PPC for Manufacturing: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

PPC advertising for manufacturing businesses is a growth area with many manufacturers seeing its benefits. Using platforms like Google Ads they are able to set up Search ads to target people that are searching for their products on Google.

And they can also set up campaigns to raise awareness and increase brand presence like Display, Remarketing and Video campaigns.

There’s also the option to set up a local manufacturing campaign in Google Ads and promote retailers that sell your products. This is possible for the automotive industry and general retailers and people can shop at local retailers or dealerships.

In this article I list seven PPC tips for manufacturing businesses that are already running campaigns but need some ideas on how to manage them effectively.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

To get the best PPC results for your manufacturing business, you should set up conversion tracking. This will help you to see where your leads or sales are coming from and that means you’ll be able to manage your PPC campaigns effectively.

In your Google Ads account, on the Conversions page under Tools & Settings, you can set up your conversion tracking. You can track calls coming from your website or when visitors contact you from a contact form.

Another effective way to set up tracking is in your Google Analytics account. First make sure it is linked to your Google Ads account in the Admin section. Then click Goals and then use one of the templates to set up your tracking.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

An important way to improve the targeting of your PPC campaigns is to add negative keywords to block searches that are irrelevant. In your Search terms report you’ll see a list of the searches that you are getting. And you will find some that are not relevant and you’ll need to select them and add them as negative keywords.

Depending on your targeting, you can add them at the campaign level or ad group level or you can create a negative keyword list. The list can be applied to as many campaigns as you like.

Adding negatives at the ad group level blocks them for the specific ad group but does not prevent them from appearing for other ad groups. So, usually it’s best to add them at the campaign level. And if you have multiple campaigns, you can save them in a list at the account level and add them to the relevant campaigns and save yourself a lot of time.

 

3. Find new keywords

There are a number of ways to find new keywords to add to your campaigns to bid on. One of the main ones is by using the Keyword Planner tool in your Google Ads account. Use this tool to search for new keyword opportunities and add them directly to your campaign or download them and add them later.

The Recommendations page is another place to find new keywords. This page shows you potential keywords suggested by the machine learning system to help improve your campaigns. However, not all the keyword suggestions are relevant and you should dismiss the ones that are not.

A third way to find keywords is in your Search terms report. This report is under your Keywords tab. And in there you’ll see searches that you’re getting and some won’t be actual keywords in your account. Adding them helps you to control them and get higher positions if you want to achieve that.

 

4. Check Recommendations

The Recommendations page, as mentioned above is a good place to find new opportunities for your campaigns. In here you’ll see many recommendation types and this could be any of the 50 that are available for all advertisers – but only the relevant ones for you will appear here.

You can either apply or dismiss the recommendations. It’s important to review them individually to see if they are relevant and how they will improve your campaigns. So, don’t just apply them.

Applying or dismissing them trains the machine learning system to send better recommendations in the future. And this helps to improve your Optimisation score which you should try to bring closer to 100% all the time.

 

5. Update bid strategy

PPC advertising for manufacturing businesses should focus on using the right bid strategy for the goals. This will change as you manage your campaigns and as you get more clicks and conversions. So, you should review this once in a while to make sure you’re using the best bid strategy.

In Recommendations you’ll at times see suggestions to change to another bid strategy. This will be based on the system’s assessment of your campaign and how the bid strategy change will improve performance.

Or you can change to one of the other automated or manual bid strategies if you want to test them and see how they perform. For example, when you first launch your campaign you can start with Maximise Clicks to get as many clicks as possible and then change to Manual CPC with enhanced CPC to control your bids manually.

 

6. Consider broad match type keywords

Adding broad match keyword versions of your phrase or exact match keywords will help you to get more traffic. That’s because broad match targets a wider range of searches that are not being targeted by other match types.

All match types target synonyms, plurals, singulars, close variants, misspellings and other keyword variations. But broad match types go beyond these and also target searches that are very broad and not closely related to your keywords.

The main benefit of this is that you’ll get some long tail searches that convert very well. But one of the drawbacks is that you’ll get searches that are too broad and not related to the products that you provide.

So, you should keep a close eye on this and block any that are not relevant by adding them as negative keywords.

 

7. Check Quality Scores

Quality Score is a keyword metric that gives you great detail about how your campaign is performing. It ranks from 1 to 10 and the higher the number the better.

It’s a diagnostic tool that shows you how your keywords are performing for the three factors, Ad Relevance, Expected Click Through Rate and Landing Page Experience.

So, if your scores are low, like below 7, then you should work on these factors by improving your ad targeting and relevance and improving your landing pages.

 

Case Study

Abmark, a manufacturer of high quality laser solutions, were working with a digital agency to promote their business. They found working with the agency difficult because they were unreachable and the performance of the campaigns had started to decline. They contacted me to help them set up a better campaign to promote their solutions. The campaign I set up led to the average cost per click dropping by 20% and they were getting on average 31 high quality leads per month. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

As a PPC specialist for manufacturing businesses, I’d be happy to help set up and manage campaigns for your manufacturing company. Get in touch below to discuss your requirements.