New to the digital marketing landscape and can’t get your PPC score over the line? Perhaps you’ve done this before but find yourself stuck with a low-performing PPC campaign and can’t gain the traction you’d like no matter what you try. Fortunately for you, you’ve got the EDGE Marketing team on your side!
We appreciate that the world of paid marketing, PPC ads, and fiddling with Google Ads to get the ROI you want takes time, patience, and (sometimes) the right insight on industry best practices. If you’re stuck with a low PPC score, all of the fiddling in the world may not get you up and over the line like you want—unless you know which steps to take.
If this sounds like you, we’re here to help. For our new marketing readers, we’ll take a quick look again at the importance and effectiveness of including PPC campaigns in your marketing strategy and what factors might be causing a low PPC score.
From there, we’ll step back, take a top-level view of the best practices you can follow to boost your score, better define your PPC campaign, and start seeing a better ROI.
Read on to learn more about PPC advertising, what a PPC score is, how it can affect the ROI of your campaign, and what you can do to start gaining better results.
Why Use PPC Advertising?
PPC advertising (the formal acronym for pay-per-click PPC advertising and ad campaigns) is an often-turned-to digital marketing strategy that allows marketers to drive increased traffic to their websites by securing a top spot on Google search result pages or a well-positioned ad on the Google Display Network. How so? By paying for these high real estate places on the Google Display Network, the ad owner pays for each of the clicks they gain on their campaigns!
Among the many reasons why marketers like PPC ads to see boosted ROIs, some of our favourites include:
- Targeted audience:
When defining the parameters of a Google Ads PPC campaign, you’ll indicate the exact ideal target audience or ad group for your ads. Among the many variables that can be identified for your audience you can include demographics, interests, location, relevant online behaviours, and more. - Cost-effective:
While some new marketers and small business owners may be leery of a paid ad campaign, the cost-effectiveness of an automated PPC campaign can’t be understated. While there seems to be an infinite amount of potential traffic online, PPC campaigns only charge you for the click-throughs actually gained (instead of simply ad views), which means that you’re connecting with interested, relevant leads who are engaged enough to click through on the CTA of your PPC campaign. In short, you’re not spending money on ‘views’ or ‘impressions’ only, and you can set a maximum budget on how many paid clicks you’re willing to spend on, meaning you don’t have to go over budget. - Measurable:
There’s nothing like Google Ads and Google Analytics to track the effectiveness, ROI, and impact of your paid ad campaigns. Helping you measure the effectiveness of each ad campaign, collect more real-time analytics about your viewers and visitors, and helping you test the effectiveness and accuracy of your digital marketing efforts, a live PPC campaign can help you measure, test, and better define all of your brand marketing over time.
Sounds good? We thought so. Let’s dive into a couple of factors that affect your PPC score and what you can do to boost a low performing PPC campaign.
How to Improve Low Performing PPC Ads
Now that you know what a PPC ad is and why it’s a fantastic addition to your marketing efforts, let’s look at what a PPC score is and a few of the common reasons why you might be seeing low PPC campaign performance.
In short, a PPC score is:
- PPC Quality Score:
A PPC Score (formally known as your ad Quality Score) is Google’s rating of the overall user experience that your PPC ad and associated landing pages offers users when they search for your keyword, see your ad, or click through your PPC campaign.
A PPC quality score is rated on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, and you can find your quality score by looking at your Google Ads account keywords report.
The effects of a great (or not so great) PPC quality score can’t be underestimated. The pros and cons of getting your score right are:
- A Good Quality Score:
Not only does a high quality score directly impact your cost-per-click (CPC) budget, it also directly influences your PPC ad positioning and results on Google and other search engines.)
In summary: a high PPC quality score will earn you more affordable PPC traffic and better conversions.
- A Lower Quality Score:
If you’re seeing a low quality score (on a scale of 1-10) your ad rank or priority on Google search engine result pages will be lower, you’ll likely see less traffic to your site, and your overall campaign ROI will be lower.
In summary: you want to try to work with Google Ads and your campaign to get the best possible quality score so you don’t throw money, time, and effort down the drain. Let’s look at what you can do to fix a low performing PPC campaign and boost that quality score.
