When you market products online using PPC, you need to tweak and optimize your campaigns on a consistent basis. It’s essential that you use recent data when shaping your PPC campaigns.
When you use PPC in your promotional efforts, you’re competing for clicks against other businesses in real time. So if you let your campaign get stale, you risk throwing away a large slice of your advertising budget.
Late in 2013, WordStream released a study that showed that many small and medium businesses tend to waste about 25 percent of their Google Adwords budget on mistakes and errors. Fixing these errors is simple, but you need to delve into the data in your Adwords account.
Let’s look at which data you need to examine.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Your campaign’s CTR tells you how many people actually click on your ads after they see them. Search engines use this data to measure how well your ads are resonating with users. If your ads are too broad, people don’t click on them.
Google rewards businesses that have a high CTR. When you run an ad that gets a lot of clicks, your AdWords quality score increases, which means your ad is exposed to more users at a lower price. On the other hand, when your ad falls below a certain CTR, it gets punished with a price increase and less exposure.
Quality Score (QS)
Your quality score has a huge impact on your ad’s rankings, placement, and costs. QS is used to measure your site’s relevance. This is done by factoring in your site’s CTR with your landing page, ad group, and search query relevance.
If you consistently monitor your website to make sure that nothing catastrophic happens, you’re likely to keep your QS high. Check for things like dead links, load speed, and relevant content.
Mobile readiness
It’s estimated that advertisers will spend about 13 billion dollars on mobile advertising this year. This accounts for about 27 percent of all the money being spent on digital advertising. Mobile advertising can get you a lot of impressions, but only if your PPC account is optimized for it.
If you’re going to spend a good chunk of your ad budget on mobile clicks, then make sure to add things like call extensions, sitelinks, and mobile ads. It’s different from regular PPC, but when done correctly, it can bring you a lot of cheap traffic.
Audits and optimization
When you create a successful campaign, it can be easy to forget about it: Many people figure their work is done once a campaign becomes profitable.
But remember, AdWords is a live auction, and if you don’t keep on top of your account, changes can give your competitors the advantage.
It’s smart to audit your account at least once a week, but it can’t hurt to do it every day. Spend a couple of minutes looking over all your numbers; when you’re familiar with your campaigns, you can quickly spot areas that aren’t performing the way they should.
When you notice negative changes, tweak your campaign until it starts performing properly again. If you can’t get it to work, you might have to disable it.
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