Over the past two weeks, we’ve looked at two core facets of any search campaign: writing ad text that’s designed to convert, and diversifying ad types to attract a wider audience.
This week, I want to discuss the third part of the process: optimizing your campaigns to improve their performance.
As every PPC marketer knows, taking a campaign live is when the testing and learning really begin. Using the insights that follow is how you develop a strong foundation into a memorable, profitable campaign.
Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can optimize existing campaigns to drive additional traffic and better conversions.
1. Understand the point of testing
Imagine you’re in a mall shopping for clothes. What makes you decide to enter a store? Is it the window display? That big sale with 50% discounts? Points or cashback on your credit card?
The store won’t know until they ask; testing and identifying what really helps. Your PPC campaigns work in a similar way.
You could have drafted the best ad copy ever — proposing value, mentioning promotions. But until you test it in a way designed to provide answers, you won’t know if the ad text works or which parts are most enticing to users.
2. Pause ads that aren’t converting
Performance metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, and conversions to impressions served can help you identify if your ads resonate with users. After your ads have served for enough time or won enough impressions, you can begin testing them.
Traffic for each ad group will vary, which is why testing ads is a continuous process. This ensures that as soon as some of your ad groups have served the right amount of traffic, you can:
- Test ad groups with significant performance data
- Test ads with a similar number of impressions to find a winner
PPC expert and long-time Optmyzr customer Isaac Rudansky shared his best practices in this blog, explaining how Optmyzr can help you test your ads more effectively.
3. Turn winners into champions
The next step is to test your ad components to find messaging that works the best across your campaigns. Some cool ways to manage ad content better include:
- Find high-performing headlines or descriptions from specific campaigns to create appealing Responsive Search Ads.
- Find ad components that are used less frequently but perform well. Use that text to create new ads that replace low-performing ones.
- Find ad text that’s being used too frequently, and create new variations to test further.
4. Keep seasonality in mind
As important as it is to keep updating your ad text and content, it’s equally vital to keep updating any seasonal offers.
For example, running Christmas ads weeks after the season ends is a fundamental advertising blunder. Avoid mistakes like this by running audits of ad text and replacing these out-of-date ads with new content.
As an aside, you can also use the Rule Engine in Optmyzr to automatically pause campaigns based on seasonality or holiday timing. Find out more about that here.
5. Enhance existing campaigns
There’s always a way to add a new edge to your ads, whether it’s through components you haven’t used or a change in strategy. Here are some ways to take your campaigns to the next level:
- Leverage ad extensions (use at least 3 types).
- Test your landing pages to find which URLs perform best.
- Find new ad group themes and make them more query-focused.
- Implement SKAGs (single keyword ad groups) for keywords with low Quality Score to build ads specific to each keyword.
Conclusion
When it comes to optimization, testing is the most important component. Until your ads have served long enough to get some strong data behind them, it can be difficult to gauge just what is and isn’t working.
The further you get along this journey, the quicker and more scalable your optimization needs to be. If you’d like to see how Optmyzr can make this experience more seamless, you can try our platform completely free for 14 days — no credit card required!
If you have any other questions, write to us at support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be happy to start a conversation!
