How to Improve your Underperforming PPC Campaigns

Pay Per Click Advertising has become one of the most common forms of advertising that has proved its worth of being highly effective when it comes to driving immediate and qualified traffic that is on a verge of converting.

Nevertheless, PPC has the power to display your ads to a highly targeted audience at the exact time when they are actually looking for your product or service.

PPC has become an innovative method to increase the traffic. But at the same time, it also requires hard work, strategic thinking, proper planning and constant monitoring.

Sometimes what happens is that in spite of putting your 100% effort, some of the campaigns do not work according to your expectations. To make it worse, sometimes you do not even understand the reasons that are causing your PPC Campaigns to underperform.

Are you also going through such a situation where your PPC Campaigns are underperforming?

Moreover, there is no point crying over spilt milk. Rather you should recover from this tragedy and modify the elements that are causing your PPC Campaigns to underperform.

Here are some tips by which you can improve the performance of your underperforming PPC Campaigns.

1. Increase the Quality Score

Quality Score is one of the essential aspect of AdWords that an advertiser looks for.

According to Google, Quality Score is the estimated quality of your keywords, ads and the landing pages.

If your keywords, ads and the landing pages are highly relevant, then it will give a better search experience to the users.

For giving the users a positive and highly relevant user experience, Google will reward you with an improved Quality Score.

One of the fundamentals of PPC is that the higher the quality score, the lower will be the costs. For this reason, it is really important to focus on improving the Quality Score of your PPC Campaigns.

Google says that the Quality Score is primarily based on three factors i.e.

• Click Through Rate
• Ad Relevance
• Landing Page Relevance

To improve the Quality Score, you will have to improve all the three factors.

(i) To improve the CTR you should follow these tips:

• Use proper match of keywords
• Employ negative keywords
• Use sitelink extension
• Write Outstanding PPC Ad Text
• Make full use of Ad Extensions
• Increase your bids
• Conduct A/B testing of the ads
• Ensure the relevance between the keywords and the ads

(ii) To improve the Ad Relevance, you should follow these tips:

• Make sure that your keywords and the ads are highly relevant and have a direct correlation.
• Have a constant check on your search terms and ensure that the keywords and ad text are relevant to the search queries of the users.
• Do not forget to use the negative keywords. You can use them at the Ad Group as well as Campaign Level.
• To make your Ad Groups highly themed and for best Ad relevance, make Single Keyword Ad Groups.

(iii) To improve the Landing Page Relevance, you should follow these tips:

• Optimize the loading time of your page
• Make your landing page easy to navigate
• Create attention grabbing headline and remove distractions
• Include a compelling CTA and highlight the USP
• Use attractive images and videos
• Make your landing page responsive and device compatible

2. Do not forget Negative Keywords

Negative keywords play a vital role in avoiding the budget leakage from your PPC Campaigns.

They are considered as a boon for PPC Marketing. Whenever a PPC Campaign fails or underperforms, the negative keywords come to its rescue.

They are those keywords which prevent your ads from being triggered by irrelevant search queries.

Whenever your ads are triggered by irrelevant search queries, they are pushed down to a lower position. As a result, the CTR falls drastically.

Moreover, if you ads are getting high impressions but you CTR is comparatively low, this calls for the inclusion of negative keywords.

By ensuring that your ads are not triggered by any sort of irrelevant search queries, negative keywords drive targeted and qualified traffic which result in increased conversions.

They also let you improve your Quality Score and reduce the Cost Per Click, making a win-win kind of situation.

3. Ensure the relevance between the Ads and the Search Terms

When you look at your Ad Groups, you will notice that there are certain Ad Groups which are performing well while the others are underperforming.

If this is the case, then it would be wise to focus on the under performing Ad Groups. The first step that is required for boost the performance of the underperforming campaigns is to evaluate the relevance between your ads and the search terms.

For this go to a particular Ad Group, check the keywords and then go into Details> Search Terms>All

With this, you will be able to see the search terms that have initiated the clicks on your ads.

If you get to see a lack of relevance between your ads and search terms, this may be a major problem as your ads are showing for irrelevant search queries which are not only lowering your CTR but is also wasting your Ad spend.

To fix this problem, you ensure to make your ads more relevant to the keywords and the search terms. By doing this you will not only improve the relevance but will also improve the Quality Score as well as increase the conversion rate.

Moreover, if a certain search term is irrelevant, add it to your negative list to ensure that your ad is not triggered to that irrelevant search term.

4. Perform Competitor’s Analysis

Competitor Analysis is the process of identifying your competitors and assessing their strategies, strengths and weaknesses.

It is an essential component of your PPC Campaign as it provides you with a plethora of information about your competitors. This information not only lets you upgrade your PPC Campaigns but will also increase the conversions for you.

To conduct a solid competitor analysis you should know about:

• Your Competitors
• The products/services that they sell
• Their strategies
• Their strengths and weaknesses
• The kind of threat that you have from your competitors.

You can collect all the relevant information about your competitors and then base your strategies according to that.

You can either conduct the competitor’s analysis manually or use a tool.

Although you can collect a lot of data manually, it is always better to use tools because they can provide you with improved and accurate data in comparatively less time.

There are a lot of PPC tools available for competitor’s analysis, giving you the opportunity to choose the tool that suits your choice as well as priority. Some examples of the tools are iSpionage, SEMrush, KeywordSpy, SpyFu, Adbeat, WhatRunsWhere, The Search Monitor, Adgooroo and a lot more.

