7 Quick wins to improve your PPC ROI

Return On Investment, or also known as ROI, is one of the most important measurements for advertisers. It shows the real effect that AdWords has had on your business, but it also gives you insights based on your specific advertising goals (purchase, sign-up, or download).

To work out your Paid Search ROI

ROI = Revenue / Campaign Cost

Calculating your ROI is important because with this metric, you can measure the success of your campaign. What is more, you can also use this data to learn/gain insights for future campaign, as well as use that data to improve on the not so successful campaigns.

In order to measure your ROI, you need to ensure that you can track your conversions/actions that you want your customers to take on your website after clicking your ad. You can do this using Conversion Tracking. This helps you to determine the profitability of your account, right down to the very keyword or ad!

So… how can I improve my ROI? Meet the 7 Wins to improve your Paid Search ROI.

1. Increase the Quality Score

Create a campaign structure as clean as possible. The best way to achieve that is to follow the same category structure as your website.

On every campaign you can create different ad groups per sub-categories, and fill every ad group with specific keywords and relevant Ads, ensuring you drive a good Click Through Rate.

Also, the landing page you choose should be highly related with the keywords, and very relevant to the customer or user. This will ensure you a good QS (Quality Score), and a good QS will ensure you, in the long term, lower prices and better ad positions. </h1

2. Relevant Landing Page

Ensure that you choose the landing pages that are most relevant to your ad. When customers click on an Ad, they expect to see exactly what they are looking for. If this isn’t the case, the chances of having a high bounce rate is increased

A high Bounce rate can negatively affect your Quality Score and consequently increase your CPC’s and resulting in a poorer ROI, so try to avoid it.

Good Keywords + Good Ads = Good % CTR

Good Landing Page + Good CTR% = High QS (Quality Score)

3. Adjust your Keywords to get a better ROI

After a few weeks or even months, depending on the traffic and impressions volume, it is time to adjust your CPC’s to get a better ROI.

During this period, you may be able to notice a trend about which keywords are converting better than others, which ones have the best CTR%, and also, which ones are helping to get which indirect conversions, as well as the click and impressions assisted conversions.

Once you have a broader view of which keywords are working well for you, you will need to focus your efforts on these. At the same time, pause the poor performing keywords (those that are reducing your ROI), as well as look to add new keywords.

4. Long Tail Keywords

Depending on the service or product your business provides, the cost per click can vary a lot. If you are working with branded products that have a good amount of search volume, trial setting up campaigns and ad groups that target these products specifically.

Let’s see one example: if you are working with the Mobile Brand Sony, instead of bidding on terms such as “Sony Mobile”, try targeting “Sony Xperia z3 Compact Black”

Yes, these keywords will have fewer searches, but the CPC’s in contrast should be cheaper, with much less competition. Given that the people looking at that specific level know what they want, the conversion rate is also likely to be much higher.

5. Use compelling ads with your USPs.

Creating appealing Ads is fundamental to getting a good CTR%. So, if you have an offers, any special discounts, extra services/USPs such as “free delivery”, 50% Sales or even a gift, don’t hesitate to use them in your Ads.

6. Ad extensions

Depending of the type of business you are working on, you can use the different type of Ad Extensions: Callout. Sitelinks. Review. Locations. Call.

The main objective for the first three (Callout, Sitelinks and Review) is to gain better visibility, which can also be translated in to getting a better CTR%, whilst offering more information about your company, your offers and products, to the customers.

For Locations and Call extension, the main point is to make the contact via phone or store a lot easier, which can be translated into goals or conversions.

7. Ad scheduling

Using the Adwords tag Segment is very easy to find out which days in the week (or even which hours) are the best for achieving conversions. This information is very relevant and can help you boost your ROI using custom ad scheduling to automatically change your bids on the fly.

By default, your AdWords campaigns are set to “Show ads all days and hours”, but if you use the Ads scheduling tool, you can set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids on specific days and times. This means that your ads will appear only in auctions that take place during the dates and times that you’ve specified.

These are our 7 wins to improve your Paid Search ROI in Adwords, but this is not exact science and, as with any optimisation, you need to try new things every day and constantly optimise and monitor the results to ensure that you are moving in a positive direction.

Get in contact if we can support you with your Paid Media activities.