Guide To Optimising PPC Ads / How To Optimise PPC Ads

Although obvious to many, the art of optimising your PPC ads is actually unknown to some.

Why Should You Optimise PPC Ads?

Optimising an account to hit and deliver upon certain KPIs should far beyond bidding up or down on a keyword. Bidding up or down may be limiting the volume an advertiser could be getting. You reduce bids, you reduce visibility, you lose clicks and you lose business. Ad Optimising can help advertisers avoid this.

PPC ad optimising also allows an agency to grow spend whilst maintaining revenue for the advertiser. It is a simple solution on how to improve PPC Performance. In doing so, you can possibly increase spend, which again helps raise revenue for the agency.

How Could You Be Optimising?

Although bid management has evolved over time, with more portfolio based approaches becoming more prevalent, an extremely simply way of bid optimising is shown below (assuming the target CPA is £20).

Keyword	CPC	Sales	CPA	Cost
Keyword 1	1.25	15	£30	£450
Keyword 2	0.9	55	£11	£600
Keyword 3	0.75	75	£10	£750
Keyword 4	0.56	87	£9	£800
Keyword 5	1.87	20	£50	£1,000

For the purpose of this demonstration, let’s assume that we have already considered other influencing variables such as average position, conversion rate, average time to convert, average time / day of converting keywords

On the above terms, using simple bid management rules, you would want to increase visibility / bids on keywords 2,3 and 4 right? More traffic means more conversions on the super efficient terms (all things being equal).

You would also want to lower CPC on keywords 1 and 5.

However, what if you can’t increase the visibility on the efficient terms? What if they are already maxed out?

What if decreasing spend on keywords 1 and 5 is going to drop the overall spend significantly, meaning the client under spends (if you are agency side) and your overall revenue for the agency decreases?

There is where PPC Ad Optimising becomes an extremely important component of PPC management.

PPC Ad Optimising Example

Let’s see an example then of what impact ad optimising could have on the above inefficient terms, keywords 1 and 5:

Keyword	Ad	Sales	CPA	Cost
Keyword 1	Ad 1	5	£60	£300
Keyword 1	Ad 2	10	£15	£150
Keyword 5	Ad 1	5	£150	£750
Keyword 5	Ad 2	15	£17	£250

Now I hear you shouting “ads are served at ad group level, you can’t optimise ads on a keyword basis!”

Whilst there is some truth in this, it isn’t the whole ad group that we are focussing on, a few inefficient keywords.

After running some ad analysis at keyword level it is best to see how the ads are performing against the overall ad group. If there are only a couple of keywords not performing in the ad group – you should probably have removed them into an ad group of their own anyway (or a separate campaign all together if they are crucial terms).

Impact of Optimising the PPC Ads – with more numbers!

From the above example we can see that Ad 1 in both cases is spiking the overall CPA.
If Ad 1 had not been served at all the next month, we would have seen the below results (potentially, assuming that all things stayed equal with the increased volume).

Keyword	Ad	Sales	CPA	Cost
Keyword 1	Ad 2	30	£15	£450
Keyword 5	Ad 2	59	£17	£1,000

In this example (if only PPC worked in such a ‘perfect world’ type of way), by optimising the ads, the following month, the Keywords 1 and 5 would see their respective CPAs drop from £30 and £50 to £15 and £17 respectively.

In this example, the client is happy as you improved the cost efficiency and grew the overall volume.
Your boss at your agency is also happy as you have maintained the spend on the account, maintaining the revenue gained.

The benefits of optimising PPC Ads are here for all to see!

Lastly, I will quickly go over the top 6 testing variables of PPC Ads. The following examples are the best ways of optimising PPC Ads:

• Heading
• Description Line 1
• Description Line 2
• Display URL
• Destination URL
• Promotions and Offers

To effectively test ads, you need to split test with one control ad.

When testing, ensure you limit to one variable at a time, for a fair and even test.
Ensure that the ads are served equally and ensure they reach a decent threshold of impressions before making judgements and changes.
(*this threshold will vary by industry and you need to use your own judgment for this – that said 10,000 impressions in a car finance industry would not be enough but 10,000 impressions on ads selling red roses might be!)

The above is by no means the full extent of ad optimising as you need to consider all influencing variables when undertaking any optimising. It is also using examples that are perfect world situations which as we all know, PPC rarely is. It is purely meant to serve as a demonstration of how simple ad optimising could be immediately improving your PPC performance without making a single bid change!

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