When it comes to driving your business forward, PPC is one of the most efficient and widely used routes in the digital marketing world. Just like getting into the driver’s seat of a car, setting up your PPC campaign requires preparation and the right mindset.

This guide outlines all the essential steps to help you gear up for the PPC journey and steer your business toward success.

The Open Road: What is PPC?

Imagine driving on a wide-open highway, the endless road stretching ahead of you.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is like a fast lane to your business goals. It’s an advertising model where you pay a fee to the host of the platform for each click on your ad. The cost you incur is determined by a bidding system.

Your bid enters an auction where it competes with other advertisers, and the platform factors in bid amount, ad quality, and relevance to decide which ads to display and what your cost-per-click (CPC) will be. 

Your ads can appear on search engine results pages (SERPs), social media platforms, YouTube and affiliate websites to name a few. Listed below are some platforms that you can run and manage your PPC campaigns on: 

• Google Ads: Advertise across Google’s search engine and network
• Bing Ads: Advertise on Bing and its partner websites
• Meta Ads: Reach users on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta properties
• LinkedIn Ads: Reach an engaged audience of business professionals

This guide focuses on the process of creating a Search Ads campaign, specifically on platforms like Google Ads where keyword targeting is the core of the strategy.

Safety Checks: Account Setup

Before you start driving, you need to ensure your seatbelt is fastened, mirrors adjusted and all other safety checks have taken place. Similarly, in PPC, you need to ensure that all the required account settings are in place in order to avoid any potential issues as your campaigns progress.

• After the completion of the sign up process on your chosen platform, enter your business information. This includes aspects such as your business name and usually your website URL. (Other options include your business phone number and your app download page, depending on where you want to direct users who click on your ad). 

Roadside assistance: After providing your business details, the next step the platform provides you is with campaign creation. It is recommended that you skip this step at this stage and choose the ‘leave campaign creation’ option.

• You will then be directed to a page where you are required to confirm some crucial account settings such as the billing country, time zone and currency. (Please note: these settings cannot be edited once submitted.) 
• The next step is to input your payment information by setting up a payments profile. Once completed, this should result in a ‘Your account was created’ confirmation. 
• Google Ads will then encourage you to complete advertiser verification at this stage. It is highly recommended to do so to ensure a safe, transparent experience for both you and users, and to keep your ads running smoothly.
• You are now ready to commence the creation of your campaign structure, starting with establishing a campaign goal

Setting Your Destination: Define Your Campaign Goals

Defining your goals is like choosing your endpoint on the map. Google Ads provides you with several campaign objectives to assist with this. Outlined below are some of the most commonly used objectives: 

• Choose Sales: If you want to drive sales online, in app, by phone or in store. 
• Choose Leads: Get leads and other conversions by encouraging customers to take action.
• Choose Website Traffic: To get the right people to your website. 
• Choose Awareness and Consideration: Reach a broad audience and build interest in your products or brand.

Fuelling Up: Campaign Structure and Keyword Research

Now it’s time to fuel up and get moving! Campaign structure and keyword research are the gasoline that power your PPC campaign. This is where you decide the ‘route’ you’ll take and the ‘keywords’ that will get you there.

As a beginner, Google Ads’ built-in Keyword Planner is a quick and efficient tool for research. It enables you to find relevant keywords that align with your business needs and the interests of your target audience. 

The tool allows you to input a few initial keywords and your website URL which it uses to generate additional keywords suggestions and also provides average search volume and forecasts.

There are several other metrics which the tool provides data on such as the level of competition on each keyword and its estimated top of page bid. It is essential to take into account this additional information to ensure that the keywords included in your campaign are well informed, relevant and align with your budget. 

After finalising your keywords, the next step is to organise the keywords into campaigns and ad groups. 

• Campaigns: The highest level of your structure. Often relating to aspects such as product categories. For example: Skincare, Makeup etc.
• Ad Groups: Groups within a campaign that contain closely related keywords. Each ad group focuses on a specific product or theme. For example: Skincare can be broken down into Moisturisers, Cleansers, Sunscreen, Serums etc. 
• Keywords: Specific words or phrases related to your product or service that trigger your ads when searched. For example: The moisturiser’s ad group would contain keywords such as ‘buy moisturiser’, ‘moisturiser for dry skin’, ‘best face creams’ etc. 

Fuel for thought: While AI is a powerful tool for finding relevant traffic, it’s not perfect. As platforms increasingly continue to incorporate AI and broader keyword matching, the risk of irrelevant traffic has grown. Hence, the inclusion of negative keywords is more important than ever. 

Negative keywords assist in reducing wasted ad spend by filtering out irrelevant search queries and ensuring your ads reach the right users. Tools such as the ‘Search Terms’ report in Google Ads can be utilised to monitor incoming search queries and identify potential terms to be negated.

Hitting The Road: Creation Of Ads

With your route mapped out and fuel in your tank, it is time to hit the road and create those ads! Your ad copy is like the signs along the motorway – it needs to grab attention and guide users toward the destination.

A standard search ad in Google Ads requires the addition of headlines (maximum of 15) and descriptions (maximum of 5). Please note: this will vary depending on campaign and ad types. 

It is essential to include ad copy that is relevant to your keywords (ensuring the actual keywords are strategically included in the ad copy), highlights your business’s unique selling propositions and includes strong calls to actions such as ‘Shop Now’ or ‘Get a Free Quote Today’. 

The ‘ad strength’ metric displayed during the creation of the ads can also be used to assess the quality of your ads.  A higher ad strength indicates increased ad relevance which helps the search engine accurately match user’s search queries due to your ad placements being higher. 

Steering you right: While Google typically mixes and matches headlines and descriptions for each ad, you can pin specific ones to ensure that a particular headline or description is always displayed in your ads. However, the recommendation is to not pin any copy because this will reduce ad strength as it limits the platform’s ability to optimise and test different copy combinations.

Speed Limits: Bidding Strategies and Budget Management

As you drive, you need to keep an eye on the speed limits and fuel gauge. In PPC, your bidding strategy controls how competitive your ads are in the auction and how much you are willing to pay for each click. 

After assigning a budget to each campaign, the next step is to determine your bidding approach and select the most suitable bidding strategy for your goal. Google allows you to take either a manual bidding approach or an automated one. However, advertising platforms are continuing to enhance the capabilities of automated bidding and phasing out the need for manual bidding. 

Automated bidding strategies leverage machine learning to adjust bids based on real-time factors and make data-driven optimisations. When used correctly, these can often lead to higher conversion rates and improved ROI. Additionally, the absence of the need to manually adjust bids is time saving and highly efficient. 

Turbocharged Tip: Despite the increased adoption of automated bidding, if you are running a small campaign with limited budgets or offer a niche product/service it might still be best to use manual bidding. The complete control allows you to optimise bids for specific keywords that are crucial to your campaign.

Roadside Pitstops: Ongoing Monitoring of Campaigns

Every road trip needs a few pit stops for rest and adjustments. In the same way, you’ll need to optimise your PPC campaign along the journey. PPC isn’t a “set it and forget it” kind of deal. It is all about constantly reviewing your performance and making enhancements. 

Outlined below are key metrics to monitor: 

Click-through Rate (CTR): Helps to measure the effectiveness of your ads, by understanding what percentage of users that see your ad actually click on it. 

Conversion rate (CVR): Provides you with an insight into the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action after seeing your ad. 

Average cost per click (CPC): Monitoring the average amount you pay for a click on your ad is essential for cost control and maximising return on investment. 

Cost per acquisition (CPA): The cost you pay for each acquisition (conversion) is a crucial metric to monitor in order to ensure that your campaigns are profitable. 

Search impression share: An indication of how often your ads are appearing compared to the total possible impressions for your targeted keywords. This is also a highly valuable metric to track competitor activity. 

Mechanic’s Secret: Test and learn! Regularly conducting A/B testing of ad copy, landing pages and bidding strategies whilst using the metrics above as key performance indicators is crucial to establishing what will provide your campaigns with the highest chance of success.

Reaching Your Destination: Summary

Congratulations! You have made it to your destination – your PPC campaign is up and running successfully. Just like any great road trip, PPC requires careful planning, adjustments along the way, and a bit of patience. But by following the steps outlined in this guide, you will be on your way to driving traffic, generating leads, and making sales.

