5 Tips to Improve PPC Advertising Performance

 1) Start with The Destination: Your website or landing page (s) are critical to your Google Ads / PPC advertising results. Focus on this first before running paid ads, as the initial impression the searcher has of your website, and your business, are imperative for increasing leads and sales.  To begin, make sure that your site loads quickly, as this is important to users as well as Google.  You can use site speed tools to check your site, such as GTmetrix or Pingdom.  If you are using a WordPress site, you can use a caching program such as WP Rocket and an image optimization plugin, such as WP Smush.  Make sure that your website is mobile friendly.  It’s important that your landing pages are visually appealing, has confidence factors (certifications, awards, testimonials, etc.), lower the barriers of entry and makes it easy to contact your business.  You can either a) use a website builder program such as Square Space or WIX b) use a WordPress site and a user friendly theme such as DIVI c) hire a good web developer.  Use a good hosting company, consider using a CDN such as Cloud Flare.

2) Focus on Best Practices: Setup and manage your campaigns based on industry best practices: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6154846?hl=en  This includes running relevant keywords focused on both search volume and relevance / buyer intent to your business.  Stay away from broad match keywords or keywords with too broad of an intent.  Use the keyword planner tool in your Google Ads account to find relevant keywords with buying intent as opposed to research / informational searches.  Make sure that your landing pages have some of the major keywords on your landing pages.

3) Optimize on a regular basis. Pay per click advertising is a fluid, ever changing process.  It’s more of a live auction than a set and forget process.  You should be strategically optimizing your PPC campaigns on a bi-weekly basis.  At the minimum, you should be: a) reviewing and implementing appropriate optimization ideas in your account b) labeling all converting keywords and phone calls, so you can be more strategic in your bidding c) removing low quality score keywords (2/10 or less) d) make sure that you are not running broad match keywords, which can run up your costs and reduce relevance d) reviewing the search terms report, adding converting / relevant keywords and excluding keywords / search terms that are not relevant. e) optimizing ads and adjusting.  Normally, I would suggest viewing ad data over a longer period of time and pausing any ads that have over 100 impressions and a click thru rate of less that 1% and writing new ads.  Test 3-4 ads per ad group, including running responsive search ads and potentially call only ads.

4) Reduce click fraud. Google does pro-actively filter out and remove invalid clicks from your Google Ads account, so you are not charged for those.  However, there are both unscrupulous advertisers that may click on your ads to run up your costs, bots, click farms and more that can waste your advertising dollars.  Using another layer of protection against click fraud, such as Click Cease, PPC Protect or other related tools, can help reduce advertising waste and inefficiencies.

5) Track results. It’s critical to accurately track conversions / results in your pay per click advertising.  A conversion is simply an action you want a user to perform, such as clicking on your ad and calling your business (website call conversion), submitting a contact form on your site and requesting additional information, making a purchase, etc.  Google has an excellent tag implementation team that can help ensure that all conversion tracking is properly setup.  You can contact customer support and request and appointment with the tag implementation team (make sure that you have administrative access to your website and that the site is being backed up on a regular basis.)

The above article was written by Steve Pitt, President of Internet Expert Online & PayPerClickAuthority.com  Steve Pitt is certified in Google Ads and Bing Ads (Microsoft Advertising) and his company is a Google Partner, Bing Ads Partner (Microsoft Advertising Partner) and A+ rated with the Better Business Bureau.  Steve has specialized in PPC advertising management since 2010 and is author of the book, Google AdWords: Better Results In 30 Days”.