers who try to game the system. Did you have some initial success when you first set up your PPC accounts on Google Ads (formerly AdWords), Microsoft Advertising (Formerly Bing Ads. And did you know Yahoo! advertising is now part of Microsoft Advertising?) Then, after a while as your PPC campaigns grew there was no improvement or even a decline in results? It could be you’re making a series of small mistakes that get magnified over time. A PPC advertising audit identifies tweaks that can improve your campaigns. All these are good reasons to conduct regular PPC audits. In this Hands-On Guide we’ll show you what to look for, and also walk you through improving two of the major areas that most audits identify for improvement: Quality Score and Ad Extensions. TIP: Your account should be up and running for at least three months— and ideally six months—so you’ll have meaningful data for your first audit. And, it’s best if the person who conducts the audit is not intimately involved with your campaign so you can get the benefit of fresh eyes to catch details you might be missing, question might be missing, question assumptions, and revisit decisions. A note about PPC platforms: Google is the leading search engine (PPC and non-paid organic) with a 76% share in 2019. Most of the other platforms (Microsoft Bing, Yahoo! Search,…) follow Google’s conventions. Therefore, we’ll use Google as an example throughout this guide. 2 aking a top-down look Tat your PPC ecosystem When you set up your Google Ads or other PPC account, you made a number of permanent decisions. Now, you’re stuck with the currency you selected for payment and the time zone you specified (actually, you can change the time zone—once). But below the account level you can have hundreds of campaigns, and each of those campaigns can have multiple ad groups containing multiple keywords—all of which can be edited, added to or deleted. Let’s take a look. Campaigns Marketers typically organize their campaigns to match the way products or services are presented on their website; if you have a shoe section, then you have a campaign pointing to your shoes. This is a sound strategy, but because it is product-centric it treats all customers the same. But what might you do differently? You might set up your campaigns to target customers at different points in their lifecycle: a campaign to educate, another to actually sell. If you have an extended sales cycle, your campaigns might correspond to the different parts of the sales funnel: initial interest, involvement, nurturing and finally asking for the sale. (If you do this, remember that ads which result in a sale are more valuable, and therefore worth more budget, than ads which generate interest.) Or, if your marketing is heavily dependent on keyword analysis, you might organize campaigns around keyword effectiveness. Put your top performing keywords in one campaign; set up another campaign for keywords which bring you a steady flow of clicks without dominating the search results; use a third category for low performing keywords that are still worth using so those results don’t skew your perspective on overall performance. This strategy will give you a sharp focus on keyword performance and cost effectiveness. Can you mix-and-match, and have one set of campaigns that’s product-focused, another reflecting the customer journey and a third built around keywords? Yes, but there’s a tradeoff: you will never be able to have a view at a glance of your PPC performance. TIP: Be conservative when modifying your campaigns. Change one thing at a time (ALWAYS a best practice in digital and direct marketing) and give it time to work before making broader changes. 3 A few other things to look for as you audit your campaigns: Where are your ads serving? Are you running in the best geographical regions (city, state or country) to promote your product? If you have stores or other physical presence, do you specify that your ads run in those regions? Without direction from you, Google will default to a broad geographical selection which may not be in your campaign’s best interest. Also, remember that Google rewards the advertisers who go the extra mile by localizing their ads. For example, if you are advertising in France, Google will prioritize French language ads first. Your English language ad will trail far behind. This is a natural reflection of Google’s focus on delivering the best user experience possible—because that is what makes the most money for Google. Make sure that your landing pages are in the native language as well. Create PPC landing pages for the most valuable Targeting Items (keywords, placements, audience lists). Many PPC advertisers have customers concentrated in specific market areas. Make sure your geographical selections reflect those concentrations. When are your ads running? Is yours a 24/7 business, or are there times of the day and days of the week when you tend to get more traffic? If so, don’t pay for poor results. Adjust the timing, save money and get more out of your investment. If you have a nationwide business, you need to make sure your ads are set to run at appropriate times in each time zone. Remember that Google sets up the time zone on your account at its inception; this can be changed only one time. Every ad you run under a schedule will be served based on this original time zone. You have to consciously set/adjust timing for other zones so that they are serving when your customers are looking for your products. 4 Higher conversion or click through rates (CTRs) may justify a higher cost-per-click (CPC) spend at specific times of each day. Keywords and Keyword Groups Your PPC campaign is all about your keywords and you’ve probably analyzed them until you’re blue in the face. But your audit is an invitation to step back and take a fresh look at your keyword strategy. Here are three things to consider: Do your keywords reflect the way users are actually searching?Check your organic search results in Google Analytics for keywords you may have missed because they aren’t particularly “exciting” but show up in searches. If they aren’t included in your keywords, add them. At the same time, be on the lookout for keywords that looked good on paper but don’t actually deliver. How specific are your keywords to your product or service?Highly specific keywords tend to cost more and deliver better results. But you may be able to get impressions with very broad keywords that contribute to future sales even if you don’t get immediate clicks. You may be able to improve productivity by including a few of these broad keywords, but be cautious because a lower click through rate counts against your quality score. Are your keywords paying for themselves as measured in buyer behavior? Some search terms might have a good chance of leading to a sale, while others may be used primarily for comparison shopping. A worst case scenario is an expensive keyword that puts you near the top position, and gets clicks from people who are comparison shopping (and click the first ad they see), but then go on to competitor websites. Make sure your top performing keywords deliver sales (or other desired behavior) and not just clicks. 5 TIP: As a rule of thumb, you should limit your keywords to 20-25 total per ad group. More than this makes it hard to manage and analyze results. An exception is categories that have a great many slightly different SKUs, such as an air conditioner filter that comes in many different sizes. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) What makes a keyword successful? How do you know if an ad group is performing as well as it should? Your Google reports offer a multitude of KPIs but some are more useful than others, and your audit should include a review of the indicators you’re using to be sure they are the right ones for your needs. Here are our two favorite KPIs, which should generally be included in all reports: Click through rate, or CTR. This simply refers to the number of clicks you get relative to the number of impressions. If you get 1,000 impressions and 100 clicks, that’s an incredible 10% CTR and life is good. A lower click through rate may mean your ads and keywords aren’t connecting with your audience. On the other hand, some categories—family law is a good example—have a relatively low CTR simply because there is so much competition. If you’re in such a category, you need to write effective ads and be prepared to allocate more budget to your PPC campaign relative to revenue.