So, are you ready to hit the gas and start your journey? Contact us today to speak to a member of our team about the award-winning PPC services we can offer your business.

The post Rev Up Your Campaigns – A Beginner’s Guide to PPC appeared first on The SEO Works.

PPC is a huge part of the digital marketing space, with search advertisers estimated to have spent $190.5 billion globally in 2024 (Statista, 2023). It’s a massively influential and useful tool to use for businesses of all sizes to achieve a range of objectives, usually to generate more sales or leads.

While we find a lot of businesses see huge success in venturing out to PPC marketing, we do see many fall short for a number of reasons. One of the biggest and most overlooked factors are the landing pages you take your audiences to. A successful and effective PPC campaign doesn’t end at the ad itself, what happens after a user clicks and lands on your website is just as important.

This is where PPC landing pages come into play…

What is a PPC Landing Page?

A PPC landing page, quite simply, is a standalone web page(s) specifically created to receive traffic from a paid ad.

When compared to webpages, a PPC landing page is designed to be laser focused on a single objective, including relevant and persuasive content in order to encourage users to take the desired action in line with your objectives. Whereas a general webpage on your main website may contain a broader range of information. It’s vital that your landing pages are aligned with the intent from your ad campaigns in order to create that seamless and relevant experience for your users who come from the ads.

Why Are Landing Pages Important?

As we’ve already outlined, one of the main reasons why we encourage businesses to have PPC landing pages is to create synergy between your ads and your website, this gives you a greater ad-to-website experience which ultimately helps drive better results and higher ROI.

We’ve discussed some of the core dos and don’ts when creating a PPC landing page in a previous blog which you can read here. One of the main focuses of these pages is to keep it simple- avoid distracting your audience.

These factors are one of the reasons why a PPC landing page is so important. If you decide for your audience to land on your homepage, or a ‘normal’ webpage, you may be at risk of overwhelming them with too many choices.

Your homepage might provide an overview of your brand, list all of your services or products, and include a large navigation menu that goes to various parts of your site. This works really well for general visitors as you’re looking to nurture them through a longer journey, however, this type of layout can distract your PPC audiences from taking the main action you want.

If your ad campaigns are designed to drive more conversions, then your PPC landing page can capture your audience and reinforce this intent in a few ways:

• Simple layout
• Testimonials
• Limited time offers 
• Easy to reach CTA’s (Call To Actions) 

All of these features will help make your PPC funnel that much more effective and optimised for generating conversions.

Alongside this is the benefit of an improved ROI. Every click in your PPC campaign will ultimately cost you money, and by taking users to a targeted page which is designed to convert PPC users, you’re making every pound count.

The Other Benefits of PPC Landing Pages

As we’ve discussed so far, the main benefits of landing pages are having a strong relevance and alignment with your ads alongside pushing for a better conversion rate and ROI. However, there are four other benefits you can get with a PPC landing page:

1) Improved Quality Score

Having a highly relevant PPC landing page that provides a good user experience plays a great role in boosting the overall performance of the ad account by improving its quality score.

Google’s quality score is a key metric of an ad account, it’s made up of multiple components, but the most relevant one is the overall landing page experience. This measures the relevance of your landing page to your ad and keywords, as well as the user experience of the landing page itself, including site speed and usability.

Provided you have chosen keywords which are relevant to your business, an improved quality score can lead to cheaper CPCs (Cost Per Click) and a better positioning of your ad placements in search results. By having compelling, relevant content within your PPC landing pages as well as offering a seamless user experience, you can boost your overall ad account performance outside of conversions and ROI.

2) A/B Testing Opportunities

With a specific landing page for PPC, you should have a greater opportunity to change and test different elements of the page itself. These could be things that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to change on your main website as it could have knock-on effects.

However, with a PPC landing page it’s much easier to change headlines, CTAs, the positioning of product information / contact form as well as the overall layout, allowing you to test what does and doesn’t work for the best results.

3) Precise Tracking and Analytics

A third great benefit of PPC landing pages is the fact you’re able to analyse performance more accurately than with your standard, core webpages. You’ll be able to review metrics like bounce rates, time on page and conversion rates. This gives you the data to make decisions for your A/B testing opportunities which in turn, gives you a positive feedback loop when seeing which layouts or design choices work best.

4) Scalability

Once you begin to optimise your campaigns based on this increased level of data, your campaigns will start to grow and so can your collection of landing pages. Once you find a landing page layout that works for your main ad funnel, you can start to expand on this to cover other areas of your business. Allowing for continuous improvement and scaling of results.

Final Thoughts

While normal webpages are essential for general traffic, they’ll likely fall short when it comes to driving relevant traffic and conversions from a PPC campaign. Having a well-designed PPC landing page will ultimately bridge the gap between the user searching for your relevant business keywords, visiting your ad and completing your desired action. This can help you align better with your ad campaigns, engage your audience further and drive more conversions.

The post Beyond Your Ads: Why is it Important to Have a PPC Landing Page? appeared first on The SEO Works.

Since making the switch from traditional shopping campaigns to Performance Max campaigns, there has been a lot of learning taking place.

Our understanding has improved greatly as we gain more insight into the effectiveness of the machine learning and AI that forms a huge part of this campaign type.

To ensure the campaigns are performing to the best of their ability it’s important to understand how you can fully optimise them as it is crucial to their success.

Firstly, what are Performance Max campaigns?

Performance Max is a relatively new addition to traditional campaigns. Initially rolled out in 2021, Performance Max aims to show content on YouTube, display, search, shopping, and other channels in a single campaign.

This entirely automated method, which makes use of machine learning and AI, enables advertisers to reach a larger audience for a lower CPC. To ensure the campaign matches your strategy, Performance Max will give you the option to select your objective at the start of the campaign.

Similar to a responsive display ad, the ad creation will include images, logos, headlines, descriptions and video which are also known as asset groups. After you give Google the necessary assets, its machine learning will distribute your ads through the relevant channels whenever it can provide the appropriate ad at the right time with the right bid to help you achieve your objective. 

Within the campaign, you also have a listing group, this is where your shopping products are organised and served if you sell products from your website. This section functions the same as Google’s old Smart Shopping campaigns which they removed in place of this new campaign type. 

So now you’re familiar with what they are – what should you be doing to optimise them?

Here are seven tips to get you started:

1) Asset Groups

As mentioned above, Performance Max uses asset groups. An asset group is essentially the information you provide to Google for your ad, whether this is for search, shopping, display or YouTube.

Providing Google with more information about your services or products will increase your chances of the ad being eligible across all types of inventory. We would recommend going for more lifestyle or brand content to ensure the creative makes sense with the products being served.

Similar to a search campaign, Google will optimise the assets and push them towards your intended audience, if you are too product-specific, it might not make sense.

One area where Google is encouraging advertisers to promote their ads is YouTube. For retailers and e-commerce stores, we see a great benefit in running ads on YouTube as around 5 billion videos are viewed on YouTube a day!

This huge statistic shows there’s so much opportunity for advertisers out there to get their product in the eyes of their consumers. However, to be effective across the platform you’ll need to ensure you can reach a relevant audience as well as having good quality video content.

If you only want to use Performance Max to push your products on the shopping channel, we would recommend not adding assets and just using your product feed. This way the campaign will primarily push shopping ads along with some YouTube and display, however, they will be shown in the shopping format. 

2) Feed Optimisation

As machine learning becomes more advanced, user control is getting reduced – so feed optimisation has become a crucial part of ensuring your Performance Max campaigns succeed.

Ensuring your feed is up-to-date and relevant by including as much information about each product as possible can help make a positive impact on the overall campaigns.

Google needs to understand what the product does so providing detailed information is key. It is always best practice to include the brand name, manufacturer number (SKU) and the barcode (GTIN).

We would also recommend including descriptive titles, detailed product categories and product types to ensure the product can find the correct customer.

Optimising the feed can be a lengthy process, so some companies will opt to use a feed optimisation tool, however, title and description changes can be done manually in the Merchant Centre.

The feed will be the foundation of the Performance Max campaign so this will have the biggest impact on results over anything else.

3) Audience Signals

Another feature of Performance Max is giving your asset groups audience signals. Unlike traditional campaigns using affinity and in-market audiences directly, Performance Max uses audience signals through machine learning.

