11 PPC Campaign Management Facts For Google Ads Advertisers

Effective PPC campaign management is what every Google Ads account needs, to be able to achieve a good return on ad spend (ROAS).

 

When you set up your campaign, you will leave it to run for a period of time, like a few days or a few weeks, depending on the volume of traffic you get. But you will at a certain point need to check what results you’ve had and the search queries that have driven clicks to your website.

 

Based on your findings, you will start your PPC campaign management to improve metrics such as conversion rate, conversions, click through rate and more.

 

So, here are 11 effective PPC campaign management tips to help take your ads to the next level, and boost sales or leads for your business.

 

1. Have a sufficient budget

Your budget should be at least 10 times your target Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA) bid strategy. For other bid strategies aim to have at least 20-30% more budget than your average daily spend. With a sufficient budget, this help the machine learning algorithm to find new search opportunities that convert at a higher rate. And combined with broad match keywords you will reach a broader audience of targeted customers. Also, check the Campaign budget simulator to see weekly estimates for your new daily budget and explore how that can impact your search traffic and your conversions. To see the Campaign budget simulator, go to the campaign page in your account and next to your campaign, under the budget column you can see it by moving your mouse over the icon next to your budget daily amount.

 

2. Pick the right campaign goal

At the campaign setup level, you will have a number of goal types to choose from. These goals include Sales, Leads, Website Traffic, Brand Awareness and more. Your choice between these will determine where your ads appear and who gets to see them. This also determines how you manage your campaign based on the reports that you are viewing. If you want to run a Search campaign for example, you have the Sales, Leads or Website traffic to choose from. If you are a retailer you will be able to see how many sales you are getting and metrics like conversion rate and cost per conversion will be important to you as you carry out your PPC campaign management.

 

3. Target the Search partners

Many advertisers choose to advertise on the Google.com search engine only, and miss out on a potentially receptive audience in the Search partners. These partners include hundreds of websites that utilise search technology and this includes some of Google’s own properties like Play, YouTube, Maps and more. By default when creating a new campaign, your ads are opted into the Search partner network. But you can remove this and add it later to see how it performs for your products or sales. At the campaign level, you can segment your traffic by ‘Network’ and see how the Search partners are doing for you.

 

4. Regularly check search terms report

This is one of the most important reports for Google Ads Search campaigns. It helps you discover how targeted your ads are and if you find a high percentage of searches that are not, then you should take time to update your keywords and match types to correct this. Also, if you find any searches that are relevant, you can add them as keywords to be able to control the bids and spend for them. And any searches that are not relevant you should add as negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

 

5. Check the Assets report

This is a Search campaign report that shows how each of your headline and description assets are performing at auction time. The Performance Rating section has four columns, Best, Good, Low and Unrated that reveal the status of each asset. This is a percentage score that helps you decide how you need to improve the asset or if it is in the Best status and nothing else needs to be done. For each asset you can also see how many Search campaigns are using that and you can click the link to see the list of ads. If for example a headline or description asset has a Low percentage score, you can update it to see an improvement, but bear in mind that it will remain in the Learning or Unrated column as it goes through this process.

 

 

6. Conduct more keyword research

Regular keyword research is an important exercise to carry out to find new keyword and search phrase opportunities. Google Ads has the Keyword Planner tool that you can find in the Tools & Settings section.

 

7. Add negative keywords

Negative keywords block searches that are not relevant to your business, from triggering your ads. Check your search terms report regularly – once or twice a week – and when you find searches that are not relevant, add them as negative keywords.

 

8. Update text ads

Part of your PPC Management tasks should include updating your responsive search ads. This includes checking the Recommendations tab to see if there are any opportunities to improve the headlines and descriptions in your ads. Doing so helps to improve the ad targeting as the system has more to choose from and to use them at auction time. The context of the search determines which headlines and descriptions appear and providing more of these help your ads reach the right users and rewards you with good Quality Scores.

 

9. Use a Google Audience Solutions

If you have some broad keywords that you want to target but are not sure if you will see positive results then you can layer an audience of people that are in the market for what you sell. You can layer Audience solutions on your campaigns or ad groups like Affinity and In-market audiences and you have hundreds to choose from. in your account.

 

10. Update your bid strategy

Part of your PPC campaign management should include testing out different bid strategies. There are four bid strategy types that you can use depending on your goals and these include Awareness based, Conversion-focused, Consideration-focused and Revenue-focused. If you want to increase awareness for your products or services for example, you will use the Target Impression Share bid strategy to get as many impressions as possible for your budget. And if you want to increase conversions, you can start with the Maximise Conversions bid strategy and then change to Target Cost Per Conversion (tCPA) as you get more conversion data.

 

11. Use Performance Planner

Use this tool to plan your campaigns over the next few months. This allows you to set the optimal budgets and bids to achieve the goals you want to achieve like number of clicks or conversions that you want each month. Google recommends that you run this tool every month and upload the suggestions to your campaigns to achieve the targets.