How to Squeeze More Out of Your PPC Budget

PPC is an extremely effective way to drive qualified and high-intent traffic to your website or landing pages with the aim of boosting your leads, sales and revenue. However, as it’s such as great method, it’s also highly competitive and, if you don’t know how to optimise properly, it can be expensive to drive clicks.

Here are just a few of our tips and tricks to help you squeeze more out of your PPC campaigns and budget without breaking the bank.

Retargeting

There are many reasons why users leave your website or landing page without converting. In many cases, it’s because they’re still in the research stage so they’re shopping around and finding out more about what’s available to them. Whatever the reason, if a user does leave without converting all is not lost. Using display or search retargeting you target users when they are further down the sales journey.

Retargeting is an effective way to improve the performance of your PPC campaigns for a fairly low cost. It allows you to follow your website visitors on their journey around the internet, keep your brand in the forefront of their minds and remind them that your product or service is the perfect solution to their problem.

Remember that those who have already been on your website have already built the beginning of a relationship so they’re more likely to come back and convert.

Remove Under Performing Keywords

In a typical PPC account, 61% of ad spend is wasted on search terms that do not convert. In order to fix this, you should regularly monitor your campaigns and ensure you know which keywords are or are not converting.

Reducing the budget spent on unproductive keywords provides you with even more budget to spend on the terms which are working.

Before pausing or removing keywords, you need to factor in what may be causing the poor performance, including relevance, landing pages and ad text. Something else to consider is the sales attribution, are keywords driving the initial clicks in a multi-click sales journey, with the actual sale/revenue attributed to another term? There are report within Google Ads and Google Analytics that can show you how a keyword performs based on different attribution models.

Device Optimisation

Searches on mobile devices surpassed desktop towards the end of 2019 (in the UK), making it even more important to put time into optimising the performance across all devices.  Optimising device bid modifiers can help improve the efficiency of the activity, however, there are a number of other practices that can be put in place to maximise performance on mobile.

Implementing the Click to Call ad extension will place your phone number in the ad, allowing users to call directly from the search results. The extension can be scheduled so calls can’t be made outside of your business hours. With the Click to Call extension it is possible to track calls of a specified length as a conversion. Connecting instantly is great for someone who’s searching for something in the moment and wants a quick and easy solution.  Google’s forwarding numbers can also be placed on a landing page. Using a snippet of code, your business phone number can be replaced with a trackable number when the user enters your site through a PPC ad.

To ensure maximum conversions, take a look at your landing pages and optimise them for smartphones and tablets. Make sure your landing pages are responsive and load quickly – remember that the majority of internet users have a short attention span and slow loading pages are likely to mean you miss out on those all-important conversions.

Optimise Ad Copy

The content of your ads can make a significant difference to your click-through rate, and in turn the overall performance of your PPC activity. Searchers are looking a reason to click through on your ad – and you have to stand out from other advertisers! Using emotion language can trigger a response that resonates with the user’s problem. For example, a company selling home security equipment could include phases like ‘protect your family’ or ‘protect what valuable to you’. Promoting offers such as discounts or free trials will help to drive clicks, however the offer should be included on the landing page.

Continually A/B testing ads will ensure that you are maximising the return on your investment. When testing always consider what the overall goal is, if it is lead generation, consider the click through and conversion rate. For campaigns set up to drive revenue, consider the return on ad spend (ROAS).  

Optimise Landing Pages

A well optimised landing page can make or break the performance of your PPC activity. The relevance of the landing page to the search term used and ad clicked by the users is a factor in the quality score and can affect the cost per click. If you are running a lead gen campaign, the benefits of your product/service should be clear, supported with video, case studies and customer reviews. A key element of an optimised landing page is the contact form. The form should be close to the top of the page, ideally placed in the header. Only request the information you actual need and give the user confidence that they are not going to get spammed with emails.

As with the ads, it is best practice to A/B test the landing pages.

Adjust all available bid modifiers

You can adjust the bid modifiers across a number of contributing touch point, including location, device, demographics, day of the week and hours. Optimising the modifiers will improve the overall efficiency of the activity, ensuring that the budget is concentrated on the areas that are working. Before you start adjusting bids, you need to analyse data available in both Google Ads and Analytics. Making changes based on smaller data sets can have a negative effect on the future performance.

‍