With the new year officially in full swing, you may find that now is a better time than any for your business’ PPC campaigns to undergo a strict review, analysing best practises to optimise your overall performance and improve the return on investment that you see from your PPC management. The new year provides great opportunity to implement new approaches and features into your paid search strategies, helping you to identify the best practices to be using for both you and your business goals.

Review any New Features

Every so often, advertising platforms, such as Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, will be seen to update their systems and the ways in which they operate, introducing a series of new features that advertisers are able to utilise to optimise their ads and how they perform. It is important that, when looking to improve how your ads run, these features are not overlooked. There are a range of new features that have recently been made readily available to users:

  • Gallery Ads – These are available on the Google Ads platform in Beta. When using Gallery Ads, ads will be shown at the top of search results, seen within a swipeable image.
  • Image Extensions – These provide users with a great way to attract more attention toward their text ads. Google Ad’s version of this feature allows advertisers to automatically pull the images used from their website, while Microsoft Ad’s version allows users to upload this imagery themselves.
  • Promotion Extensions – These can be found within the Google advertising platform and can be added to the account down to an Ad Group level. This feature is great for advertisers using sitelinks or ad copy for promotions. Promotion extensions stand out to users more and adopt a ‘coupon’ type look.
  • Lead form Extensions – These are available in Google Ads as a Beta within search ads. Lead form extensions allow for users to gain leads directly from their paid ads.

Review your Budget

One of the best ways that you can work to optimise your PPC campaign’s performance is through the review, and potential redistribution, of your daily budget. To ensure that your budget is being used to its highest potential, you need to consider whether:

  • Your campaigns are seen to be using their total assigned budget each month.
  • Any additional traffic could be captured to grow the results that are seen by your campaigns.
  • Any poorly performing, but highly optimised, campaigns should be paused, or removed, so that their budget can be pushed into better performing campaigns or ad groups.
  • It makes sense to shift budgets from lower performing campaigns to increase the budgets of more successful campaigns and ad groups.

Consider Mobile Customisation

A mobile paid ad strategy is a best practice often ignored by a number of advertisers, users often not realising that, in many cases, mobile ad traffic has been seen to vastly surpass traffic seen by desktop users. Customising your ads for mobile can offer a great way for your business to be discovered. Marketers that are not seen to optimise their PPC campaigns for mobile run the risk of wasting a great portion of their monthly budget, meaning they may miss out on countless opportunities to reach their target audience as a result.

To assess whether optimisation for mobile is the right step forward for you and your business, advertisers should first start by assessing the volume of traffic that is seen to be coming from mobile devices in their PPC account and the conversion rate of this traffic. This will help to determine whether campaigns should be customised as to better target these users in the future.

 

Overall, there are a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration when looking to optimise your pay-per-click campaigns for the new year, helping you to utilise best practices and improve the performance of your ads, improving your return on investment.

To find out more about the PPC strategies that you should be utilising for your business, get in touch with our PPC consultants at In Front Digital and discover what we can do to help you and your company grow.