PPC Management

Struggling to wrap your head around PPC Management and everything involved? Get in touch with Hush to discuss the best strategies and what will work for you… it can be a balancing act!

Maximise Your Gains!

Increase your impressions.

Essentially, the more impressions you have, the more clicks you’re likely to glean, leading to an increase in conversions.

Take ‘training tips’.

When you’re throwing around weight in the gym, there’s always someone else that’s got slightly more muscle mass than you that you will happily take tips from. You can apply this theory to your PPC Management. Why not do a little investigation into what your competitors are doing to ‘bulk up’ and boost their traffic via their ad listings? Have you noticed a company that always manages to ‘pip you to the post’ and bag first position? What are they doing with their ads that you aren’t?

Increase your keyword bids.

This one’s a bit of a no brainer – if someone else is happy to bid more than you, they have a higher chance of appearing above you on the search results pages. Just like increasing your protein intake promotes more effective muscle growth, increasing your keyword bids allows you to build on your PPC Management success and work your way further towards position one (AKA: more clicks, and more conversions!).

Check your keyword match type.

Your Adwords Manager should know how to change your keyword match type, and when it is time to do so. There are a handful of different keyword types that will provide you with different results, below:

1. Broad match:
   Default type. Use me to include show for user typos, known synonyms and known related searches.
2. Negative match:
   Add keywords as negative when you want to avoid being shown for that term.
3. Broad match modifier:
   Use me when you want to be slightly more specific. Broad match mod means that you will show ads for searches that include the words designated with a + sign (and close variations).
4. Phrase match:
   Your ads will show for searches that match a particular phrase.
5. Exact match:
   You don’t need us to explain this one! Your ads may also be shown for a re-ordered search, too, as long as the meaning of the search isn’t changed.

Check your bid adjustments.

Take a look at your data. Is there a particular day, or time of day that you spot conversions coming in the most frequently? This may mean that this is a common time for your audience to search for your product or service.

If they haven’t already, ask your Adwords Manager to apply a bid adjustment around this certain time – this means that you can increase the amount you’re willing to pay for that limited time period, meaning you’re even more likely to gain clicks and conversions, without having to up your entire budget.

A/B test and maximise on your gains.

It’s true that what may work for one person, might not work for you! As with all things in life, sometimes you need to apply a little trial and error to see what actually works. Do you have a set of 5 ads within your AdGroup where 2 are converting really well and the other 3 are sub-par? What is different about them? Would it be worth switching those ads off and setting up some fresh ads that are similar to the top converters? We think so!

Cut The Pounds

‘Cut back’ on keywords that are costing you a lot.

Keywords can become expensive when the competition is high, or the keywords you are using are too generic. Take a look at your keyword list to determine which ones are your ‘key ingredients’. Can you cut the ones that are too generic? Can you use long tail keywords instead?

Add a sprinkling of negative keywords.

Negative keywords help you cut back on your spend as you are making sure that you aren’t paying for accidental or irrelevant clicks from people that aren’t going to convert. When you add a negative keyword, it means that if that is contained in the search term, your ads won’t appear, meaning fewer wasted clicks!

Decrease cost by increasing quality score.

While to the average advertiser CPC is calculated by dividing the overall cost by the number of clicks sourced, Adwords actually have a funky little way of figuring out your CPC. They determine what your CPC will be by taking the ad rank of the next highest bidder (your closest competitor) and dividing this by your quality score, and adding £0.01 to ensure you have the top bid. Let’s say your closest competitor’s ad rank is 3, and you have a quality score of 4. This would mean that your CPC would be £0.76 (3 divided by 4, plus 0.01). However, if you had a quality score of 9, your CPC would work out to be £0.34 (3 divided by 9, plus £0.01).

Check your location targeting.

Make sure that you are not targeting locations that aren’t really necessary. This is a similar concept to adding in negative keywords, you need to be making sure you aren’t showing your ads to places that you aren’t interested in sourcing conversions from. Most campaigns are set up as standard with a national target, but if you only deliver to a 50-mile radius around Leeds, do you want to be showing your ads to and sourcing clicks from consumers in the London area that you’ll have to turn away?

Maintain Your Progress

Keep on top of your negative keyword lists.

Use the search query report to figure out if you’re getting clicks from irrelevant searches. If you’re a laser cutting company, you want to avoid bringing in costly clicks from users looking for laser eye surgery…

Practice what works…

We’d always recommend A/B testing to see what is the most effective for your company, as unfortunately no marketing strategy has a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Figure out what works for you, and stick to it!

…But don’t be afraid to make a few changes.

You always want to be optimising your account and building upon former successes. Making huge changes if you’re not overly confident can be disastrous, but Google’s best practice guidelines are forever changing, so don’t let yourself get stuck in a rut. If you find that what you’ve been implementing successfully for the last year or so is starting to see fewer and fewer impressions, clicks or conversions, it might be time to shake it up a bit.

Hush’s PPC Management Top Tips

• KPIs will differ from company to company. For example, for companies looking to glean brand awareness, clicks may be key, but for another that is more established, conversions will be the key performance indicators. Your KPIs can also change over time.
• Work out your CPA. If you’re an eCommerce site and bringing in your conversions ends up costing you more than you’d profit (resulting in poor ROI), it might be time to trial new keywords or have a new PPC strategy developed.
• Optimise your website. Slow load times, non-mobile-friendly websites and redirected pages can increase your CPA and affect your campaign’s progress.

If you’re not sure where to start with your PPC management, contact the HushBots who will happily offer a helping hand!