Unlike the main audiences, audience signals allow you to input traits about your target audience such as demographics, interests, intentions and behaviour to help the algorithm target the right users.

Customer lists are a valuable asset when it comes to audience signals as they hold real customer data. Providing you can do so we would definitely recommend adding this to your asset group. 

Customer intent audiences are another good way to make your audience signals more specific as you can include keywords.

Using keywords that you know your target audience uses will help take Google’s algorithm to the next level, increasing performance.

Website visitor audiences are also a good option if you are unable to access customer lists. These work similarly to remarketing audiences so are more likely to reach a high-intent audience. 

4) Customer Acquisition

A new feature which was introduced for only Performance Max campaigns is the ‘new customer acquisition’ feature. When creating the Performance Max campaign, it will give you an option in the settings to opt for new customers.

If the aim of your campaign is to go after new customers who aren’t familiar with your brand then this feature should complement your strategy as it essentially targets new customers who haven’t previously visited your site or purchased from you.

5) Campaign Exclusions

When it comes to creating Performance Max campaigns, there are a lot of campaign exclusions which can be added. Adding a brand exclusion can be an important part of growing your non-brand presence.

If you receive a lot of conversions through your brand and want to grow the non-brand side, then brand exclusions can be crucial to building that.

Similarly to adding a negative keyword list, the brand exclusions list will allow you to exclude your brand as well as other branded terms you don’t want your ads to show for.

To find the brand exclusion you will need to visit the settings of your Performance Max campaign – here you can add a list of any brands you want to exclude your ads from being shown. 

Due to the nature of the campaigns harnessing AI and machine learning to find the best places to send your audiences to, the campaigns will find pages that have been indexed by Google and may take users to web pages outside of the pages you have set in your campaigns.

Because of this, you also have the option to exclude certain URLs that you do not want to take users to.

As previously mentioned, Performance Max has lots of audience signals available for your campaigns. It enables you to add potential audience exclusions that can focus on attracting new clients rather than existing clients.

When choosing to use these exclusions, the ads will mostly be displayed to visitors who have never visited your website. If your goal is to attract new clients, this can complement the brand exclusion list.

6) Insights

As Performance Max is a relatively new campaign type which runs off Google’s algorithm, the data they allow us access to is very important. In the insights tab, you can see various bits of data, including what search terms are showing up in your campaign.

Review the search terms and use them to your advantage by adding them to the headlines and descriptions of the ads – if a user has searched for this then they are more likely to interact with the ad.

However, if you see terms that don’t look relevant, you can reach out to a Google rep and ask them to add a negative keyword list. 

Unfortunately, one of the main drawbacks of this campaign type is that the level of insights you can see is fairly limited and the action that you can take on these insights is even more so.

7) Commit to Your Campaigns

It’s natural to want to make adjustments to campaigns as soon as possible, particularly if you’re not getting the desired results. But, since Performance Max campaigns use an algorithm to learn, it’s critical to stick with them.

Making too many changes might have a detrimental effect on the campaigns, particularly when it comes to bid and budget management. 

The Performance Max campaigns will enter a learning phase when changes are made; during this period, the algorithm will attempt to determine how to split your money and reach potential customers most effectively.

It’s crucial to wait to make any adjustments until the learning period is over, which can take up to two weeks. However, be aware that if you make significant changes to the campaign, it could go back into learning.

Conclusion

When Performance Max initially launched, advertisers could only access a small amount of data to inform optimisation decisions.

We can see a growing amount of data with Performance Max’s advancement, which allows us to make more informed optimisations. However, seeing trends and changes in this data requires regular evaluation of the campaign.

By following these best practices you can gain greater control over your shopping strategy.

Are you still struggling to get the most out of your campaigns?

Click here to get in touch with one of our PPC experts, or find out more about our PPC services here!

The post Top 7 Best Practices For Optimising Your Performance Max Campaign appeared first on The SEO Works.

AI is integrating more and more into our everyday lives, but it’s nothing new when it comes to Google. Google Ads has been using a branch of AI – ‘machine learning’ – for some time now, which means digital marketers are already utilising this technology in ad copy creation, audience targeting and day-to-day optimisation.

Using AI in PPC allows you to understand user behaviour, predict potential outcomes, automate marketing activities and develop personalised marketing content. This will make your ad processes, such as keyword selection, bidding management and ad selection, more streamlined and efficient  – all done in real time. 

As AI continues to evolve, its role in enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of PPC campaigns will only grow stronger.

In this blog, we will explore how to effectively incorporate AI into your PPC campaigns.

How has AI grown within Google Ads?

As already mentioned at the start of this blog, AI isn’t a ‘new’ feature in Google Ads. The term AI is something that has certainly gathered pace and is most definitely taking the internet by storm, but the integration of types of AI has been a long-standing part of the platform for over a decade. The main being Machine Learning.

For total clarity, the concept of machine learning is a branch of AI. This term has been heavily used throughout Google Ad’s definitions of some of their features, so while there may be some sceptics, there’s no doubt that the ad platform has been utilising a form of AI for quite some time.

With this in mind, let’s explore the beginnings of how Google Ads used AI…

Automated bidding and enhanced CPC

Arguably it all started in 2010, with the release of automated bidding. This was a strategy built by Google to take “the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids…”.

This resulted in the strategy ‘Enhanced CPC’ to bring about a new age of automated features across the platform, all of which are harnessed by advanced machine learning.

Smart bidding strategies

This later developed further in 2016 with the introduction of smart bidding strategies. Using machine learning algorithms you could now bid on keywords to maximise conversions, taking these even further by bidding to maximise on conversions with a target cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS). 

The platform used bidding signals based on consumer data to calculate the best outcome that is possible in line with your goals.

This data includes:

• Gender
• Age
• Device
• Location
• Time
• Day of the week

These features were fine-tuned and have grown in sophistication over the course of several years, expanding to different campaign types such as Google Shopping, YouTube and Discovery.

Machine learning

As we get closer to the present, these automated bidding strategies and tools were replaced with even more advanced machine learning versions of themselves, giving us fewer options to make manual adjustments and leaning more into automated bidding and adjustments.

Where we are now, we have new campaign types like Performance Max which are almost fully powered by machine learning, or AI as they now refer to it. 

In the present day, new AI tools are launching for Google Ads that are less focused on bidding strategies, with the new focus being on developing tools that can enhance the campaign creation and optimisation process.

Creating campaigns using Google’s AI features

There are now different ways you can simplify creating an AI-powered campaign. To get started from a campaign level all you need to do is enter your website’s product or service URLs.

It will then produce relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets for your campaign. All you need to do from here is simply review and apply suggestions you feel are relevant to your business.

Performance Max campaigns have been the best example of how AI-driven campaigns can drive growth to your business. Advertisers who have utilised this campaign type have on average seen an uplift of 18% more conversion at a similar cost (according to Google’s official reporting).

To make things even easier Google has introduced a function that allows you to paste a block of text that best describes your business, product or service which it will use to generate a selection of headlines and descriptions for you to choose from.

YouTube is another campaign type which is benefiting from AI-powered creative tools. These tools are now revolutionising the way video ads are created and enhanced. Once you have uploaded your video, YouTube uses its AI feature to help make videos engaging for all audiences.

Features such as trimming, flipping and adding voiceovers or music are the most popular. These features help make your ads high quality and also match the viewing preferences of your audience. 

The drawbacks of using these AI features

However, these features are relatively new within the platform and can end up producing poor results in terms of headlines and descriptions, if a detailed description of your business isn’t provided. The current form of machine learning lacks the nuance and understanding for businesses that have a particularly unique offering. 

For businesses that have less of a unique service or offering, it’s still a fine line to tread. It’s great for getting initial ad copy onto your screen, especially if you’re stuck for what to write. However, without reviewing it yourself and casting a professional eye over the copy you may end up with headlines and descriptions that are uninspiring. 

If you are using this tool, we’d always recommend reviewing and amending the copy where appropriate to what makes the most sense from a brand standpoint. The point of ads is to captivate an audience to your website or service, so if the copy Google is producing doesn’t captivate you it’s worth taking another look.

