Looking for more conversions and lower PPC costs? Look at these 4 areas of your PPC campaigns to improve your campaign performance.

Optimize Your Campaign Configuration

Optimizing your campaigns involves paying attention to the details. If the proper groundwork has been laid, the details constitute simple steps of clicking the right boxes. Though, you’ll need to click all the right boxes in all the right places.

Be sure you’ve defined the goal of the campaign. If you’re promoting an event, but haven’t yet begun registration, the goal may be visits to the event website and 3 unique pages viewed.

Maybe you just opened a barbershop and want to attract new customers. Will your goal be a coupon download or an appointment scheduled online. A call-from-ad conversion would be just as important to track.

If the PPC campaign doesn’t have a defined conversion, you’ll lose the ability to set campaigns to maximize conversions—or be stuck with generic conversions that will generate higher costs per click.

Note that in the barbershop example, 3 distinct conversions can be created for each user action. Over time, one strategy may prove to be more effective than others. Some may prove to be less expensive in terms of cost per conversion. In any case, now you can make a more informed business decision.

Analyze the keywords and segments targeted by your campaign. Do you need to broaden or divide segments? Does your messaging match the potential audience?

Understanding the differences among your various audience segments can greatly improve PPC campaign efficiency. If you sell auto accessories, the person who buys a Ford F-150 differs in many ways from the one who buys a Ram 1500. (yes it’s true, we did the research for a client)

Don’t be TOO detailed in audience segmentation. You’ll end up with campaigns that never deliver ads. Audience segmentation will take experimentation to get right. If you’re budget can handle the bloat, it may be worth the effort to stay more broad.

Align Your Campaign Assets

Web users absolutely despise being misled. If the landing page doesn’t meet user expectations created in the ad, you’ll lose more money on clicks that don’t convert.

Users want what they want, when they want it. Make sense?

Essentially, the carpet should match the drapes.

If your auto repair shop ad promotes brake services, why does the click lead the user to the shop’s home page? The user expected to get information about a brake job. Instead they must find the brakes job section on their own. We’ve created extra clicks—and a lower conversion rate—for a user with a 3-second attention span.

If you’re in a lead gen environment, you’ll want to consider where in the funnel you’re attracting leads. A form with 20 fields probably goes ignored for first-time users in many instances. You may have to get basic essential information up front, and ask for the additional information via a lead nurturing campaign or PPC display remarketing campaign. The expected conversion should correspond to the stage within the marketing funnel.

Particular attention should be paid to any keyword-based campaigns. Slight variations in keywords can attract very different audiences. The keyword phrase “lawn equipment financing” has a much different meaning to users than “finance lawn equipment”. B2B audiences will prefer the former and B2C audiences the latter. Depending on who you are, the differences will be important—and burn ad spend if you get it wrong.

What Happens After the Click?

PPC focuses so much on keywords and clicks, it becomes all too easy to forget that all those clicks represent real human beings. People with emotions and reactions. People who make the decision to move forward or not with the use of your product or service.

In the old days, you rarely bought anything without talking to someone, in-person or on the phone. In the internet era, purchases happen more often than not without any human interaction. With lead generation, multiple touch points might need to occur before human interaction happens.

Knowing how people interact with your landing page can have a huge impact on conversion and thus ROI.

If you’ve never used a screen recorder, you will be amazed at how much you can learn from watching users interact with your landing page.

What you thought was obvious, where to click for warranty information, becomes a mystery to half the users who arrive at the landing page. Oftentimes you discover your page layout doesn’t quite layout correctly across mobile devices. Or worse, you discover the conversion form only works on Android devices and not iPhone.

If you don’t have access to a web traffic screen recorder, we recommend starting off with Hotjar. It’s free to start and setup doesn’t require much effort.

Research Your Target Audiences

Know who you want to convert. The more you know about your target audience, the better your campaign will perform.

Understanding your target audience will determine things like imaging, messaging or product/service offering. All of this information will be in addition to helping identify the best keywords to target.

Start with a buyer/lead persona document. The persona will provide key information about your target audience. The persona humanizes your click. It allows you to begin creating the connection to the actual person who will have to complete the conversion.

With a well-scoped persona, you have the basic structure upon which to build your PPC campaigns. Your campaign could have an ad group for each persona you decide to target. With targeted campaigns, you increase overall campaign quality. The higher the quality of your campaigns, including the landing page, the bigger the discount you get per click in keyword auctions.

With a greater focus, your campaigns will generate more efficient performance. With a lower CPC and higher conversion rates your business gets greater value from your digital marketing investments.

Want More Value From Your PPC Campaigns?

Acute Angle Marketing provides digital marketing services and consulting to businesses like yours. We’re unique in that we work on a performance-based approach to PPC advertising management. Our clients only pay for our services when we achieve an agreed upon result.

We also specialize in helping businesses with existing digital marketing campaigns find ways to improve their performance or efficiency.

We offer a wide array of services such as SMS & email marketing, content marketing, video marketing and editing services.