How to Increase a Low PPC Quality Score
Let’s get to it–if you’re seeing a low ROI, have a low PPC Quality Score, or want to boost a low performing PPC campaign, here are some of the best practices you can take to get a leg up.
- Review Your Ad Copy
The first step in improving your PPC campaign is taking a much closer look at your ad copy. What keywords have you chosen? Is there a clear CTA? (Call-to-action, or, a clear and actionable step that your ad viewer should ideally be taking when seeing your ad.) You want to make sure your keywords are highly relevant to your target audience’s interests and accurately reflect what your brand is about and has to offer.
- Look at Your Target Audience Parameters.
Speaking of ad viewers, we recommend looking at the parameters or demographics that are defining your ideal ad audience and campaign. While you want to ensure your ad is highly relevant and targeting a well defined audience, there are downsides to your ideal target audience being too big (too broad) or too defined (too niche–not enough potential searches or views.)
- Review Your Keyword Strategy.
Next question–consider if you’re bidding on the right keywords. While it’s super important to make sure you’re bidding on and using keywords that accurately reflect your brand, ad, and offer, it’s just as important that you consider which negative keywords you don’t want to use. These are called negative keywords, and we’ll explore this topic more deeply another day. In short, negative keywords are search terms you don’t want to trigger showing your ad groups your ads or filters out irrelevant search queries.)
- Optimise Your Landing Page.
Your PPC campaign and ad landing page are where your ad will lead viewers who click on your campaign. (Win!) While a click-through is the first goal of any good PPC campaign and a good sign that your ad is hitting the target for your viewers, it is essential to make sure that the landing page where a viewer is redirected is optimised for conversions, easy to follow, and accurately reflects your offer and brand.
Some of the questions to consider when reviewing and optimising your landing page include: Is your landing page relevant to your ad? Does the page have a clear call to action? Are they mobile-friendly and do they offer an easy-to-use and navigate experience for the viewer?
- Try A/B Testing.
If you haven’t tried out A/B testing before, now’s the time to do it. A good A/B test can help you identify which ad copy and landing page are performing best and most accurately hitting the target with your ideal audience. We recommend testing different headlines, body copy, images, and CTAs / calls-to-action to see which combination drives the most clicks and conversions.
On that note, don’t change too many variables at once. We recommend testing 1-2 variables to see which has the best ROI, and then running another A/B test to try out a third.
- Consider Google Ads Retargeting
Retargeting strategies allow marketers to re-target users who have already visited their web page, seen a PPC ad, or otherwise interacted with the brand. Retargeting ads mean showing these somewhat-engaged viewers relevant ads again based on their previous behaviour with the brand and are a great way to move them further down the sales funnel.
- Adjust Your Keyword Bids.
If you’ve reviewed your keywords for accuracy and feel certain about your choices, we suggest adjusting your keyword bids or bidding strategy to help you stay competitive. While PPC ad campaigns are a great way to automate your digital marketing efforts, we also recommend regularly monitoring your bids and adjusting them based on your budget, competition, and recent performance or ROI to stay at the top of your game.
We appreciate this is a lot of information about PPC campaigns; that said, you may be able to test just two to three of the above factors and see a quick boost in your PPC Quality Score. Not quite where you want to bet just yet? Run through each of the above steps independently to see where your campaign could be falling down, and remember to keep these best practices in mind next time you’re designing a PPC campaign.
EDGE Marketing Can Be Your PPC Campaigns Partner
EDGE Marketing specialises in helping businesses improve their PPC campaigns and SEO efforts, solidify their online presence, and implement effective digital marketing strategies. Whether you need help refining your keyword strategy, optimising your landing pages, or trying your hand at A/B testing for the first time, our team has the expertise you need to succeed.
If you’re a small business owner or first-time marketer who doesn’t yet have an in-house expert who can design, test, and measure your campaigns, we can help. Each week we publish articles examining industry trends and best practices that will help you find and convert new leads, drive increased traffic to your website, better understand your existing customers, and create an SEO strategy that will boost your ROI.
If you’re interested in learning more about digital marketing best practices, strategies, and how you can automate filling your lead funnel, follow along with the EDGE Marketing blog. Not ready to execute your marketing efforts alone? Connect with our team to learn more about our services and how we can take your digital marketing to the next level.
