Last Updated on 2020-10-12 by ppcguybklyn
When we are running paid search advertising, it is unlikely that our accounts can maintain the same level of high efficiency all the time. There will be some underwhelming months, and there will be some months that just have worse performance than previous periods. As paid search specialists, it is our job to plan the according to optimizations of our accounts based on the performance. In this article, we will be discussing the 4 signs we need to check when the PPC accounts are not performing well, and how to address these signs and improve our accounts
Before evaluating our campaign performance, we need to know the following 3 things:
- Check the account periodically
To ensure keeping the same standard everytime we check our account, we need to monitor the performance at a consistent time. For example, we could check the performance of the previous week every Monday, then use the data from that time period to determine how we want to optimize our accounts this week.
- One optimization at a time, if possible.
If we perform multiple changes everytime we optimize our accounts, it would be difficult for us to know the performance difference after the optimization can be attributed to which change. So we will have trouble knowing what changes work and what changes don’t work. That’s why we should try only making one change to the account at a time whenever it’s possible, then see if this change has positive or negative impact on our ad performances.
- Understand the average performance of the account and what the client expect
The standard we use to evaluate our accounts, usually would be based on the average performances and what do the clients expect from their PPC ads. With these two information to measure the success of the accounts, we would be able to make more subjective decisions on how to improve our ad campaigns.
Now that we know how we want to evaluate our ads, we can start to discuss the important signs that indicate our PPC ads are underperforming.
Low Click Through Rate
Click Through Rate, or CTR, is an important metric to measure the performance of our keywords and ad copies. Normally the ads with extremely low CTR would bring very limited profitability to the account because they lose too much traffic through the transition from impressions to clicks. Every industry has its own benchmark for CTR. But usually when I’m managing my Google Ads account, I would want my non-branded keywords to have at least 1% CTR. If the average CTR is lower than 1%, then it means there is room to improve.
Having low CTR means that the ads the audiences see when they enter their search queries, are not related to the content they are looking for. Or the ad copies themselves are not attracting enough for the audiences to click through even though they are related content to the search terms. In other words, low CTR indicates that our ads are showing to the audiences who have no general interest in our product or services.
How to improve:
To increase click through rate, we need to start with approaching the right audience. One of the ways to do this is adjusting our keyword list. Keywords with the lowest CTR will have to be paused from our campaigns. We can also add frequently searched words that are not related to our website content as negative keywords to ensure we don’t serve our ads while the audiences search for these keywords. After we have a new and improved keyword and negative keyword list, we can use this information to edit our ad copies. Making our ad copies more related to the search terms of the audiences is one of the keys to promote our PPC ads to the people who are actually interested in our products and services.
Low Quality Score
Our campaigns can have a better chance of getting lower CPC and getting better exposure by having higher quality scores. If the quality score is lower than 4, Google Ads will recognize it as too low and the keywords will not be promoted that regularly by the system. 6 and above would be the range of quality scores we should go after if we want to have better performances.
In my previous Google Ads introductory article,the factors that decide quality score are mentioned. These factors are: expected CTR (relevance between ad copies and keywords) and landing page experience (loading speed and webpage design.) These are the areas that we can focus on when our quality scores are too low.
How to improve:
To improve expected CTR, we have to start from our ad copies. Are the headlines and descriptions fully utilizing the character limits of Google Ads? Do we put performing keywords in the headlines? Do we use proper call to action in the descriptions? These are the things we want to consider when we are trying to boost the performance of our ad copies. If the answers to all these questions are yes but we are still seeing low expected CTR. We should be thinking about A/B testing different copies and finding the best one.
As for landing page experience, if our jobs are purely paid search specialists, we might not have that much power over the decision of improving loading speed and web design. We could only actively reach out to the people who are responsible for web development and web design and offer our suggestions. Normally if a website is using an ecommerce platform, it should have competent loading speed so the web design would be the part we want to pay attention to. Continue to A/B testing to find the proper web design is the key to improving overall landing page experience.
High CPC
High CPC has different definitions among different industries and clients. We could use the requested budget from our clients to calculate the maximum number we could pay for one click. If our CPC is higher than this number, then it is too high. The reasons for high CPC are usually intense competition and the auto bidding algorithm aims for a more aggressive bidding strategy to get more exposure.
How to improve:
Before we start to work on lowering our CPC, we need to find the top performing keywords. These keywords provide us high CTR, high quality scores and even high conversion rate. We want to keep the bidding prices of these keywords to make sure they stay at the first page of the search result. Then we move on to the keywords that have mediocre or even bad performance and lower the CPC of these keywords since keyword ranking is not as important as the top performing keywords. If we are using auto bidding, most of the bidding strategies offer a target CPC option. We could calculate the max CPC before we choose auto bidding, then assign it as the target CPC to tell Google Ads that this is the highest price we want to bid for this campaign.
Low conversion rate, high cost per conversion
Low conversion rate usually leads to high cost per conversion and it means one thing: our audience is somewhat unwilling to complete a conversion action after clicking through the ad to our landing page, resulting in us spending high cost for one conversion action. We could also reference to industry benchmarks to find the definition of a low conversion rate. Usually if less than 1% of clicks in an ad campaign can become conversions, the conversion rate is too low. As for cost per conversion, it depends on the value each conversion can provide and the expected ROAS from the clent. For example, if each conversion can bring in $50 worth of revenue and the client is looking for a ROAS of 2, then our target cost per conversion would be $25. Anything higher than this number would be considered a high conversion cost.
How to improve:
There are many ways to increase conversion rate and decrease conversion cost. Sometimes conversion rate optimization (CRO) could even be offered as a separate service. I think when we are strategizing how to increase the conversion rate from a PPC perspective, we have two options: enhance traffic quality and improve the conversion process.
The most important part of enhancing our traffic quality is to make sure our website content and the search queries of our audience are highly correlated. Similar to improving CTR, the content of our landing pages must resonate with our ad copies and keywords. We also need to let people know the appeals of our products and services in a very short period of time by including the right content in our landing pages.
As for improving the conversion process, we have to make sure the process of making a conversion action of checking out is simple and not time consuming. If we are using an ecommerce platform, we usually don’t have to worry about this part since the platform offers its own checkout design. But if we build the website ourselves, we need to think about how to make the process better so that we can get the information we want without making people want to leave the website before completing the checkout.
Conclusion
A good paid search professional should have the ability to plan on different ways to improve PPC accounts according to different data and metrics. There is no shortcut to this, we can only know how to do this by accumulating experiences and trial and error. Continuous testing is always the key to finding the best optimization plan for our PPC accounts.
