Part 1: 4 Easy & Underestimated Hacks to Skyrocket Your PPC Campaign | Hite Digital

Our search for the next “big win” often prevents us from acknowledging that we won’t scale our campaign exponentially nor steadily based on single wins. To develop a successful PPC campaign, you must begin with a solid foundation based on thorough planning and research followed by rigorous optimizations. Trends are rapidly evolving, and Digital Marketing is doing a great job keeping up. You must embrace change and continuously reassess your campaign strategies if you want to obtain optimal results.

While the most substantial way to increase your campaign’s ROI still involves long-term planning and thousands of micro-wins, its level of success is heavily impacted by the following core ideas and their proper implementation.

This is only the 1st part of our blog post on PPC Hacks that will help your campaigns skyrocket

The right tracking setup can easily make or break a campaign.Tracking conversions and goals in Google Analytics and Google Ads is critical to understanding the impact of your digital marketing campaigns.

There’s little point in analyzing metrics and optimizing campaigns until conversion tracking is set up correctly. Relying only on clicks and click-through-rates is not enough! While they might bring a smile to your face, they don’t make you money nor will they make your campaigns successful. Instead, it’s crucial to capture the metrics that will enable you to optimize your campaigns efficiently and scale. (Simply said, track conversions.)

That said, tracking conversions and analyzing data alone won’t increase sales overnight. But, it helps you make smarter marketing decisions, which are key to increasing the campaign’s ROI.

How will proper tracking help improve my campaign’s profitability?

Conversion tracking matters, . Any savvy business person knows: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”

If you’re not convinced, let’s look at the stats. According to , 97% of campaigns with poor tracking don’t produce a positive ROI. It’s straight-forward; if you aren’t tracking conversions, your campaigns aren’t likely to produce a profit.

Less than 30% of active Google Ads accounts have conversion tracking implemented ( Search Engine Journal ). This means, 70% of advertisers have no idea whether their campaigns are working or not. As mentioned before, we can accurately assume from the get-go they’re not profitable.

While looking into the remainder, it turns out only half of them had any meaningful conversion metrics in place. This means only about 15% of all Google Ads accounts have conversion data that can actually be used to improve campaign performance.

While delving into the performance of these accounts, the following was found:

ALL ACCOUNTS

• On average, Google Ads accounts had a conversion rate of 2.35%.
• About 30% of them have conversion rates below 1%.
• The best performing quartile of accounts had conversion rates of 5.3% and above.

ONLY ACCOUNTS WITH PROPER TRACKING METHODS

• An average conversion rate is 3.16%.
• Just over 15% of accounts had conversion rates below 1%.
• The highest quartile of accounts had conversion rates of at least 8% or better. Furthermore, the highest 10% of the accounts with effective tracking had conversion rates of more than 11.50%

We can conclude that Google Ads Accounts with proper tracking have about 50% better conversion rates than the typical Google Ads account. This shows that implementation is a must.

It is important to understand how each one of the steps within the sales funnel contributes to a conversion and how this can be applied to your campaign. Proper data attribution will allow you to apply the campaign strategies needed to increase ROI by correctly identifying all your potential customers. This brings us to the next point: creating custom audiences.

Tailor Strategies for Custom Audiences

Keyword intent, ad content, and campaign settings are extremely important for paid search. But they are only effective when matched with the most efficient and well-segmented audiences. The more you know about your traffic, and the visitors who convert, the better you can target your campaigns.

The Pareto Principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. When applied to digital marketing, this means that 80% of your revenue can be attributed to 20% of your customers.

Although the percentages may vary, it is still the case that some of your customers are worth a whole lot more than others, and identifying them will make the difference in your campaign’s profit.

Understanding the sales path means understanding your audience and how to target it. If your product has a long sales funnel, you can target different stages with specific content tailored to each segment.

Considering they are at different phases of the buying funnel and buyer intent differs for each one, segmenting custom audiences will allow you to change your approach to specific groups of people. Then you can provide messaging that best fits their needs and appeals to them the most, whether this is aggressive promotions for cart abandoners or unique sales propositions for home page visitors.

With such easy access to limitless information; resources, reviews etc, the buying process is much more complex than it used to be and usually requires several different touch points before a user converts. Credibility and reputation is more important than ever, designing a strategy for each phase of the cycle is crucial to create a solid relationship with engagers.

Use and Abuse Remarketing Lists

Remarketing is the ability to show specific ads to users based on their previous visits and actions on your site. This can be extremely effective in terms of conversions and cost since you can use those previous visits and actions to identify highly interested individuals.

Through remarketing with Google Analytics, you can create remarketing lists in Google Ads based on various parameters.

Go beyond all visitors — cart droppers, blog readers, video watchers, phone callers, previous converters… the possibilities are endless! The audiences can be used for Display, Search, Shopping and YouTube, so make sure you use them whenever possible to supercharge your campaigns.

We have already discussed the importance of targeting customers throughout the different stages of the funnel and tailoring the message. Remarketing campaigns have been a game changer for this purpose.

When you properly identify and credit the first interaction and subsequently add the customer to your audiences, you automatically gain a competitive advantage. You can now follow this customer throughout their whole journey, and all their online interactions will be influenced by the fact that they’ve visited your site before.

With the appropriate audience lists, ad message and bid modifiers in place, you will have a campaign strategy that your competitors can’t beat.

Google’s Targeting Options

“…Catering to a specific and defined audience is far more powerful than targeting keywords.” -Neil Patel

Google has shifted the primary focus from intent to customers. And why not? After everything we’ve discussed, it’s a no-brainer; there isn’t a single campaign structure in the world that will generate profits if it’s not targeting the right audience.

Google used their infinite data and proprietary tools to introduce their own audiences.

Instead of solely relying on your own data and findings, you can now apply Google’s predefined audiences to better target your potential customers. You can choose from a wide variety of user demographics, what their interests and habits are or what they have been actively searching for online. A combination of highly targeted (and specific) audiences is the perfect combo to maintain costs controlled and improve the campaign’s ROI.

Originally published at https://www.hitedigital.com on June 27, 2019.