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Pay-per-click advertising, often referred to by the acronym PPC, is integral to any digital marketing strategy. When trying to optimize your website, social media, and other digital marketing efforts for search engines and the people who use them, it is best to use a mix of organic and paid advertising.

Align and Reassess Client Objectives

In order to run a successful PPC campaign, you first need to define what a successful campaign means for you or your client. These goals must be clearly defined and attainable. One easy way to do this is to assign a quantitative value that you want to reach, as qualitative values are inherently more vague

Often, these goals are tied to a metric that is measured during the course of a given PPC campaign. For example, you may be measuring year-over-year (YoY) growth, return on advertising spending (ROAS), lifetime value of new customers (LTV), or overall profitability. These metrics must be measured in the most efficient way possible to ensure that the data collected is accurate.

Use Google Ads to its Full Potential

For many getting started in paid advertising, Google Ads is often your starting point. However, there are several features within Google Ads that you may not be aware of or are using less effectively than you could. By engaging these tools, you can strengthen your current PPC campaigns with a few simple mouse clicks.

The first tool we recommend enabling is Google Ads Conversion Tracking. Google Ads conversions are preferred over Google Analytics because conversion tracking offers better integration, more conversions, and view-through capabilities. There are also additional advanced features that you have access to by using Google Ads Conversion Tracking. Considering the ultimate goal of any PPC campaign is to track data in the most accurate way possible, enabling this feature is integral to improving your campaign.

The second tool is called enhanced conversions. Layering enhanced conversions on your Google Ads tracing foundations can improve the accuracy of your data. This is because enhanced conversions send hashed first-party conversion data from your website directly to Google. Additionally, this data transfer is encrypted, which protects your data and privacy.

Finally, we recommend implementing consent mode in your Google Ads account. In recent years, third parties have begun removing their cookies which can reduce the reliability of your conversion data. With Consent Mode, Google can use consent signals to recover any conversions that are lost due to a lack of third-party cookies. Like enhanced conversions, consent mode improves your conversion coverage.

These are just some of the ways that you can improve your Google Ads campaigns. However, you can also improve your PPC strategy by looking at platforms beyond Google.

Consider Using Other Platforms

There are other platforms that run pay-per-click advertising that are often overlooked due to Google’s large market share. However, these platforms can be highly lucrative. Because there is less competition on these platforms, you can often get further reach for less money.

One great platform to invest in is Microsoft Advertising Campaigns. Microsoft has a large reach to many customers through their search engine Bing. However, Bing is not nearly as popular as Google, which means Microsoft’s search engine often gets overlooked. This makes Microsoft Advertising Campaigns a perfect opportunity to boost your PPC campaign in an area your competitors may not be aware of, let alone be using. The only thing you need to note is that the platform is increasing in popularity due to its first-to-market AI offering, so there is no better time than the present to take advantage of this opportunity.

Performance Max can be a useful tool for optimizing PPC campaigns, such as dynamic remarketing parameters. This element is often an afterthought for advertisers, but properly configuring dynamic remarketing can enhance your campaign performance by ensuring the right products and services are shown to the right people.

Optimize Your Use of Common PPC Tools

There are several tools that are available across PPC platforms that can help you improve your campaign performance. You may even be using some of these tools. However, you may not be using these tools to their full potential.

The first tool we are highlighting is offline conversion tracking or OCT. This tool enables PPC specialists to import data from your CMS or integration options directly into Google. By doing this, we can assign a specific value to a lead and further quantify the effectiveness of PPC campaigns.

Another popular tool used in PPC is Ad Creative. This tool is useful in keeping things fresh with new ideas. While the current popular PPC strategy is to rely on responsive search ads or RSAs, this method may be doing your PPC campaign a disservice. Google does optimize RSA copy to get the best click-through rates or CTRs, but high CTRs do not guarantee high conversions or ROAS.

Instead, you can use the Ad Strength feature of a basic guide to analyze your ad copy for relevancy and uniqueness. Ad Creative can help mix creative messaging into your advertisements and even run a few variations of your campaign within each ad group, giving you further insight into what works and what doesn’t. By optimizing your use of Ad Creative, you can greatly improve your campaigns.

Google recommends you incorporate broad match into your PPC strategy. This tool is an effective way to scale a campaign and works best when combined with smart bidding features. By optimizing your use of these tools, you can improve your current campaigns significantly in both quality and effectiveness.

Improve How You Run and Manage Campaigns

Finally, there is the administrative way to manage campaigns. Mismanagement can be a campaign killer, resulting in poorly managed data and a misreading of your results. Instead, you can improve how you run and manage your campaigns through two simple methods.

For improving the way you run campaigns, you can incorporate campaign experiments by running A/B testing on different bidding strategies and landing pages. Setting up an experiment is quick and easy through Google, which gives all the more reason that this step should be incorporated into your strategy. Performance Max campaigns can also run A/B testing by creating multiple asset groups and setting them to target the same products and services while using different assets, landing pages, or audience signals. These simple experiments can provide great insight into what small changes you can include to improve your PPC campaigns.

As for managing your campaigns, you can improve your management through consolidation. Single keyword ad groups, or SKAGs, can be too complex to manage efficiently, especially when you are tracking several keywords. You can simplify your campaign structure by incorporating smart bidding, which centralizes your conversion data and thus consolidates your campaigns. By taking your search ads that have several copy variations and putting them all under one task, it will be much easier to manage your PPC strategy than it would be if each variation was given its own campaign.

Partner With PPC Experts

It can be difficult to complete all of the above without the guidance of a PPC expert. Depending on the size of your firm, you may even need a team of experts to ensure your campaigns are being run as optimally as possible. That is where our team at BluShark Digital comes in. Our PPC specialists are highly trained and educated in how to create, run, and manage campaigns on several platforms and using the most cutting-edge tools in the industry. To see how we can improve your digital advertising campaigns today, contact us!