If you’re beginning to spend money on paid advertising, particularly Google’s PPC platform (formerly called Adwords), then you’ll notice that your first campaigns results might not be as good as you hoped for.
This is okay: very few campaigns start off as successes, and most of the time optimization needs to be done in order to improve the rests. The good news is that with clever optimizations, you can drastically improve your results week-to-week.
So how do you optimize your Google PPC campaigns? Let’s discuss.
3 Tips To Optimize Your PPC Campaigns
Improve landing page load speed.
Your PPC campaigns might be doing much worse than they should if your page loads too slow. A slow load time results in drastically higher bounce rates, which lead to much lower conversion rates. This causes advertising to be much more expensive per lead or per customer!
To improve your page load speed, use some of these tips.
Run your page through
Google’s PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights will let you know of some things you can do to immediately improve page speed. Suggestions include things like minifying your JS/CSS code, compressing or shrinking images, and addressing server response time.
Make sure your page loads well on mobile.
The majority of Web traffic nowadays comes from mobile devices, and so will a lot of your customers. If your page loads fine on desktop but has problems on mobile, then you’re going to see much worse PPC results.
Use lazy load.
Lazy load is a functionality, usually done in Javascript, that allows certain page elements above the fold to load before the rest of the page. As the user scrolls, the page continues to load. This will help improve load speeds.
Add new keywords (and negative keywords).
When you first start your PPC campaign, you should be using keywords that indicate high buying (or lead) intent. As you run your campaign, you should be looking to move toward more long tail keywords.
Long tail keywords have the most specific requests in them, meaning you can run ads that directly address people’s concerns. This leads to a higher lead quality because you already know what they want!
Negative keywords are another way to optimize your campaign. Take a look at the search terms people are using. If you see search terms that don’t apply to your business (for example, search terms that include a geographical area that you don’t serve), then make sure to exclude them!
Split test different ads.
The quality of your ad will determine your clickthrough rate. Your clickthrough rate can have an effect on your traffic costs. A higher clickthrough rate means that you’re converting more of the impressions into clicks, and Google rewards this with higher quality scores, higher impression shares, and lower winning bids.
To start a split test, you want to create two versions of the same ad. What you test is up to you: different headlines, different descriptions, even different landing pages!
Google makes it easy to split test ads. You can run one ad against another on the same exact keywords, within the same campaign. You can also choose the winner after a determined length of time. Split tests are used by many companies to see which ads do better.
