PPC WINS WHEN PERFORMANCE IS DOWN: PART ONE

This is the penultimate of six posts as we continue to delve deeper into each of the six steps of our free available guide - "6 Steps to Assessing Your Online Marketing Spend". If you haven't already you can sign up below to download this guide.

This post is the first of two parts that shares even more quick wins to improving your campaign performance.

Having already shared 6 quick wins for PPC within our free guide, in this post we thought we’d share even more… unfortunately not all are so quick.

This post concentrates how to approach your PPC campaigns if performance is poor. See this as a checklist on how to dig into your campaigns and ensure you have the best possible setup and approach. Following this process should help you discover any issues and fixes for your campaigns and at the very least better understand why performance is recently down.

Seasonal & Current Trends

PPC performance may currently be poor, but reasons why this is the case may not be down to your website, campaigns or management. First port of call we encourage is to look through external factors to understand the markets current situation and typical seasonality at this time of year.

Firstly to review the seasonality of your website. Look through your business data in your Analytics platform to outline the monthly peaks and troths for your website over the last few years. We also encourage you to use tools like Google Trends & Google Keyword Planner to understand search trends. Using the Keyword PLanner plug in your top performing keywords and review the monthly search trends to help better understand the seasonal and recent trends.

Is this typically a quiet period for the industry?

Looking beyond the typical seasonal trends and reviewing the current industry landscape as it may be bucking the typical expectations. Using Google Trends certainly helps provide more recent data in terms of sudden changes to demand. In addition to this reviewing your current performance of other channels can help with better understanding why PPC performance is down for you.

Other Channels Performance

Is the poor performance specific to PPC alone or does it apply to other website channels?

It is important to understand this before digging into the finer details of your PPC setup. If other channels are struggling in line with PPC than it may be a seasonal trend or website issue affecting all marketing activity. To better understand this we suggest completing the following steps:

• Review all other channels performance vs. PPC

• Plot out PPC performance vs. other channels

  • Can quickly do this using 'Plot Rows' - read Hidden Gems in Google Analytics for more information

• Dig further into what exactly is struggling for other channels

  • Rule out if issues for a specific location, device, browser, landing page etc.

• Run a live test conversion on your website to ensure all is working

• Within PPC as a channel, compare Google Ads to Microsoft Ads

Competitor Activity

Another reason for a decline in PPC performance could be down to your competitors recent activity. Through no fault of your own, their strategy could be causing a drop off in PPC traffic and conversions for you. To better understand if this is the case follow these steps:

• Review Auction Insight reports in Google Ads

  • Monitor competitor impression shares against your campaigns

• Run live searches to monitor competitors’ active ads/offers in place

• Check for competitors bidding on your brand terms

• Facebook Ad Library is a great tool to also monitor competitor wider promotional activity

Traffic & Spend Splits

Having reviewed the external market and other marketing channels performance, we now look deeper for PPC specific concerns.

Review traffic and/or spend splits to check the weighting alignment with the best converting. This exercise is to ensure you’re allocating your spend in the most efficient areas and don’t have too much spend going through the less efficient areas.

Specifically the areas we look to optimise are by device and match type. Starting with match type, ensure that you're not spending too much on Phrase match keywords and have more focus on Exact match type. Typically Phrase keywords capture a broader set of search terms that are likely to convert at a lower rate.

Review conversion rates by device to identify the best converting device for your campaigns and website. Following this ensure that your campaigns have a good balance of traffic/spend aligned with device conversion rates. To change device bidding strategy, implement/tweak device bid adjustments if needed - more information below.

Bid Adjustments

Plenty of bid adjustments available to use across your Google Ads campaigns. Some of the adjustments available include:

• Age

• Gender

• Day of Week

• Time of Day

• Device

Making these adjustments can really influence performance and take your bidding strategy to the next level. Before implementing any adjustments, you need to devise a plan to which campaigns would benefit from these changes and which available changes are of worth to your campaigns – you don’t need to use them all.

We recommend analysing the data of each of the aspects listed above. This ensures you’re making the best decision with what bid adjustments are to be applied. When digging into this data it is important to remember…

• Analyse significant volumes of data

• Analyse different performing campaigns separately

  • Brand, Generics and Competitor keywords

  • Different markets

• Keep the adjustments within -30% & +30% to avoid losing control with too many adjustments applied

We hope these tips help with campaign performance, check out the second part of this post - PPC Wins When Performance Is Down: Part Two

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