AI Video Creation

Google has recently been pushing video creation within the ad platform which is why they have released this feature, to help those without a budget to create videos,  continue to compete on the platform.

There is a huge benefit to appearing on the platform and we do see this as a great brand awareness opportunity, however, context and quality of content are key when using this tool.

If what is produced using the AI tools on YouTube is not top quality, and your competitors on YouTube are producing high-quality ads, then venturing out onto the platform can harm your image and overall performance.

Enhanced Audience Targeting

Google’s AI technology is more enhanced than ever before – with the data you provide, it learns when to deliver your ad to the right people at just the right time to encourage them to convert.

It will calculate the probability of your campaigns converting and determine the best bid for your campaign. From our experience, this works best with accounts that have high-volume conversions or accounts that have richer levels of conversion data. 

This technology can significantly enhance any digital ad campaign, boosting both performance and ROI.

While this is arguably one of the features that harnesses the true power of AI, by finding the right user within your location, we still recommend providing Google audience signals in order to steer it in the right direction.

Across search, you can provide detailed demographic targeting to show Google the exact users you want and can even prevent Google from showing the ads to users outside of these demographics currently. 

The new performance max campaign type harnesses AI to fully determine who, when and where your ads are shown. 

A warning for certain businesses

For new businesses with small amounts of ad data or businesses with a large portfolio of services and products, Google’s AI cannot always determine the right searches and people to trigger your ads 100% of the time.

This is why we recommend using the audience signal feature for these campaign types, as this allows you to ‘nudge’ Google in the right direction of who you want to target.

Ultimately Google has the final say on who they target, but by giving the algorithm data to work off,  you’re giving yourself the best chance of success for these campaigns and working with the AI tool to produce you great results.

Generate and Edit Images With Google AI

Google has finally stepped up its AI capability with the introduction of image creation. You are now able to generate new images, replace image backgrounds, automatically enhance visuals, and create all the necessary sizes to engage audiences across Google’s advertising channels with Performance Max.

Image generation can help marketers save time and resources, creating high-quality image assets tailored to your business or brand, without necessarily needing a designer.

But it’s important to note that this tool is in BETA, so there may naturally be teething problems with the tool.

Consider the quality versus your competition

Similarly to the other generative tools we’ve discussed, it’s important to give the tool detailed prompts to make sure you give it the best chance to work. However, the quality of the imagery remains the most important thing to consider when using the tool. If what is produced is of poor quality, too generic, or doesn’t represent your brand then it might not be worth using, no matter how much time it might save you.

Measuring the Success of Google’s Built-in AI Tools

While adopting AI features can bring great benefits, it’s important to understand and measure the success of these features.

Google AI requires time, patience, and refinement, which is why tracking usage metrics can help us understand how humans interact with our AI features. The following metrics are the ones we recommend tracking:

• Adoption Rate 
• Interaction rate
• Session Time
• Queries per session
• Abandonment rate
• Customer Feedback

Conclusion

It’s an exciting time for marketers to see the evolving benefits of AI integration in Google Ads. The last 12 months have shown that these features are getting more sophisticated and accurate with each iteration, allowing marketers to dedicate more time to strategic & creative planning.

However, we must exercise these features with caution, as AI operating autonomously can produce off-brand visuals, robotic copy, or low quality conversions. It is the responsibility of a Paid Media expert to refine and add the human touch to data and content, ensuring maximum positive impact on our PPC campaigns.

Want the help of an expert to guide you through the ever-evolving paid landscape? Find out more about our PPC services, or get in touch with our experts today!

The post How to Use AI Strategies in Your Google Campaign in 2024 appeared first on The SEO Works.

When it comes to improving efficiency and maximising the results from your PPC activity, many overlook the landing page their ads are taking users to.

With the cost involved in bringing users to your website through Google Ads, it’s vitally important to ensure the page users land on is functional, well-designed and encourages users to convert.

Below we’ll go through a number of different Dos and Don’ts to help refine your landing page and drive better results from your Google Ads campaigns.

Landing Page Dos

Do Keep It Simple

As we mentioned before in not distracting users on a landing page, you want the page users are directed to to be clean and simple. Your page should be easy to navigate and read, yet include the information needed for users to understand your product or service.

Text should be in small, easy to digest paragraphs, broken up by enticing imagery or other graphic elements to encourage users to stay on the page. Additionally, your specific goal should have an easy to reach and noticeable CTA.

Ideally you want to design a landing page that establishes a journey for the eyes and naturally encourages a user to continue scrolling and reading through your page.

Do Have Your CTA (Call To Action) Above The Fold

Essentially, the further down your CTA (Call To Action) is – the lower conversion rate you’re likely to achieve. Having the enquire/purchase button after rows and rows of text may well bore a user and cause them to click off your site.

Instead, you want to have an eye-catching graphic or image at the top of your landing page – along with some compelling and informative content. You then either want to have your CTA sitting next to, or just below, your first few punchy lines of text.

This gives users enough insight into your product or business and is quickly followed with encouraging the user to take the desired action on your website.

Do Write Compelling Copy

The text within your landing page is another super important element to your PPC landing page. In particular, the headline and subheader are most critical as these are the aspects that first hook a user when they arrive on your landing page.

Ensuring your headline includes your focus keyword(s) and that content throughout your landing page also centres around your target keywords is crucial to ensuring your keyword quality scores are high.

Compelling copy throughout your landing page will also help improve engagement time, and ultimately conversion rate by keeping users interested in what you offer.

For example, in this landing page, it has been designed specifically for users who are visiting our site from Clutch. Rather than sending them to our homepage, we have designed this landing page so it is tailored to the context of their user journey.

Do Have Trust Indicators & Testimonials

Another element to improving your PPC landing page is some form of trust indicator. This could be in the form of reviews or testimonials. Having genuine feedback from your previous customers can be really beneficial when it comes to new users.

A user who is unfamiliar with your business is most likely sceptical about the quality of your product or service. Having reliable and authentic testimonials or reviews can really help remove those doubts from new users – and encourage them to convert.

Do Test Your Landing Pages

Another crucial element to optimising your PPC landing page is to test different layouts and designs of your landing page. Google Ads gives you the ability to A/B test different landing pages – meaning you can send 50% of users to one page, and the remaining 50% to another page.

Numerous different elements of a page can be tested – from different images, to different CTAs or different text layouts.

Continuously testing a different aspect of your landing page then allows you to gather data and understand what aspects help improve engagement time and converts, and which don’t.

Heatmap and analytical tools such as Hotjar allow you to review exactly how users are interacting with your page, and which elements they focus on. Using these types of tools will further help gather data from which you can optimise your PPC landing page.

Landing Page Don’ts

Don’t Distract

When creating your landing page, you want to avoid creating too many distractions and areas for users to click off. This includes links to other pages or areas of your website.

If you’ve paid for a user to click onto your site based on a specific keyword and purpose, you want to ensure they move further down the sales funnel by creating a simplistic landing page.

Having specific widgets or buttons for users to click only deters them from making a purchase or submitting a form. Essentially you want to review every element of your landing page – every part of the page should be directing users towards your desired action/conversion.

Don’t Have Your CTA (Call To Action) Below The Fold

Following on from the previous point around not distracting users, you also want to ensure the desired call to action (CTA, such as purchase or sign-up) is towards the top of your page.

Keeping your CTA way down at the bottom of the page, following several paragraphs of information can divert users away from your main aim or encourage users to simply click off your site.

Don’t Make Your Landing Page Too Wordy

Although you may need information to tell users about your product or service, as well as your business, you don’t want to bog down users with dozens of paragraphs of text. Seeing a huge wall of text as soon as a user clicks on a url can be massively off-putting and cause the user to click off the page.

You want to have a well designed, engaging and eye-catching landing page. It should flow naturally between short paragraphs of text and other elements or images, encouraging users to absorb information – and ultimately perform whatever desired action you want users to take on your site.

Don’t Have a Slow Landing Page

This is an element many don’t consider and can have one of the biggest impacts on performance. It’s estimated that for every 1 second a user has to wait for a landing page to load, dropoff rate increases by nearly 10%! An alarmingly high number for businesses already paying money for users clicking onto site.

Ideally you want a landing page to load in under 3 seconds. Google offers a useful and free PageSpeed Insights tool which provides an insight into computer and mobile load times, and which elements of the page are slowing down your site speed.

