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PPC should be an essential part of your Digital Marketing strategy. The potential PPC has to drive instant visibility and traffic from your desired target audience is unmatched from other areas of Digital Marketing such as SEO but what is needed for a successful PPC campaign?

Below are some important factors to consider…

Campaign structure

One of the most important things to consider is the structure of your AdWords account. Are your keywords all grouped in one campaign or ad group? Are you utilising different keyword match types? Do you have at least 2-3 ad variations per ad group? These are just some of the things to consider in regards to the structure of your AdWords account. Campaign structure should somewhat reflect the structure of your product/service categories on your website and different product categories should be within their own campaign. This allows for much greater flexibility when assigning budgets to these areas as well as much greater clarity on how each area is performing.

Having every keyword in one ad group or campaign will severely limit the flexibility on the account as well as an understanding of what is performing well and what isn’t. Lastly the challenge with more complex websites where there is a huge range of products or services is that the campaign structure should not be so overly complex that it means managing it on a day to day basis becomes too difficult.

Negative keywords

Negative keywords should are fundamental in improving your AdWords performance. Stop your adverts showing for irrelevant searches by adding negative keywords. This will prevent wasted expenditure on users that are not looking for your products or services and that are very unlikely to convert into a sale or lead.

Conversion tracking

Setting up conversion tracking is vital for gaining an understanding in how your campaigns are performing and which campaigns are leading to sales or leads for your business. Running AdWords campaigns without any sort of conversion tracking is not advised as you will essentially be wasting money without being able to see how your campaigns are performing. This makes it almost impossible to evaluate the worth of your campaigns and where they need to be improved or refined.

Google quality score

Improving your Google Quality Score is a fundamental part of improving your overall AdWords performance. Google Quality Score remains a mystery to many of those who are new to AdWords however it is one of the most important factors in improving your overall account performance. A stronger Quality Score will lead to lower CPC’s and in turn can lead to a significantly improved ROI.

The main focus when looking to improve Quality Score should be ensuring there is a very strong relationship between your targeted keyword, the ad copy text and the landing page. This means implementing a structure where only closely related keywords are grouped together in the same ad group with ad copy that contains text that is highly relevant to the keywords within the ad group. It is also very important to ensure you are sending the users to a landing page that is highly relevant to what they are searching for, in addition your on-site experience such as usability, CTA’s and site speed.

Link AdWords & Analytics

Linking Google AdWords and Analytics may seem like a very simple step but it can be a hugely important one in helping to improve your AdWords performance. Having Google Analytics linked to the AdWords account allows for a much greater understanding of what is happening to the traffic from PPC once it lands on-site.

Are there particular pages where users are dropping off? Is the traffic that PPC is driving not interacting with the website and leaving the site immediately? So many insights can be gained from Google Analytics and these findings can be used to refine and improve your AdWords campaign. By running AdWords without the use of Analytics means you have very little knowledge on the traffic you are driving via PPC and considering this traffic is being paid for, it is essentially wasting money. Using Google Analytics you can also compare PPC performance against other channels.

Conclusion

These are just a few areas to consider when looking to improve your AdWords performance, PPC is highly complex and requires a lot of hands on work to get it performing to the levels where it is meeting and exceeding targets. However, if the fundamental areas mentioned above are in a strong position, you will have the strong foundations in place to build upon to see some big improvements on your AdWords account.