Pay per click (PPC) campaigns are one of the most effective tools for growing your business. A lot of work and money goes into building a winning PPC campaign, but even if they start out successful, they can also fail for various reasons. A successful PPC campaign can really improve your revenue, but a failed one can make you end up wasting millions.
So why do PPC campaigns fail?
In a recent Simplilearn webinar, Google expert Brad Geddes discussed the various ways you can look at your perished PPC ads, determined what went wrong and then bring them back to life. You can watch the complete webinar here:
If you’d rather read than watch, here are the highlights from the webinar.
When dealing with data, the most important thing is finding out the root cause of when something suddenly changes. In order to understand why data changes, a chain of events needs to be understood first. Data usually flows in these three levels:
Always start with the volume of data you’re working with—understand whether it went up or down. This volume can be compared from one-time frame to the other on a year-on-year (YoY) or month over month (MoM) basis.
Then understand your impressions. You usually lose your impressions based on your shared budget or lost impression share (rank). These factors are ultimately influenced by your budget, quality score, bids and so forth.
If volume and impressions share changes, the root causes that you need to start looking at are:
Losing impression share can be due to an increase or decrease in the budget. However, losing impression share when the budget remains the same can be due to higher cost per click (CPC). This means that the CPC increased significantly and your budget can only afford a few total CPC.
Lost impressions share (budget) can help project budget changes. It is also useful to look at Impression Share budget trends to see if you have a lot of impressions are coming in.
An increase in weighted quality scores can enter you into more auctions and positions and your Lost Impressions Share (Rank) will increase. If Impressions top percentages drop, the ad could fall to page 2 more often and never get displayed. Bid changes can affect affect rank and ultimately position, which can enter or remove you from additional auctions.
If the impressions and volume haven’t changed that much but there are differences in metrics, then move from impressions to when clicks take place.
Click-through rates (CTR) are determined by impressions and clicks. But it is also influenced by a huge amount of other factors in your account. It can be influenced by:
CPC is the most straightforward of all the metrics. It is very stagnant unless your competitors make major changes to bids or quality scores. It is influenced by:
Using auction insights, you will be able to see how the competitors changed their position above your rates. If their top of page rate and position are above you a lot, it means that they raise their bids or quality scores a lot (assuming you haven’t made changes). If you want to maintain your position, you need to change your bids or work on your quality score and add extensions.
Cost changes have very few influencing factors as compared to the other metrics. It is simply the number of clicks you get and your average CPC. When there are a lot of cost changes it is because of changes in your clicks and CPC.
Conversions are a factor of the number of clicks you receive in your conversion rate. The CPC data along with your conversions data tells you how much you pay for a conversion.
If your conversion rate goes down, your cost per conversion goes up. So if there is a major change in the conversion rate, look at the campaigns or ad groups where it happened, so that you can examine that data and fix it.
If your CPAs are going up a lot, it's not only because of the increase in click prices. There are a lot of metrics that can affect your conversion rate and return on ad spend (ROAS):
Heatmaps can help you quickly see where you get the most impressions and identify outliers. You can also drill into campaigns/ad groups where the data changed. First of all, isolate the campaigns with the biggest changes, then drill down to the ad group with the biggest changes and then look at the overall data analysis at the ad group level. Once you find out the problem, look at the change history. Google logs the changes you make in your account so you can isolate the time frames and see the massive changes.
Once you know in which campaign or ad group the change happened, segment down to the time frame when it happened, then look at what changed in that particular spot. After this, you can start to segment your diagnosis:
Sometimes, your action plan can be as easy as unpausing a few ads or adding a few keywords or bit modifiers.
Other times it can be in depth - maybe you need to lay out a new ad testing plan because your CTR dropped too much. This lowers your conversions and the offer is no longer available for you. So you need to come up with something new so that can get your CTR conversion rates back up.
Let us take a case where your conversion rate went up 55 percent on a MoM timeframe. This may sound like a good number but when you look at all the metrics, it may not be so great. Your impressions increased to 94 percent, clicks increased to 94 percent and cost increased by 73 percent. This means that even though you have good impressions and clicks as a result of your higher cost, your conversion rate is still low.
Take another example where you increased costs to 95 percent. In this case, lets say your impressions went up 74 percent, clicks increased to 108 percent and your conversion rate increased to 136 percent. Now even if your budget increased a lot, because your conversions were higher and CPCs lower, you get a higher conversion rate.
You can analyze all these data yourself by using Google’s Data Studio, which allows you to transform your data into appealing and informative reports.
Simplilearn offers the Advanced Pay Per Click (PPC) Certification Training which is designed to transform you into an industry-ready paid marketing professional. You will learn to master the nuances of pay per click, display advertising, conversion optimization, and web analytics, and you’ll acquire extensive project experience to prepare you for managing paid marketing initiatives.
Name | Date | Place | |
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Advanced Pay Per Click (PPC) Program | 5 Jun -20 Jun 2021, Weekend batch | Your City | View Details |
Medo specializes in writing for the digital space to garner social media attention and increase search visibility. A writer by day and reader by night, Medo has a second life writing Lord of the Rings fan theories and making cat videos for people of the Internet to relish on.
Advanced Pay Per Click (PPC) Program
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