What Is A Basic Checklist To Optimise PPC Campaigns?

Your Pay Per Click campaigns require regular updates to improve their performance. That could be on a daily, weekly or monthly basis or whenever updates or changes are required.

 

Knowing what changes to make can be difficult. Many AdWords managers struggle with where to begin. And that’s understandable considering the many features available in AdWords.

 

However having a basic checklist can help. So I’ve put together this list that you can follow each week or month to optimise your campaigns:

 

1. Check Ad metrics
2. Add new negative keywords
3. Check the Opportunities tab
4. Check the search terms report
5. Do keyword research
6. Update budgets accordingly
7. Adjust bids

 

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Here are the 7 important tips to optimise your PPC campaigns and improve ROI:

 

Check Ad metrics
It’s important to check your acquisition and conversion metrics regularly. Acquisition metrics include Click Through Rate (CTR), Impressions and Clicks. And conversion metrics include Conversion Rate, Conversions and Cost Per Conversion.

 

You can see these at the campaign, ad group, Ad, keyword and search term level. And in your Google Analytics reports too.

 

They help you to understand how your Ads are performing and based on that you can optimise to improve performance. For example, if your average CTR is 3% and you want to increase it to 7%, you could start by removing lower performing Ads.

 

Add negative keywords
Negative keywords block your ads from appearing for irrelevant searches. Adding them helps to reduce budget wastage, improve ROI and make your Ads effective.

 

There’re two primary ways to find negative keywords: (1) with the keyword planner tool and (2) in the search terms report. You can check these daily to ensure you are blocking all irrelevant searches.

 

Check Opportunities Tab
The opportunities page is where you see suggestions for your campaigns. This shows suggestions that can help improve them and increase the Search Health Score.

 

 

It’s worth checking this section daily. And if you find anything relevant for your campaigns, you can add them here. This helps to get your Health Score to 100% which is an indication of well optimised campaigns.

 

Some common opportunities you’ll normally find include:

 

⁃ new keywords to help improve clicks and impressions
⁃ Budget suggestions to increase traffic and conversions
⁃ Ad extensions to add to make ads prominent

 

Check The Search Terms Report
The search terms report is one of the most important reports in Google AdWords. It shows the actual searches that your ads are getting for your keywords.

 

 

One fact about search terms is that they’re often more in number than keywords. That’s because people Search in a wide range of ways and it’s not possible to include them all as keywords. In fact, Google says 15% of searches each day are completely new to them and haven’t appeared before.

 

Keyword match types are what help to target all these searches. Having phrase, modified broad and broad match keywords will help you target all these searches.

 

The search terms report also helps you find new keywords to bid on. And you’re also likely to find irrelevant searches to add as negative keywords.

 

Do Keyword Research
From time to time you may want to increase impressions and clicks for your campaigns. One way to do that is by adding new keywords. So, you can use the Keyword Planner tool to find new keyword opportunities.

 

The keyword planner tool will help you discover opportunities you may have missed earlier. You can either include them in existing campaigns or create separate campaigns with new ad groups and budgets.

 

A competitors website is another place to find keywords. Use the Keyword Planner tool in AdWords to analyse their websites. This tool will comb through the site looking for related themes and show a list of relevant keywords that you can include in your campaigns.

 

Also, use a tool like Spyfu or SE Ranking to research what competitors are bidding on. This will show you the exact keywords in their campaigns and whether they’re in the top or bottom positions.

 

Update Budgets Accordingly
If your budget is limited and you have a good ROI, then it’s time to increase budgets. This can be done easily in campaign settings.

 

The budget increase should be substantial enough to see a change in performance. So the increase should be 25% or higher to see a real boost in traffic and sales.

 

Adjust Bids
There are two main bidding options in AdWords: Manual and Automatic. For automatic bidding you can use one of the 7 available bid types to meet your goals. These include Maximise Clicks, Maximise Conversions, Target Outranking Share and more

 

 

With manual bidding you can change bids at the ad group and keyword level. And you can use bid modifiers to increase or decrease bids for locations, devices and campaigns.

 

Manual bidding gives you more control than automatic bidding and you can quickly increase bids for the best performing keywords. However, it can be time consuming especially if you have hundreds or thousands of keywords and Ads.

 

This is where automatic bidding helps. Using Google machine learning system, bids are assigned based on performance factors.