PPC for SaaS: 6 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

PPC marketing for SaaS businesses is the solution to targeting people and businesses that are searching for their solutions. And Google Ads is the number one platform with the best targeting tools in the pay per click (PPC) sector for this.

The best part of PPC advertising is that you only pay for performance. So, you only pay when you get visitors to your website or when they call your business.

And these visitors are highly targeted because they are searching. With the campaign types available in Google Ads you can reach these audiences and control your costs on a daily basis.

But it’s not enough to just setup a Google Ads campaign for your SaaS business. You need to manage it effectively too and use the campaign management tips I’ve listed below.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

To successfully manage your PPC campaign and achieve a good ROI for your SaaS business, you need to setup conversion tracking. This helps you to see how your ads, keywords and campaigns are performing and you can turn off the poor ones and increase exposure for the good ones.

So, you should setup tracking for any actions that are important to you, including signups, downloads, contacts, calls and so on. And you can do this on the Conversions page in your account.

If you have a Google Analytics account, I recommend that you setup goal tracking. This helps to track not only your PPC traffic but other traffic sources too like social media, organic, direct and so on and you can see how they interact with your Google Ads traffic.

There are a few goal templates to use and you can pick the most relevant for you.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

A powerful way to improve the performance of your Google Ads campaigns is to add negative keywords. This will block searches that are not relevant for your business and will help to improve your return on ad spend (ROAS).

You can add these at the account, campaign and ad group levels.

Regularly check your search terms report to see if you can find any searches that are irrelevant. And then add them as negative keywords so they don’t appear again. The search terms report is under the Keywords tab in your campaign.

 

3. Find new keywords

A regular part of your advertising in Google Ads should include looking for new keyword opportunities. That’s because people search in all kinds of ways nowadays and there are many new keywords that are appearing in your industry.

The Keyword Planner tool will help you with this research. You will find it in your Google Ads account in Tools & Settings and it’s a free tool.

 

4. Check Recommendations

Part of your campaign management should include regular updating of your Recommendations page. In here you will find many recommendations and opportunities to improve your campaigns and some will be relevant but many won’t too.

You can apply the recommendations you like and dismiss any that are not relevant. And updating them like this helps to improve your Optimisation score.

And the higher the score the better because it helps the machine learning system to send better recommendations in the future. So, try to get your score closer to 100% regularly.

 

5. Do competitor analysis

You should do regular competitor analysis to see how other SaaS businesses in your space are advertising and how prominent they are. There are a few tools you can use to do this and you’ll get to see the keywords they are bidding on, the searches they appear for, the ads they have and how much they spend each month on average.

A good website to use is SERanking, which has a competitor tool that helps you look into your competitors’ campaigns.

 

Also, in your Google Ads account, you’ll find the Auction Insights report under the Keywords tab in your campaign. This report shows how you come up in the top and absolute top positions relative to your competitors.

If you find you are not appearing high enough – maybe you come up 62% of the time in the top positions but want to appear 80% of the time, you can increase your bids or bid limits to try to achieve this.

 

6. Consider broad match type keywords

Broad match keywords can be a challenge to manage especially when you first launch a PPC campaign for your SaaS business. That’s because they drive a wide range of searches and some will be too generic and not relevant for your business. So, this could waste your budget and affect your return on ad spend.

When you first launch your campaign, you should focus on phrase and exact match keywords. This gives you greater control over your searches and helps you to also target keyword misspellings, plurals and singulars, synonyms, abbreviations, close variants and others.

However, when you have built a good negative keyword list as described above, you can add broad match keywords. This will help to increase click volumes and conversions and will help you to target searches that you haven’t reached yet.

 

Case Study

Timeneye is a time tracking solution that helps small and medium-sized businesses track their teams’ work levels. They are in a competitive sector and it can be a challenge to achieve high positions for some keywords at an affordable cost. I setup a new campaign for them which helped to increase conversions by 26% and the interaction rate increased by 196%. Read the full case study.

Get in Touch

As a PPC advertising expert working with SaaS businesses, I’d be happy to help setup and manage campaigns for you. Contact me below to discuss a proposal and quote.