7 Strategies for a Successful Paid Search Campaign

Define Your Metrics

There are a several different ways you can measure the effectiveness of your paid search campaign.  CPA (Cost per Acquisition) and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) are just two of the most popular. The majority of metrics can also be very misleading. Profit will most likely always be your best choice when choosing a metric. Sales and Revenue can increase, profits can still go down. CPA can be low but it doesn’t necessarily mean that your profits are higher, so when choosing a metric, go with Profit.

Be Relevant

From your keywords to your ad copies, always be relevant, not only does it help increase your CTR (click thru rate) but it will also improve your quality score, which can result in lower CPC (cost per click) and higher ranking. A few good rules of thumb to follow: Keep your ad groups concise and highly specific; make sure your keyword centers on a single product or service and avoid duplicate keywords among different ad groups. Use Keyword Insertion on your Ad Copies; it will definitely make your Ad more relevant and increase your CTR (click thru rate). Make sure your landing page is also specific to and relevant to your Ad Copy; having the exact content, products and or services that your customers were looking for on your landing page will significantly increase your CR (conversion rate.)

Setup Goals and Funnels

Now that you have gone through all that hard work setting up your campaign, you have to make sure that is working as it should. Tracking and analyzing your data on a daily basis is critical for the success of your campaign. First, create conversion goals, whether your conversion is a sale, a form lead or a phone call, you must setup a conversion goal for that and of course, do not forget to link to your AdWords data. You can create several conversion goals to help you better track your campaign. Linking your goals to your AdWords data will also enable you to quickly view your CPA (cost per acquisition). Conversion Funnels are also extremely vital to the success of your campaign. It will help you understand your visitor’s behavior during a visit and show you where visitors are abandoning your website before converting. With this data in hands you can optimize your website in order to increase your conversion rate.

Track Your Conversions

Once you have all of your conversion goals and conversion funnels in place it’s time to track and analyze your data to optimize your campaign. Knowing exactly which keywords are bringing you the highest revenue, or even better, the highest Profit or ROI, will allow you to get rid of underperforming keywords and capitalize on high converting ones, reducing costs and increasing profits. Analyzing your data will also help you identify where your visitors are coming from and which ones are actually converting and not wasting costly clicks.

Use Search Query To Find New Keywords & Negative Keywords

Use search query reports to identify what terms your ad is actually displaying for. Look for keywords that are irrelevant to what you are offering and are generating clicks and use them as negative keywords. Searching query reports are also a good way to identify new revenue producing, highconverting keywords to use on your campaign. Having enough good negative keywords in your campaigns will allow you take advantage of broad match keywords and will also increase your click thru rate.

Use Day Parting

Running a day parting report could be crucial to the success of your paid search campaign. You want to make sure you are getting qualified traffic to your website rather than just a ton of non-converting clicks. By running a day parting report and having your conversion goals setup properly on Google Analytics, you will be able see the number of clicks, impressions, conversions and revenue at each time of the day. Perhaps your optimal time for conversions are only during business hours and on weekdays, so why let your campaign running and wasting clicks during nights and weekends. After you have this data in hands you can setup your campaign to run only at times where you have optimal conversion rate. Knowing how to setup and use day parting properly will save you money and increase your ROI.

Create a Separate Campaign for Mobile And Tablets

Creating a separate campaign for mobile and tablets is strongly advised if you want to take full advantage of your budget. You may consider a more aggressive bidding style since fewer ads are shown on each page. It will allow allocating a specific budget only for mobile so you will know exactly how much you will spend. You can also test different keywords since keywords that may work for a desktop campaign may not work as well for mobile and tablet campaigns. Creating specific Ad Copies for your mobile campaign can also increase your click thru rate and conversion rate by using call to actions and buttons with phrases such as “click to call now” or “request a quote from your phone”.