PPC for Food Business: 8 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

If you’re running a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign for your food business it’s important that you regularly manage it to get the best performance results. So, it’s not a good idea to set up the campaign and then leave it to run for weeks and months without any optimisation.

You should take regular action to improve the search targeting, ad relevance and visitor engagement on your landing pages.

And doing this regularly, especially at the beginning will save you a lot of time and costs later. In fact, as the targeting of your ads improves, you’ll spend less and less time managing them in the future.

So, I’ve put together this list of eight PPC campaign management tips for your food business, to help improve performance.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

Setting up conversion tracking is one of the first things to do when you create a PPC campaign for your food business. Unfortunately, many advertisers leave this till later and they run their ads without any tracking and they are not able to optimise their campaigns effectively.

If you haven’t set up conversion tracking yet, then now is the time to do it. You should set it up as soon as possible so you can see which ads, keywords, campaigns and more are driving sales or leads for your business.

Google Ads has the tools to help you set up tracking. And you can use your Google Analytics account which provides you more in-depth reports when you set up goal conversion tracking. And you can import these goals into your Google Ads account for conversion tracking.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

To get the best quality leads or sales from PPC advertising for your food business, you should ensure that your search targeting is good and that you minimise the searches that are not relevant.

To achieve that you’ll need to continue adding negative keywords to block irrelevant searches. Now, when you first set up your PPC campaign it’s likely that you added some negative keywords. But this is not enough. You’ll need to keep searching for more and add them as negative keywords to block other searches that may appear.

The search terms report is the most important report to help you with this. It shows you the actual searches you are getting. And you should select all those that are not relevant and add them in bulk as negative keywords at the campaign or ad group levels or add them to a negative keyword list.

 

3. Check Recommendations

The Recommendations page is full of insights about your Google Ads campaigns. It shows you a list of opportunities that have the potential to increase the performance of all areas of your account.

Some recommendations will be relevant and some won’t. So it’s crucial that you review them individually before applying or dismissing them. And updating them this way will increase your Optimisation score which helps the machine learning algorithm to send better recommendations later.

 

4. Find new keywords

The PPC campaign for your food business should have the best keywords to drive the most relevant searches. So, you should regularly review your keywords to see if there are any gaps, and add some new ones.

The Recommendations page mentioned above is one place to find keyword recommendations. Here you’ll get some good suggestions, but some will not be relevant. So, just dismiss them if they are irrelevant and add the ones that will lead to an uplift to your campaign.

Another place to find keyword opportunities is in your Keyword Planner tool in Google Ads. With this tool you can carry out research based on current keywords you have and see if there are any new recommendations. And then you can run a forecast to see what you’re likely to spend.

A third place to find new keyword opportunities is by doing competitor research and I describe below how you can do that.

 

5. Update bid strategy

One of the recommendations you’ll see often in your account will be to update your bid strategy. This is mainly if you’ve started with an automated bid strategy like Maximise Clicks, or have used a manual bid strategy to control the bids for your keywords.

But you can change to a conversion-focused bid strategy like Maximise Conversions when you are getting at least 30 conversions per month. And you can set a target cost per action (CPA) to control how much you want to spend for each conversion.

 

6. Do competitor analysis

As a food business it’s important to check what other businesses in your space are doing with their marketing strategy. And this is especially important for PPC advertising for your food business because you can easily lose positions, traffic and conversions to competitors.

So, it’s a good idea to see what keywords they are appearing for and how much they’re paying per click on average. And knowing how much they are paying on average per month in their PPC campaigns will help you to set your budget and choose the right keywords.

The Competitor research tool in SE Ranking will help you with this information. And you’ll be able to see what ads and keywords they have in their Google Ads account and how much they spend.

 

7. Consider broad match type keywords

Adding broad match keywords to promote your food business has benefits and some drawbacks. The main benefit is that you’ll be able to target a wider range of searches including long tail ones that will help to increase conversions. And you’ll see an increase in impressions and clicks and get more customers.

One big drawback is that you will get some searches that are too generic and not relevant for your products or business. And because of that, you’ll see more of your budget going towards these searches and that may lead to a drop in conversion rates.

However, an effective way to counter this is by adding negative keywords to block these searches from appearing again. And as you carry out more keyword research, look out for potential searches that will use up your budget for no return – and block them.

 

8. Check Quality Scores

Quality Score is a quick way to see how your keywords are performing. It shows you the landing page experience, the ad relevance and the expected click through rate for each of your keywords and you can then update them to improve your advertising efforts.

You can see the Quality Scores on the Keywords page. Any scores below 7 should be improved and you can do that by providing a great user experience on your landing pages and making sure that ads are highly targeted to the keywords.

You can improve that by including your keywords in the ads. And ensure that the most important content on your pages are easily visible above the fold, especially for mobile visitors.

 

Get in Touch

Need more PPC advertising help for your food business? I’m happy to help and as a Google Ads expert I’ve worked with many food businesses and you can contact me on the form below to discuss.