PPC Tactics for Paid Search Success: –
1. Audience by layers: demographics and affinity:
It’s no secret that a campaign will perform better if clearly define who it is for.
By using the combined power of Google Ads and Analytics, give the campaigns a better chance of success by targeting those most likely to take the desired action.
2. Layered audience: in the market:
While demographic and related audiences are more focused on “who they are,” audiences in the marketplace are more focused on “what they’re doing.”
This is an audience that exhibits certain online behaviour consistent with those who are actively “in the market” for a product or service.
3. Layered Audience: Life Events:
Anyone who has run a direct response campaign (even in the days before digital) knows that reaching potential customers at key stages of life events can be critical to their performance.
Having ever obtained a mortgage (or have just moved to a new address), will probably notice an increase in the volume of offers to receive.
Google Ads allows running promotions for specific “life events” on a limited basis today. It is limited because:
Restricted to life events related to:
- University graduation.
- Marriage.
- Moving.
It is currently available for Gmail and YouTube campaigns.
They launched these targeting capabilities in recent years and hopefully, it will eventually expand as a targeting layer for additional events and platforms.
4. Running a Responsive Search Ad (RSA) by ad group:
Please try again, but this time with a few keywords and audiences that might not be the main focus.
If the campaigns are anything like the majority, they have a few top audiences and a set of keyword variations that make up the majority of conversions and revenue.
Try RSAs to try and find success outside of that core audience.
5. Set a target cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS):
This is a Marketing 101 principle that sadly even some of the largest companies in the world don’t complete (or at least complete correctly).
Automation is now in place to optimize campaigns at scale for a specific CPA or ROAS, but that functionality is useless if that hasn’t been resolved (and potentially even worse if to have a CPA or ROAS goal calculated with poor logic).
Without the proper context, CPA and ROAS are very incomplete numbers.
However, one can come up with a number that is a reasonable mark to optimize campaigns once to take the time and effort to put together the following:
- The various marketing campaigns are necessary to drive the buyer out of pre-conversion awareness.
- The lifetime value of a customer.
- The margins.
6. Try Smart Bidding strategies:
Once that building block is in place, start letting the system “do the hard work” necessary to get the campaign there.
7. Invest in Microsoft Ads now:
Microsoft Ads has come a long, long way since the early days of Bing, when many people in PPC treated them as an afterthought that would “turn around” when we had the time and as long as they made it easy to copy AdWords campaigns. .
They even have some features that Google doesn’t (and can’t) have.
8. Use of Google Analytics data to execute remarketing campaigns:
A quality visitor that enters the site on a “store locator” page is an opportunity to present remarketing ads that promote the in-store experience.
The example is from a company that has a physical retail and e-commerce presence.
9. Report store visit metric (for businesses with physical locations)
While we’re on the topic of physical stores, taking advantage of the Store Visits metric available in Google Ads is a great way to get additional support for the campaigns.
Sometimes in-store management can seem like digital marketing campaigns are designed more for e-commerce, so it’s great to be able to present this kind of data.
10. Review and (most likely) review the campaign structure:
Restructuring a campaign is often one of the first things an experienced PPC professional ends up recommending once an audit is complete.
A poor campaign structure is a lot like the foundation of a house – if it’s in bad shape, it doesn’t matter much else.
A proper campaign structure has always been important, but it is absolutely critical if want to take advantage of automation capabilities to optimize and scale campaigns.
To allow automation to handle the heavy lifting and get out of the weeds, one must be very strategic about how to structure campaigns.
There is no manual on a correct way to structure a campaign for all types of companies, but in general, it is necessary to take into account
- Geography.
- Seasonality
- Products mixture.
- Basic terms.
- Budget property.
- The capacity/bandwidth to manage it all.
Proper setup requires a lot of heavy lifting, but it will pay the dividends of long program life and scalability.