According to the Digital Marketing Institute, only 12% of your keywords are responsible for all of your ad conversions. Failing to understand that is what leads most PPC campaigns to fail.
Sure, you might think that creating a solid keyword list, writing great ad copy, and publishing your campaigns are going to do the trick.
However, you’ll need to put in a little more effort than that to succeed. That means managing your campaigns on a daily basis.
If you’re just starting out with paid ads and want to learn how to best manage your PPC plan in order to see a profit, then follow these nine steps.
1. Pay Attention to Google’s Suggestions
When you log into your Google Ad Words account after publishing a campaign, it’s likely that you’ll see suggestions on how to optimize everything.
This could range from adjusting the text in one ad to adding extensions or even changing the keywords.
Usually, Google will show a percentage meter at the top of the page. This indicates whether or not your campaign is 100% optimized according to current trends and online behavior.
Pay attention to these suggestions! Make the changes! Google is smart and it knows what it’s talking about.
2. Add Negative Keywords
It’s hard to be 100% accurate with your keywords every time. You might think that “dog sitting in Boulder” is a great keyword to attract people to your dog sitting business.
But, then you find that people are clicking on your ad because they’ve searched “dog sitting in Boulder jobs.” They’re dog sitters too, and they’re looking for jobs, not your service.
In this case, it’s a good idea to take a look at what people searched for in order to find your ad (whether it results in an impression or a click).
Then, add negative keywords to your negative keyword list so that your ad won’t show when people search for that specific term.
This will save you a lot of wasted ad money on clicks that don’t turn into conversions, so make sure this is at the top of your pay per task checklist.
3. Transfer Budgets to Another Ad Group
Optimizing your campaigns, in general, should be part of any Google checklist for paid ads. However, optimizing takes time as you have to wait a while in order to see results and analytics.
One of the most effective things that you can do to increase your campaign effectiveness is to take a look at which ad groups are performing best.
The idea is to create more than one ad group per campaign in order to test the effectiveness of copy and keywords. This also helps you see if one ad group is performing much better than another.
If that’s the case, then transfer more money to that ad group. Increase the daily ad spend and watch that group grow.
4. Optimize Campaign Settings
While this is usually part of a monthly task checklist, you can also optimize your campaign on a daily basis, too.
Check your campaign settings to make sure that you’re targeting the right location, language, and audience.
Sometimes, especially if you’re working in different languages or trying to sell in different countries, this can get changed in the process of setting up a campaign.
So, make it a point to add this to your weekly task list just to make sure you’re not missing out on target audiences or paying for clicks that you don’t need.
5. Continuously Optimize Ad Copy
Never ever underestimate the importance of your ad copy.
Every morning, look at your ads and compare them to other ads that are ranking for the keywords you’re using.
What is the difference? Can you do anything to make yours better? If so, do it!
Changing and optimizing your ad copy should actually be at the top of your task checklist, as it also affects things such as your ad relevancy and overall quality score.
6. Check Your Landing Page Daily
Checking your landing page doesn’t require a lot of time. In fact, if it’s a part of your PPC plan checklist then it’ll soon become second nature and you’ll just do it without even thinking.
Why is it so important? Your landing page accounts for a huge part of your overall paid ad campaign success.
It needs to be relevant, high-quality, and it needs to provide the user with a great experience.
This means that if the landing page goes down or if there’s some other type of big error, then you’re going to want to know.
If the link is broken and you’re sending people to that page, your campaign and budget are going to suffer.
7. Check Your Budgets
When you start running a campaign, make a budget worksheet.
Then, create another worksheet that acts as a “catch-up budget” worksheet.
Divide your total budget by the days of the month and check each morning to ensure that you’re not going way over or coming in way under your target budget.
This will help you not only avoid going over budget, but it’ll help you see where you can spend more or increase your bids.
8. Expand Your Keyword List
When you’re taking a look at the words that people used to find your ad, you’re looking for negative keywords.
However, it helps to look for other keywords that you hadn’t already thought of.
If you see that people are searching for a relevant phrase that you didn’t already have on your list, then add it to your list!
Expanding your keyword list depends on how people are interacting with your ads and what your overall campaign goals are, but it’s a good way to optimize your efforts either way.
9. Create Your Own PPC Plan Daily Task List
No two ad campaigns are alike. Okay, they might be alike but they’re definitely not exactly the same.
This means that your campaigns are going to require different actions than those of other companies.
In order to maximize revenue with the least amount of ad spend, you’ll need to figure out what works for you.
So, play around with your campaigns and develop your own daily task list and tweak it depending on what you need to do each day. This is going to be the most efficient way to see better results.
Start Increasing Revenue with PPC
PPC ads are a relatively low-cost way to increase brand awareness or revenue.
Depending on the goals you set and the budget you allocate to your paid ad campaigns, you can see a lot of success.
However, that all depends on the kind of PPC plan you have and how often you’re optimizing your campaigns.
Ready to start increasing your revenue with PPC? Contact us to discuss your needs and we’ll help set you up on the road to success.