What are the main areas of optimisation in PPC?

If your business is running PPC ads and you do not see the results you wish for, there are multiple ways we can help optimise your campaigns and increase the return on investment:

  • Account restructuring – campaigns and ad groups
  • Keyword and negative keyword research
  • Ad copy optimisation
  • Audience targeting
  • Bid adjustment and budget management

To read more about the importance of PPC and the role of a PPC account manager, visit our ultimate guide to PPC advertising.

How to do a PPC keyword research?

When it comes to PPC keyword research for Paid Search advertising, there are different types of keywords you can look for and categorise for further use:

  • Commercial keywords – the most valuable search terms for your ads
  • Branded keywords – keywords containing your brand name
  • Competitor keywords – keywords containing your competitor’s names
  • Broad keywords – these have a low commercial intent, however, can increase your visibility and brand awareness
  • Long-tail keywords – precise keywords, usually offering low volume, but also low cost and competition

Once you know what you’re looking for, you can use keyword research tools such as Mangools KWFinder and Keyword Tool to see the average monthly search volume, as well as the price per click and the level of competition for each keyword.

The PPC account structure, including the keyword count, is entirely up to the account manager; however, a good guideline for how many keywords should be in an ad group, is the keyword relevance to the ad group. Your ad copy must directly correspond to the chosen keywords. Typically, a PPC campaign would have a maximum of 20 corresponding keywords. If your keyword count is up in the 10s and 15s, we recommend you evaluate if they are a good match for the ad group.

How much should you spend on Google Ads?

There is no one recommended figure for pay per click advertising, as the allocated budgets will vary from business to industry. However, a low PPC spend will make it challenging to draw valuable conclusions about the performance of your ads and PPC campaigns. This will make it hard to optimise the campaigns and ads for a better return on investment, making the PPC investment not very worthwhile.

One way to calculate how much you should spend on PPC advertising is to identify the number of leads or sales that you require and maximum of that you can profitably pay for a lead or sale. Once you have this information, you can calculate your PPC marketing budget by multiplying your required number of leads with your maximum cost per lead.

PPC advertising budget = Maximum cost per lead * required number of leads

Google Ads has a setting, called “Optimize rotation: prefer best performing ad”. This setting enables the Google algorithm to optimise the delivery of your PPC ads to show the variation that is most likely to improve the performance of your PPC account. Google recommends that you have three Expanded Text ads and one Responsive Search ad in each ad group

How long to test ads for and how to choose the winner?

Once you have enough data, you can perform an ad copy analysis to determine the best performing ad copy. You can pause the poorest performing ad copy and then add in another ad copy variation to split test. By doing this process repeatedly, you should see an improvement in the performance of your PPC ads. One way to measure the performance of your PPC ads is to download and group the data in Microsoft Excel. You can then look at various metrics to decide which ad copy to pause.

PPC ad testing

There are a few metrics that you can look at when carrying out PPC ad copy analysis. As a starting point, here are a few of the metrics that you could look at:

  • Clickthrough rate: Clicks / Impressions
  • Conversion rate = Conversions / Clicks
  • Impressions to Conversions = Conversions / Impressions

Why am I not seeing my PPC ads?

There are multiple reasons why your PPC ads might not be showing up on Google. If you are not seeing your PPC ads appearing on Google’s search engine result page, then here are four reasons that you could consider:

  1. It is essential to note that your daily budget will limit how frequently your ad will show up. If the budget isn’t large enough, then Google will show your ad sometimes and not show it on other occasions, even if your Ad Rank is high enough for your ad to show.
  2. Your budget may be high enough, but you may not be bidding enough. This means your Ad Rank isn’t high enough for your PPC ads to show up.
  3. Your Ad Rank may be high enough for your ad to show sometimes but not high enough for you to have 100% impression share. This means that your ad will show sometimes and not others.
  4. Your PPC ads or keywords might be disapproved. This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as the use of inappropriate language or trademark issues.