Making improvements to site speed has the added benefit of reducing bounce rates and increasing conversion rates across all channels, making it a very worthwhile task to undertake.

Don’t Have A Website That Isn’t Mobile Friendly

Following all of the previous points on what not to do for your PPC landing page and website, it is also crucial to ensure your website works seamlessly across mobile.

Typically, businesses generate anywhere from 50-70% of traffic from mobile phones, meaning you could be missing out on a huge number of conversions if your website doesn’t work well across mobile.

Often the biggest stumbling block for user experience across mobile is specific elements of a page that look and work well on desktop but do not translate well across mobile.

Examples for this include huge pop-ups that dominate over 80% of a mobile screen that are intended to only cover a small portion of the screen. Instead you want to have a sleek and easy to navigate mobile experience for users – making it easy for users to scroll through your site and ultimately convert.

Conclusion

It’s clear from this list there are numerous factors that can impact your landing page – with some being easier fixes than others. Depending on your capabilities, you may not be able to test every point mentioned above.

Additionally, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach when it comes to optimising your PPC landing page – every sector and business works differently. However, even being able to experiment with different CTA positioning, wording or different images can make a difference.

Exactly how you go about making changes and optimisations to your landing page can differ depending on what resources you have. The most important aspect is simply testing different elements of your landing page. In doing so you should start to see the positive benefits in terms of conversion rates as a result.

If you feel like you could do with a helping hand in optimising your PPC landing pages, it might be time to speak to the experts…

Our award-winning team has helped countless businesses generate more sales and improve ROI across Google Ads – find out more about our services or get in touch today!

The post The Dos and Don’ts of PPC Landing Pages appeared first on The SEO Works.

The success of a marketing campaign is measured through ad metrics, serving as a key indicator of how well the campaign is doing in relation to key performance indicators (KPIs).

These metrics are pivotal for evaluating the effectiveness of strategies, offering a comprehensive overview of your marketing plan’s performance.

In this blog, we take a look at some of the key metrics to be aware of, what they mean, and why they’re important.

Interaction Metrics

When assessing the effectiveness of your campaigns, it’s essential to consider KPIs around ad interactions – such as impressions, clicks, and click-through rate (CTR).

By optimising your campaigns with the use of this data, you can ensure that you are getting the most out of them. It’s also important to combine these three indicators when measuring your efforts, to ensure you can identify any trends!

Impressions

An impression is recorded every time your advertisement is shown on a Google network, including display, search, Performance Max, and YouTube.

Impressions are a useful tool for measuring the volume of people seeing your ad.

Clicks

A click is counted when a user engages with your ad. Monitoring clicks offers insights into ad placement and budget adequacy, indicating campaign effectiveness.

Clicks are a good indication that your campaigns are working. Increased clicks naturally improves your quality score, potentially boosting ad placement whilst lowering cost-per-click (CPC).

Click-through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) measures the frequency with which users click on your advertisement after seeing it, which can provide you with insight into the ad’s efficiency.

Conversion Metrics

Conversions, conversion rate and conversion value are three crucial metrics to track in order to determine the actual performance of your campaigns.

Conversions and conversion rate will reveal the genuine impact of your strategy, and conversion value will help you calculate your return on investment.

You can then use this information to make informed judgements about future investment opportunities.

Conversions

A conversion is when a user performs a specific action on your website such as filling in a form or making a purchase. But, depending on the objectives of your business, a conversion can be defined as many different things.

If your primary goal is to generate leads, you may set up a conversion as an inquiry, or if you run a store, you can set up the conversion action as a purchase.

Conversions demonstrate that consumers are performing the desired action you want them to, which makes them a reliable indicator of success.

Conversion Value

Following closely behind is conversion value, which can help you determine how much revenue you have generated from your campaigns.

Conversion value will help you track and optimise your campaign’s return on investment (ROI), and you can even use target ROAS (return on ad spend) bidding strategies to help maximise your conversion value (sales revenue).

Conversion value is essentially the figure you have assigned to a conversion. Typically used for e-commerce businesses, the conversion value will be attributed from the merchant centre as it’s the price of the product.

Bidding Strategies

Google Ads offers several different bidding strategies that are tailored to different campaign objectives. Your bid strategy will be determined by which network your campaign is targeting.

The most common objective for a campaign is to receive conversions (purchases or leads), however, some campaigns may be set up to receive clicks or impressions.

Google now uses a range of automated bidding strategies which essentially learn as they go using information about a bid’s performance to inform future bids. 

Here are some examples of bidding strategies, and what they mean…

Maximise Clicks

Maximise clicks sets your bids to get as many clicks as possible within your daily budget – this bidding strategy is the best if you are trying to increase site visits.

Target Impression Share

Another bidding strategy is target impression share. Target impression share sets bids with the goal of showing your ad on the top of the page – this bidding strategy works best when you are looking to increase visibility.

Target CPA

Target CPA bidding works well when you are working towards a cost per acquisition (CPA), as it sets bids to help you obtain as many conversions as possible in relation to the CPA you specify.

Target ROAS

Target ROAS helps set bids to get as much conversion value as possible at the target return on ad spend (ROAS) you set. This bidding strategy is recommended if you are looking to reach a specific return on investment.

Maximise Conversions

This is one of the most popular bidding strategies as the bidding will help you optimise towards conversions.

It will emphasise the area that you want to maximise while keeping your budget into consideration.

Maximise Conversion Value

Lastly, we have maximise conversion value. Maximise conversion value works in a similar way to maximise conversions however you will add a target ROAS.

This bidding strategy will aim to spend your budget to maximise conversion value for your campaigns.

Budgeting

When it comes down to choosing your budget, lots of factors will come into play. Most companies will have a set budget that has been allocated for the month.

The campaign objective and keywords will determine how you split the daily budget out as there may be certain areas you want to focus on. 

This will also vary per industry as some industries typically have a higher CPC meaning you will need some extra budget to cover all bases.

Conclusion

In conclusion, each and every ad metric is important for ensuring the effectiveness of your ads. Understanding ad metrics and how they affect your data is crucial to the success of your campaigns.

There are many more ad metrics that you can consider based on the objectives and purpose of your campaign, but the ones that are mentioned above are some of the most popular. 

Want to learn more about how ad metrics impact your campaigns’ success? Contact a member of the team to book a free PPC audit today.

The post Google Ads Metrics: Understanding the Importance appeared first on The SEO Works.

In today’s marketing climate, getting the biggest return possible from your investment is as important as ever. However, when it comes to PPC, it can be easy to squander money without realising.

Making the most of your budget is particularly hard today given Google’s increasing pressure for advertisers to spend more across Google Ads.

Simply following Google’s recommendations can often lead to money being needlessly wasted, worsening your ROI.

In this blog, I’ll go through a few important aspects of PPC that can help you prevent wasting precious budget, whilst looking to maximise ROI.

Using correct keyword match types

Setting the correct keyword match types can help campaigns in terms of conversions and reach. However, the wider you cast your net – the less relevant the user can be.

In the last couple of years, Google has been making a really big push to encourage people to use Broad match keywords. Although Broad match keywords are great at generating a lot of impressions, they can result in huge amounts of wasted spend on clicks from users uninterested in your product or service.

Because of this, I’d suggest erring on the side of caution when it comes to using Broad match keywords. They aren’t the holy grail that Google suggests and can easily lead to your ads overlapping each other – leaving you vulnerable to wasting significant amounts of money.

If your PPC budget is fairly limited, focusing on Exact and Phrase match keywords can drive conversions whilst limiting spend on irrelevant search terms.

However, if you have a larger budget (of say, above £3,000 per month) it can be beneficial to use a mix of keywords to capture as many conversions as possible – including the use of Broad match keywords.

Regularly reviewing search terms

Reviewing the search terms within your search campaigns is vitally important to help you identify what your ads are spending money on, particularly now that Google is recommending the use of Broad match keywords.

Failing to check search terms within your campaigns may lead to Google pushing your ads to users who are searching for something quite unrelated to your service or product.

Checking search terms is particularly important just after launching a new campaign as Google looks to test your ads across a variety of users, gathering data from which to optimise from. However, without looking into your search term reports, Google may start optimising your campaigns towards terms that convert well in terms of clicks but are unrelated to what you offer.

