7 Proven Ways to Improve the Performance of Your PPC Campaign

When we start working on a PPC account or campaign, it usually comes with some history.

Whether we inherited it or were asked to perform an audit, the goal is always the same: to look at it with fresh eyes, utilizing our expertise and hard-earned skills.

We need to make sense of it all to fix problems and improve performance.

This post will teach you about seven key areas to optimize to improve the performance of your PPC campaigns. Even if you’ve been working on an account for a while, it can benefit from a thorough review of these critical opportunities.

Seven Crucial Areas for Improving Your PPC Campaign Performance

Location-based performance.
Device performance.
Network Performance (Search vs. Search Partners vs. Display).
Performance by the audience.
Negatives and lists of negatives
Platform Features Available (and Applicable to the Account/Campaign)
Tracking of conversions.

1. Locational Performance

Looking at where your existing and prospective customers are located is an often overlooked but obvious way to segment performance by audience.

You will most likely notice patterns for various states, regions, and even postal codes.

This appears to be self-evident when we consider that demographics can vary greatly from place to place.

Users from so-called affluent suburbs, for example, may have higher transaction values or LTVs (lifetime values), which would justify an increase in the amount we are willing to spend to acquire those customers (CPA).

If there are significant differences in performance by location, it may be necessary to split the campaigns and structure them so that ads and ad text can be aligned and tailored accordingly.

2. Device Performance

It’s self-evident. Despite the increasing convergence of experiences across platforms and devices, user behavior remains (more often than not) significantly different.

It’s not just about screen size and resolution; it’s also about context and why we use one device (i.e., mobile) over another (i.e., desktop).

Knowing our users and customers, as well as how they convert, it is unlikely that one device will outperform the other. However, the numbers never lie, so it’s simple to see and adjust the strategy by increasing or decreasing the weight of our bids.

3. Network Performance (Search vs. Search Partners vs. Display)

We still see PPC campaigns that target all networks from time to time (Search, Search Partners, and Display).

We could debate the quality of impressions and clicks from partners’ websites for hours. However, most of the time, these only generate so little traffic that the spend is negligible in the context of an account.

And, given that there is no way to target Search Partners on their own, whether we keep Search Partners on or off is a different story.

However, the same cannot be said for the Display Network; Search and Display campaigns should always be separated.

For starters, Search is a pull medium, whereas Display is a push medium. Display ads, even when highly targeted, are a form of disruption of the user experience, and we must always acknowledge this in our creativity and messaging.

Furthermore, we should most likely use the two networks to target customers and prospects at different stages of their user journey, with different strategies, KPIs, and targets aligned to that.

4. Performance of the Audience

We frequently see search engines driving significant traffic from existing customers who use the engines to quickly “navigate” to a website to access their accounts.

When they come from PPC ads, these navigational clicks can be quite costly if appropriate safeguards are not in place.

Add suppression lists to avoid incurring any extra costs that will not result in additional conversions (where possible).

Other logical applications of audience targeting include the segmentation of the user base into clusters defined by behavior (i.e., page visitors) and/or engagement (high content consumption), and thus for remarketing purposes.

However, audiences can also be used for observation rather than targeting, as shown in the preceding example.

Because these will not affect campaign performance, it is strongly advised to include as many relevant audiences as possible.

Once gathered, the data will provide valuable insights into which segments are most valuable and which audiences are underperforming. This will allow you to make the necessary changes to bids and other campaign elements.

5. Negatives and Lists of Negatives

Keywords are still the most powerful signal. However, due to the complexity of natural language and the various (often unique) ways people search, even the most sophisticated machine learning can struggle to fully understand the intent.

As a result, it’s more important than ever to reduce the chances that keywords will match unwanted search queries. You must constantly review and mine the available search query data.

Even with the current limitations, search query reports can be extremely useful in understanding what Google thinks a website or page is about.

As a result, it can potentially help us reduce costs for unwanted, less relevant searches while also potentially helping to increase the quality score (QS).

6. Platform Features Available (and Applicable to the Account/Campaign)

Continuing from the previous point, one of the benefits of using additional features such as ad extensions is the effect they can have on the quality score.

QS should be enough of a reason in and of itself.

Furthermore, given the high cost of search engine ad listings, wouldn’t it make sense to always try to maximize on-page real estate?

If we’re paying a high price to be there, we want to make sure it’s worth it. Furthermore, the more space we can take, the less space there will be for competitors and other advertisers!

Less commonly used features include the ability to upload offline conversions (more on that later) or run experiments and A/B testing.

7. Tracking Conversions

Last but not least – and this is one of my favorites – we must track conversions and ensure that we are tracking the correct goals.

Everything in digital marketing should be measurable, and marketers should be held accountable for the success of their advertising campaigns. Conversion tracking should always be at the heart of media buying strategy and execution.

However, we frequently see examples of PPC accounts and campaigns that either does not have conversion tracking or are tracking the wrong endpoints.

Assuming our conversions are firing and recording properly, some expert advice is to:

To quickly and easily see a breakdown of conversion types by campaign, use the segmentation option within Google Ads (see example below). In fact, the segmentation view is a tremendously useful, yet vastly underappreciated, tool!

When using Target CPA or Target ROAS bid strategies, set the appropriate conversion goal(s) for each campaign.
Create and use custom columns to add conversion points and/or performance metrics such as CPA, ROI, or ROAS.

Finally, consider the following:

In an ideal world, marketing practitioners would have unlimited time to focus on data analysis and problem-solving.

In reality, we are all frequently under pressure to deliver results — and quickly.

As a result, the tried-and-true 80/20 Pareto’s rule should always come in handy when we need to make improvements and show results quickly.

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers, especially when we’re dealing with hundreds of campaigns, ad groups, ads, and potentially thousands of keywords.

So begin where you can make an immediate difference. Look for the campaigns and terms that account for the majority of ad spend.

20% of those are likely responsible for 80% of your outgoing costs.

If those campaigns or keywords are hitting your goals, improving their performance could help you take things to the next level and become the CFO’s best friend.

However, this is also possible if the 20% is not driving the expected results.

In that case, make it a priority to fix those campaigns.

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