5. Take Remarketing into consideration

Remarketing is a feature that in PPC that allows you to show your ads to users who have already visited your website in the past.

Hence, the remarketing campaigns are a great way to increase the overall conversions for your campaigns. This is because the remarketing campaigns only target those users who have who have previously shown some kind of interest in your product or service.

Remarketing helps you to connect with your past visitors and persuade them to come back to your website to complete the conversion goal.

As your past visitors are already familiar with your product, service or brand, they are more likely to convert into a lead or sale.

Remarketing also lets you create highly targeted ads because now you know that you have to only target the people who have visited your website and what were they looking for.

Furthermore, you can even segment your audience through remarketing and create different ads on the basis of the pages that your visitors have visited.

Generally, it has been observed that the campaigns that include remarketing as one of its strategies tend to have a higher conversion rate. This is because you remind your audience about your product or service when they are actively looking for it. This makes them convert as soon as possible.

As your conversion rate goes up, your ROI gets increased automatically.

6. Improve the Landing Page Experience

According to Unbounce, “A Landing Page is any web page that a visitor can arrive at or “land” on.”

More precisely, a landing page is a certain web page that is designed while keeping a single objective in mind.

The landing page acts as a first step towards the conversion funnel because it is responsible for converting your website visitors into potential conversions.

The Landing Page acts as a strong indicator of the performance of your PPC campaigns and holds the potential to increase your conversions exponentially.

There are certain things that you should keep if you are looking forward to improving the user experience of your landing page.

The first thing that you do is to create attractive headlines that grab the attention of the user. As a matter of fact, the headline only has few seconds to grab the attention of the user. So make sure that your headline is straightforward enough to catch the attention of the users instantly. Make your headline short, clear and concise.

Remove all the distractions from the landing page as they might divert the users from taking the desired conversion goal.

To minimize the distractions you can either shrink or remove the irrelevant menu and eliminate the side bars. You can also take off the irrelevant images as well as videos.

Include a compelling Call-to-Action because it is the most important element when you are looking forward to increasing your conversion rate.

The CTA is the action that you want your customers to take and if you do not have a CTA, your visitors will not convert into customers.

Ensure that the CTA is the most prominent feature of your landing page so that it becomes easy for the visitors to click on it.

Although the content aspect of the landing page images and videos speak a lot more than the words. Choose images and videos that are relevant to your product and service and also make sure that they are of high-quality.

Do not forget the fact that a very large percentage of users use mobile as a device. And for this reason, you should optimize your landing page for the mobile users as well.

Reduce the loading time of your landing pages because while surfing the internet, the users are in a hurry. If they find that a certain website is taking too long to open, they will simply move on to some other website. Moreover, even a delay of one second can hamper the performance of your landing page conversions. So to avoid this, you should reduce the loading time of your website.

7. Take advantage of the Ad Extensions

Ad Extensions are a type of ad formats that show or reveal extra information about your business, product or service.

Consider using the Ad Extensions of you want to increase your CTR significantly.

The Ad Extensions not only increase the visibility of your ads but they also let your ads receive more qualified clicks. They also highlight the benefits, features and details of your products. Basically, there are two types of Ad Extensions. One is Manual Ad Extension while the other is Automatic Ad Extension.

(i) Manual Ad Extension

They are customizable add ons to your Ads that gives extra information about your product or service. They are of the following types:

• Sitelink Extensions: They are the most common type of extensions that are used. They are located under your headline and description. They offer quick access to your conversion oriented pages. They drive in more users who are looking for something specific.
• Location Extensions: This type of extension allows you to add your business address to your ads. This makes it easier for customers to reach out to you.
• Call Extensions: You can display the phone number of your business with Call Extensions. The call extensions make it easy for a lot of potential customers to get in touch with you through the phone.
• App Extensions: This extension allows the users to download your app by directly giving the download link.
• Review Extensions: These extensions allow the reviews of the third party on your ads. By sharing a positive review by a respectable third party can enhance the CTR of your ads.
• Callout Extensions: These extensions let you add more text to your ads like short clips of text that makes you stand out in a crowd.

(ii) Automatic Ad Extension

These extensions are automatically pulled out from the different sources to create an ad extension for you. They are of the following types:

• Customer Rating Extensions: They are generated from certified Google sources and consumer surveys.
• Seller Rating Extensions: They are automated extensions that add to your store’s rating.
• Previous Visits Extensions: It provides a short footnote telling the user if they have recently visited the website.
• Dynamic Sitelink Extensions: They link to a popular offering or piece of content on your website.
• Dynamic Structured Extensions: They show additional information about various categories of your website.

Final Thoughts

As popularly said that There is room for improvement, so is in the case of any underperforming PPC Campaigns. You just cannot abandon your PPC Campaigns by pausing or deleting them just because they are under performing. Rather you should look for various loopholes that are causing your PPC Campaigns to underperform. Understand your underperforming keywords and then optimize them to enhance or boost their performance.

About the Author: Dinesh Thakur is the Co-Founder of Ads Triangle which is a Google Partner and Bing Accredited Agency. He has over 7 years of experience in Pay Per Click Marketing.

Dinesh has helped hundreds of businesses to grow their revenue through PPC. He has expertise skills in Google AdWords and is passionate about Pay Per Click Marketing.