Frequently checking search terms can help you spot irrelevant search terms your ads may be bidding on, allowing you to add these terms as negative keywords. This helps reduce wasted spend and allows you to allocate more of your budget towards the terms you want to target.

Inspecting your search terms can also have other benefits besides limiting wasted spend; excluding irrelevant search terms can also help to improve your keyword quality scores. As part of keyword quality scores, Google reviews click-through rates (CTR).

If your ads generate a lot of impressions for terms unrelated to your product or service, this may well reduce CTRs and ultimately lower quality scores across your Google Ads account.

Targeting the right audience

Selecting the most appropriate and relevant audience can also ensure you maximise your PPC budget. Google allows you to target audiences based on a number of different segments including age, location, device, purchase intent, habits and interests. This can help give you real control over who you target with your ads and limit wasted spend.

For example, if you have a local business in Manchester it may be redundant to target users who live in Aberdeen. It’s important to review location targeting when first launching your campaigns, as Google automatically selects ‘presence or interest’ – meaning it can also serve ads to users who have simply shown interest in your target location. This can result in you spending money targeting users outside your chosen area or country.

Audience targeting is also critical across other campaign types such as Display, YouTube, and Demand Gen. These campaigns allow you to target specific audiences, either to remarket to users familiar with your company, or to advertise to users with specific interests or habits.

It’s therefore vital to make sure you’re serving your ads to users who are likely to be interested in your product or service to give your campaign the best chance at generating conversions at an effective cost.

Keyword quality scores

When targeting keywords Google rates the overall user experience that your ads and landing pages provide based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. A higher quality score will help your ads appear higher up the page and help to reduce your cost-per-click.

As previously mentioned, working on excluding irrelevant search terms can positively impact your quality scores. Additionally, sending users to a landing page that is relevant to the terms you are targeting will help to improve landing page experience. It will ensure that users aren’t taken to a page that has no association with the search term that they’ve just typed into Google.

The area that is easiest to work on within Google Ads is around ad relevance – how closely your ad copy relates to a user’s search query. Making sure the headlines and descriptions within your ads are as closely related to your target keywords as possible is typically the best way to improve ad relevance.

If a user searches ‘denim jeans’ for example, you’d ideally want to mention denim jeans within both the headline and description of your ads, clearly indicating to a user that your website sells the item they are looking for.

Use ad extensions

Ad Extensions (now named ad assets on Google Ads) are a great way of adding additional information regarding your business to help persuade users to click on your ad. Utilising ad extensions such as sitelinks, phone numbers, and price extensions also helps to improve the performance of your ads – increasing click-through rates, and driving more users onto your website.

Ensuring your ads have enough ad extensions, including at least 4 sitelinks is considered best practice by Google. Having a sufficient number of quality ad extensions helps the overall quality of your ads and can help increase the position of your ad.

When calculating ad rank, Google takes the expected impact of your ad extensions into consideration, so it’s important to ensure these are in use. Not optimising your campaign ad assets may therefore mean you lose out on that all-important top position when advertising on Google.

Ad scheduling

The ad schedules for your PPC campaigns can be vitally important to help prevent you from wasting spend. Google’s smart bidding strategies automatically push spend during the days/hours your account typically generates higher conversions, however, depending on your business it can be important to manually adjust when your ads are shown.

For example, if you own a software company that sells products/services to other businesses, you may want your ads to only run during your opening hours (9am – 5pm, Monday – Friday) so you can answer any calls you receive from your ads.

Limiting your ad schedule, particularly within the B2B sector, can therefore help you push your budget during the day and stop your ads from spending throughout the night.

Choosing the right bid strategy

Google Ads allows you to select a bid strategy for each campaign to determine what you want a campaign to focus on. The bid strategies available allow you to focus on one of the following: Impression Share, Clicks, Conversions, and Conversion Value. Deciding which bid strategy you choose can depend on what your primary objective is and what type of business you have.

For example, if you are an E-Commerce business, ideally you want to focus on Max Conversion Value. Doing so means Google will look to optimise towards users who will generate the highest revenue for your business. If you’re in the B2B sector, typically a Maximum Conversion bid strategy is most suitable if your primary objective is to generate leads.

If you’re focusing on conversions or conversion value, Smart Bid strategies use Google AI to take a wide range of auction-time signals such as device, location, time of day, language and operating system to capture the unique context of every search. Although choosing a Smart Bid strategy gives you less control – they typically perform better compared to a manual bid strategy.

The Smart Bid strategies available on Google Ads are Target Cost Per Action, Target Return On Ad Spend, Maximise Conversions, Maximise Conversion Value, and Enhanced Cost Per Click.

Using a Target Cost Per Action or Target Return On Ad Spend bid strategy gives you the option to add a specific target for a campaign. Using either bid strategy means Google will look to generate a specific CPA or ROI, helping to improve the efficiency of your campaigns.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are numerous different action points that can be looked at within your Google Ads account to improve the efficiency of your account and help reduce wasted ad spend. There are also numerous other areas not covered in this blog that you can look at, such as ad placements, scripts, and device targeting – to name but a few.

Exactly which aspect you should focus on first really depends on the type of business you have and how your campaigns are set up, as there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. However, you should see an incremental improvement in performance and ROI as you work through each area.

One of the biggest areas worth reviewing to maximise PPC performance is landing pages. Making sure your landing pages are simple enough to encourage users to convert, whilst containing enough engaging content can be a tricky but worthwhile task. In turn, landing page optimisations can also greatly improve keyword quality scores.

If you feel like you could do with a helping hand in optimising your Google Ads account, it might be time to speak to the experts…

Our award-winning team has helped countless businesses generate more sales and improve ROI across Google Ads – find out more about our service or get in touch today!

The post Tips for Helping Your PPC Budget Go Further appeared first on The SEO Works.

Bidding on branded keywords can be a bit of a controversial topic in the world of PPC. Is it really beneficial for your business? Is it a waste of money? 

Here we will explain what branded keywords actually are, some scenarios where bidding on branded terms can provide positive or negative results, and whether utilising these keywords is the right decision for your business.

What are Branded Keywords?

Branded keywords are targetable terms in Google Ads that in some way relate to your Business. Some examples of these are your business name, iconic brand products, or key figures of your business. 

Using international technology company Apple as an example, it’s clear from simple keyword research that there are a lot of keywords that are highly linked to their business.

Apple has two options. They can either not advertise for these terms on Google Ads, rely on their Organic presence, and risk competitors appearing above them with paid ads; or they can put a proportion of their advertising budgets towards these keywords.

When Should We Target Branded Keywords?

Protecting Brand Image

Depending on the goals of your business, it may be important to be present for every search including your brand name, key products, services, etc. In this case, you may set aside a budget to ensure an ad is shown for all relevant brand terms.

Maximising Impression Share

In some cases, your organic ranking for a certain product may not be high enough to show in position one. Using branded keywords for PPC can supplement this to ensure you are still showing at the top of the page for a keyword that is important and relevant to your business.

Combating Competition

In competitive industries, direct competitors sometimes try to insert themselves into a customer’s conversion journey by targeting other businesses’ brand terms. 

A great example of this is the competition online between food delivery services. Well-known brands such as UberEats and Deliveroo will aggressively target each other’s branded keywords in order to show higher on the page and potentially steal customers searching for the other’s brand.

The downside of this is that some businesses can get into a “bidding war” targeting these priority terms, and this can result in CPC skyrocketing in Google Ads.

When Shouldn’t We Target Branded Keywords?

Low Competition

If your business has quite a high search volume but low competition it may not actually be necessary to bid on branded terms, and it could be more of a detriment than an advantage. 

If no competitors are bidding on your branded terms, or you are confident that people searching for your branded terms would not be swayed by a competitor, then you could consider bidding on these keywords a waste of budget.

Low PPC Budget

If your allocated budget for PPC is small, bidding on a brand may not be your first priority as this will sometimes capture returning visitors already familiar with your brand. It may be more beneficial to rely on organic results to capture people already familiar with your brand and use your full budget for new user acquisition.

Skewing Results

Generally, branded keywords have a much higher conversion rate due to the high conversion intent linked to these searches. We often see conversions here come in with a higher click-through rate and lower CPA, which can skew your account’s overall performance. This is worth bearing in mind when reporting results back to your team.

