Here at In Front, we always recommend a combined PPC and SEO strategy for maximum reach and ROI. SEO isn’t an overnight process, so whilst your SEO takes its time to deliver results, a solid PPC campaign can drive those all-important leads.

PPC can work for almost any business and is a vital tool for dominating the search results, did you know:

  • Users that visit your site via PPC are 50% more likely to convert than organic users
  • Paid search results get 65% of all clicks for commercial keywords
  • Half of users cannot distinguish between organic and paid results

With these stats in mind, it can be worrying when your PPC campaign isn’t performing as well as you had hoped.

Here are our top tips to improve the performance of your PPC campaign when it isn’t working:

Check Your Settings

Whether you run your Google Ads campaign yourself or have taken over from an agency that has been working on your campaign, it’s crucial you regularly check your settings to ensure there is nothing hindering your performance or set up that you don’t want to be.

Important settings you need to be aware of are:

  • Location – make sure you are only targeting areas/countries that you mean to be. Unless target locations are defined, Google automatically shows your ads worldwide – this will waste a lot of budget and could drive irrelevant leads that you cannot fulfil.
  • Ad schedule – if you only open weekends 9am-5pm, you don’t want the phone ringing off the hook on weekends when no one is around to deal with potential leads.
  • Ad rotation – unless you are intentionally running an experiment, make sure your ad rotation is set to show your best performing ads.

Amend Keyword Targeting

If you’ve not checked your keywords since you set up the campaign, you should review which keywords have wasted a lot of budget and determine why.

Keyword match types can help you reach a variety of different users searching in different ways but left unattended can waste away your budget very quickly.

Broad match keywords may seem like the best option as you will reach a vast amount of people, but it’s only when you look at your search terms report that you will see how far they reach. Your ads will end up showing for many irrelevant searches, so we recommend phrase match as the best keyword match type.

Read our guide on keyword match types.

If you have looked at your search term report and see a lot of searches that include a word of phrase you don’t want to appear for, such as “free” or “cheap”, you can add these to your negative keyword list, so you won’t appear for these going forward.

Change Up Your Ad Copy

You could have the best website and most amazing products, but if your ad text isn’t as equally great then how will potential customers ever know? Ad text is your chance to drive users to your website with enticing language, deals and information.

If your ads get a lot of impressions but very little clicks, leading to a poor click through rate, this is a clear indication that your ad text isn’t good enough and needs revising. Three basic steps to great ad text are:

  • Unique selling point/s
  • Benefits of your service/product
  • Call to action

Landing Page Design

Your campaign is set up correctly, you’re targeting the correct keywords and you’re finally getting clicks on your ads – great! However, how is your website looking lately?

Your PPC ads should direct users to a relevant landing page which is easy to convert on and has clear, concise information about what they were looking for – not a top-level category or something similar.

Poor landing pages won’t convert, and you will have wasted your budget.

Read our guide on how to create a landing page that converts.

Consult the Experts

PPC can be costly if done wrong. Can you afford to waste your marketing budget? Get in touch with one of our PPC experts to discuss our prices and how we can help you get your PPC campaign back up and running!