Is Bidding on Branded Keywords Right for My Business?

It all depends on your priorities for PPC. If you are in a competitive industry, competitors will likely be using tactics to bid on your business’ name to try and steal customers. If you need to maintain a position at the top of the search results in this case, then it may be worth building a brand campaign.

If you are a smaller business with a smaller PPC budget, focusing on brand for PPC may be counterintuitive for growing your business. In this case, you will likely want to focus your budget on acquiring new users and reviewing the need for a brand campaign at a later date.

Unsure of the best route to take with your Google Ads campaigns? Find out how our PPC services can help, or get in touch with our expert team!

The post When to use (and not use) branded keywords in PPC appeared first on The SEO Works.

Another year, another edition of Google Marketing Live!

At this year’s event, they announced a collection of ways to improve campaigns, deliver better experiences and understand what is actually driving performance.

In this blog post, we take a look at all of these new features, what they are, and what they mean for you!

AI-powered Campaigns

The New Conversational Experience in Google Ads

You can now build better search campaigns with the new conversational experience in Google Ads. Ask Google Ads for ideas, to easily generate effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images and other assets, by analysing landing pages and Ads.

Google will be testing the new conversational experience in July and we expect it to be available broadly, later this year.

Search Generative Experience (SGE)

In the coming months Google will be rolling out the new Search Generative Experience (SGE).

Google will be experimenting with Search and Shopping Ads that directly integrate into the AI-Powered snapshot and conversational mode, as well as new formats that use generative AI. They hope this will create relevant, high quality Ads that are customised to every step of the search journey. (Eligible in the US)

Automatically Create Assets

Generative AI is coming to automatically create assets in Search and Performance Max campaigns.

They will use your landing pages to help you generate new headlines and descriptions that will better match your customers’ search queries. This will help improve your Ad relevance and keep assets fresh and on-brand.

Brand Restrictions

Google has introduced brand restrictions for broad match. This new feature will allow advertisers to use broad match and get that additional reach, whilst making sure you only match to relevant brand traffic that you specify.

You can access this feature when you enable the new broad match campaign level setting.

Smart Bidding Improvements

Advances in Google AI will allow the continued improvement of smart bidding, providing more accurate predictions, that will most likely deliver you conversions and value.

These advances will optimise more intelligently for search queries never seen before – helping to drive better performance, showing up in more valuable search moments, capturing new and never before seen opportunities.

Responsive Search Ads Top Search Categories

Responsive Ads have always used Google AI to help show more relevant Ads to your customers, but now you can review the top search categories for each of your Ads. This will provide a deeper transparency into what’s driving your Ads performance and allow you to optimise your Ads with new ideas. 

Business Information

Adding business information to your Ads (logos and names) is now available globally in all languages. Adding these assets can help your customers identify you at a glance and find what they need easily.

Advertisers adding their business information have seen more engagement with their Ads and on average an 8% increase in conversions.

Customer Connections (Performance Max)

Increase performance with new goals for new and existing customers

Google is enhancing the new customer acquisition goal in Performance Max so advertisers can optimise for new customers.

Having the option to either optimise the campaign to bid higher for new customers or exclusively bid for new customers only. Along with this, later in the year, Google will be releasing a new re-engagement goal that helps you connect with your most valuable, existing customers for increased retention.

Advertisers can also combine their first-part customer lists with Google AI for better performance at every step along the customer journey.

Performance Max Campaign Prefills

Sourced from your website, past campaigns and Google AI’s predictions, Performance Max campaign prefills will offer customised suggestions for assets and daily budgets as you create your campaigns.

These can be updated at any time based on what works best for you. Google will also be integrating recommendations into the setup flow of your campaigns later this year, giving you suggestions for what bid and target strategy to use. 

Performance Max Asset Creation with Generative AI

Powered by generative AI, Google is introducing asset creation flow in Performance Max campaigns.

Advertisers just need to provide a few details to help Google AI learn and you will be supplied with multiple options for text and images, easily added to your campaigns. The power is in your hands – you can revise, remove and direct Google AI to create more options based on your ideas.   

Ads Creative Studio

New tools available in Ads Creative Studio will allow creative teams to preview and export assets for Performance Max directly into Google Ads.

The new trend explorer will also help teams find the latest search trends to develop the latest new creative ideas for advertisers.

Explore Deeper Insights

• New experiment types within Performance Max will allow you to A/B test different configurations within a single campaign. For example enabling the final URL expansion feature so advertisers can see how it performs – this will be available later this year.
• Improved search term insights will help advertisers understand their customer intent and how they are searching for their business by including more search term categories. Apply custom date ranges, view historical insights and download them to dig even deeper. 
• Improved performance insights will be streamlined into one unified view showing several explanations and insights. 
• New asset insights will provide advertisers with more information on how their assets are performing with their audience and provide recommendations to use AI-generated assets to improve performance. 

Generative AI for Retailers

As previously mentioned, retailers using Performance Max can drive more online sales with the new customer acquisition goal, so advertisers can optimise for high lifetime value customers. Along with this Google will be launching a new re-engagement goal so advertisers can connect to the most valuable existing customers to help increase retention. 

Store sales reporting and bidding is now available in Performance Max, allowing advertisers to understand how many offline purchases occur (along with their modelled value) after customers interact with Ads. 

Shopping Campaign optimisation opportunities and profitability reports

New tools are being built to give advertisers better insights on what is driving sales within their shopping campaigns. You can now better understand the profitability of your products in your campaigns, looking at how they fluctuate over time based on budget and bid changes. You can view this new reporting feature in your Google Ads account today by implementing conversions with cart data.

You can now also identify product and category level optimisation opportunities in Google Ads at a glance. For instance, missing attributes or more granular policy restrictions and then quickly see recommendation actions for improvement.

Full-Funnel Video Solutions

Google is now offering AI-powered tools that will improve the effectiveness of your YouTube creatives. You can generate a variety of video Ads, such as horizontal, square or vertical, using existing assets from sources like your product feed or app listings with only a click of a button. 

You can also add local offers onto your products via YouTube in-stream Ads and show item availability and variable pricing based on locations of customers. These offers are shown alongside online offers, turning your product feed into a true full-funnel and omnichannel experience.

Enhanced YouTube Campaigns

During Google Marketing Live 2023, Google announced how YouTube Solutions were enhancing. With new ways to create assets, launch video campaigns and drive high-impact results.

Creative Assets with AI-powered Tools

Use voice-overs on your videos using the new Google AI text-to-speech technology. Create horizontal, square or vertical Ads using existing assets from historical campaigns, product feeds, app listings and more and make vertical video Ads from your horizontal videos, all using Google AI.

Google AI also improves the quality of your images on youTube by increasing image resolution using smart cropping to resize images.

YouTube Suitability Settings

Account-level suitability settings let you opt out of showing your Ads on or alongside certain websites, videos, channels and mobile apps that aren’t a good fit for your brand. Google Ads is now bringing out impact forecasting, which will give advertisers feedback and transparency into how these settings will impact their campaign performance. Allowing advertisers to make more informed decisions about their exclusions.

Improved Data Collection

Manage First-Party Data

Google is currently working on providing an easier way for advertisers to import their first-party data into their Google Ads account, in a privacy-centric way. Coming Soon advertisers will be able to easily and securely connect their data sources and translate data into insights in Google Ads. Improving accuracy, measurement and analysis.

Enhanced Conversions

Coming soon, Advertisers will be able to use enhanced conversions in Search Ads 360 and enable them easily in Google Ads. With new account-level controls, advertisers can quickly set up enhanced conversions across entire accounts. Along with easily activating first-party data by creating conversion-based audience lists using customer match. 

Google Analytics 4 Audiences

You will be able to build and add relevant Google Analytics 4 audiences in Google Ads, as you create and manage your campaign. Including using Google AI to predict audiences that will most likely convery. A feature exclusively to Google Analytics 4.

Fractional Data Driven Conversion Credits

Google has introduced Fractional credits with data driven attribution. Meaning if a customer clicks on a paid Ad but purchases through an organic listing partial credit for the ads will be imported into Google Ads from Google Analytics 4. This will improve the bidding performance of your campaigns as it will show the true value of each Ad / keyword etc.

Improving App Experiences

• Apply your product feeds to your App campaigns and turn them into a storefront. 

• Add promotion assets to your app campaigns to show your customer promotions when they are viewing your Ads.

• Add seasonality adjustments to your campaigns to manage user demand in peak season. Your App campaigns will optimise your bids based on conversion rate changes that you are anticipating, during seasonal events. 

Product feeds are available now, with promotion assets and seasonality adjustments due to be available in beta in a few months. 

Web to App Connect

Create an effective web-to-app experience for your customers with Web to App Connect. It provides its uses with clear, step-by-step guidance to implement conversion tracking, bidding and deep links. Helping advertisers optimise their web-to-app experience for their customers that already have your app.

New Display and Video 360 Features

Google has launched a new feature called optimised targeting for display and 360 video, which uses AI to help engage with new audiences that are more likely to convert. Optimised targeting looks beyond manually-selected audience segments in your campaign to find audiences that you may have missed.

It looks at keywords on your landing page and creative assets to find these audiences. Optimised targeting is automatically turned on for all campaigns, however this can be turned off in your ad groups settings. 

More Insights from Connected TV (CTV)

The new digital & TV report in Display & Video 360 will now allow advertisers to measure the reach and efficiency of their CTV campaigns alongside traditional TV buys. Cross-device measurement is also coming soon for CTV campaigns, so advertisers will have a clever view of what people are doing after seeing their Ads on a smart TV. Given a fuller picture of how connected TV campaigns can assist in your customer journey. The beta is available for US advertisers now and will be launching fully later this year.

Conclusion

With so many exciting new features, and lots still to come, this was a fantastic event! We’re looking forward to seeing how they progress, and how we can utilise them to help our clients get more customers online.

If you’d like to find out more about them, we post lots of free guides and tips on our LinkedIn, so give us a follow!

You can also find out more about our PPC services or get in touch with our team of experts, and we’ll help your business take full advantage of the diverse range of Google products available.

The post Google Marketing Live appeared first on The SEO Works.

If you work in marketing, you will have definitely heard of ‘CPC’ or cost per click. It forms a central part of paid advertising, and analysing it is a crucial element of any PPC strategy.

But lets start from the beginning…

What does it actually mean? How do you calculate it? What are the different types?

We’ll cover all of this, and more, in this blog!

What is CPC?

Cost Per Click (CPC) is a metric used in pay per click (PPC) advertising where the advertiser pays a sum each time their ad is clicked. The system works towards a daily budget which is set by the advertiser, which can vary depending on competition, industry, and seasonality.

CPC is essentially how much it costs to display an advert on search engines, social networking sites, and other platforms. CPC is an important metric for an advertiser as clicks and cost quickly add up. Monitoring your CPC and ensuring it is reflective of your budget will help your campaigns succeed. 

How to calculate cost per click (CPC)?

Cost per click (CPC) is calculated by dividing the cost of an ad by the number of clicks it gets. The formula is: CPC = total ad cost / total clicks. For example, if you spent £1000 on a campaign and got 5000 clicks, your CPC would be: £1000 / 5000 clicks = £0.20 per click.

The bidding strategy you choose will also play an important role in your advertising goals and how you calculate your CPC.

CPC will vary across campaign groups, which will give you more context. Looking at the overall metric for an entire account is quite a blunt measure. You can also analyse your ad strategy with more specific CPC metrics such as Max CPC, Average CPC, Actual CPC and the Manual CPC bidding strategy. 

What is ‘Max CPC’?

Max CPC is the highest amount that the advertiser is willing to pay for a click on an ad. If the max CPC is set to £5.00 then you could pay up to £5.00 if a customer clicks on the ad.

To work out what max CPC you want to set, you can use keyword planner to view the top of page bid (high and low) – this way you can see the highest and lowest price that the keyword will cost per click. You’ll often pay less than the max CPC, as in each auction you will only pay what is needed to rank higher than the advertiser below you.

Setting a max CPC can be beneficial to your campaigns as you can set different CPCs for different ad groups and keywords, giving you more control over your bids and budgets. 

What is ‘Average CPC’?

Average CPC is the amount that you have been charged per click on your ad. The cost is calculated from dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks. This differs from the Max CPC as it is calculated based on your actual CPC rather than an estimation.

In simple terms, it is the average cost you will spend for every ad click. Depending on the search intent, some days you may spend more and others less. This will all be reflective when you view your average CPC for the month. 

What is ‘Actual CPC’?

Actual CPC is the final amount that you’ve been charged for a click. Typically you will pay much less for actual CPC than estimated as you only need to pay the minimum amount to beat a competitor who is also bidding on the same keywords.

The actual CPC is calculated on this, which gives you the actual cost you will pay. This can vary depending on the industry, competition and seasonality. If you are in a competitive and seasonal industry, you may find your advertising costs vary during each month.

Ensuring you have enough budget to compete in your industry is important, however ad rank and quality scores pay equal importance to where your ad shows on Google. 

What is Ad Rank?

Ad rank is the score that decides where your ad is shown on the SERP. This is determined by bid amount, ad quality, competition of an auction and the intent of a user’s search.

What is Quality Score?

Quality Score lets you know how well your ad is performing against competitors. A higher quality score means your ad and landing page are more helpful to your user and their search than your competitor’s ads. Expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page relevance help determine your final score. 

If you meet all of these requirements, you have a good chance of beating your competition and appearing high in the search results.

What is ‘Manual CPC’?

As Google becomes more automated, manual bidding strategies are becoming limited. 

Manual CPC is one of the few manual bidding methods that Google allows an advertiser to apply to their campaigns.

It allows you to set your own maximum cost per click (CPC) for your ads. This differs from automated bidding strategies, which sets the bid amount for you. Despite Google moving over to automated bidding strategies, manual CPC is still a widely popular strategy as it allows you to set and control the maximum amount you want to pay for each click on your ads. This bidding strategy can be beneficial for advertisers who want more control over their campaigns and budget.

What is a good cost per click?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to what a “good” cost per click (CPC) is. It depends on a number of factors, including your industry and the level of competition bidding for ads. Some industries, like legal or finance, tend to have higher CPCs because the competition is fierce and the potential customer lifetime value is high. Whereas a more niche product in a lower demand sector would see lower cost per clicks. Different platforms also have different average CPCs. LinkedIn Ads, for example, tends to be more expensive than Google Ads.

Rather than fixating on cost per click, it pays to look at the bigger picture in terms of your target return on investment (ROI). This is basically how much money you make for every pound you spend on advertising. Let’s say you’re happy with a 5:1 ROI, meaning that for every £1 you spend in advertising, you get £5 back in revenue. In that case, a £2-3 CPC might be acceptable and you will be willing to bid more in order to be at the top of the adverts.

While it is hard to determine a good overall cost per click, there is a way to conduct some research. You will be able to determine what approximate cost per clicks may be for your industry by using Keyword Planner (more on this below).

Using Keyword Planner to find the cost per click

Keyword planner is an essential tool when it comes to finding the CPC of your desired keywords. It provides you with valuable metrics which can help you determine whether the keyword will be useful for your search campaigns.

It is a free tool provided by Google in your Google Ads account, which you can find in your tools and settings. 

Keyword planner can help you discover new keywords by giving you suggestions for keywords related to your products, services or website. It also allows you to see the average number of searches for a particular keyword.

This is where you can weigh up the pros and cons of using a certain keyword and determine if it will be useful to your campaigns. 

Advertising on Google Ads can become costly and that’s why it’s important to check the cost of each keyword you are planning to use. You can also view this in keyword planner by viewing the lowest and highest price you will pay for a keyword. This way you can determine whether the keyword is cost-effective.

Keyword planner is also a useful tool to segment your campaigns. Once you have researched the terms you want to use, you can organise them into categories which can then become your campaigns or ad groups.

Speak to the experts

The world of PPC is a confusing one, full of lots of different acronyms and jargon, and it can be difficult to stay on top of it all!

Also, when it comes to your budget, you want to be able to rely on it being spent wisely and in places that are going to help your business grow.

That’s where our team of award-winning experts can help.

Find out more about our approach to PPC, or get in touch with our team today today!

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