Unlocking Success in Paid Search: The KOSE Guide to Boosting Campaign Performance

For advertisers who rely on Paid Search to meet their marketing goals, it is important to know what key optimizations and strategies can unlock and enhance results of their Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign. Optimizing your campaign can result in generating higher quality leads, more efficient conversions, and making your media dollars go further. Here, we’ll walk you through three things to improve your campaigns.

 

Allocating Budgets

Don’t be afraid to shift your budget around. Across lead gen, ecommerce, and paid search campaigns it’s crucial to allocate as much budget as possible to the most efficient and high converting initiative. If you’re in tune with your campaigns and checking their performance regularly, you’ll see trends. It’s common to run multiple campaigns at once. This is how marketers help guide Google and other channels into a particular geography or emphasize the value of things like keywords, for example Brand searches vs Product searches.

The metrics to look at when it comes to efficient budget allocation are:

• Cost
• Conversions
• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) or CPL (Cost Per Lead)
• SOV (Search Impression Share, Search Impression Share Lost due to Budget, Search Impression Share Lost due to Rank)
• Ecommerce conversion rate and revenue
• Qualified leads

If you notice your CPL is increasing along with your SOV Lost due to Budget, there may be an increase in competition in the auction. On the other hand, another campaign might be really efficient with a low CPL and strong conversion volume. If there’s an opportunity to boost conversions in a campaign, shift the funds. Check out this KOSE BLOG for more ideas on how to make the most of your marketing dollar.

 

Audit Keywords

Ad group structure informs ad copy, meaning that ad copy is tied directly to the keywords within an ad group. This is why taking the time to think about your keyword structure as a whole is crucial to the success of your campaigns. If your keywords are relevant for what people are searching and your ad copy and landing page answer the query of the user, you are providing the best possible experience for the searcher.

Three Things

There are three things  to review, and they live in different subsections under keywords in the platform. 

• The first is Search Keywords. Here, you’ll take a look at how the keywords you provided are performing. You’ll want to ask yourself questions like Are these keywords serving? Are any keywords not serving? What keywords are performing best? Is there an opportunity to expand your keywords or remove them? The answers to these questions will give you insight into what is working and where there are new opportunities.
• Secondly, Search Terms. These are the actual terms users are typing into the search bar when your ad is served. These might be the most important keywords to look at because you can see if there are irrelevant queries, ideas for themes related to your campaigns, or keywords that need to be funneled into a different part of your campaign. In Google Ads, you can see what Search Keyword was triggered by the search term. For example, you have two ad groups, one for an MBA Program and one for Online MBA. If a user is searching for an “MBA Program near me”, we would want to make sure that person received an ad from the MBA Program ad group like ad 1, because it is most relevant. If we are looking at search terms and a user searched the same query and it triggered “online MBA”, like ad 2, we know this is not the most relevant keyword to match the search. By looking at Search Terms, we know that we would then have to add “online” as a negative keyword to the MBA Program ad group.
• Lastly, Negative Keywords. Implementing Negative Keywords at the ad group level allows you to funnel queries into their respective ad groups. In addition, account-level keywords are important for brand safety measures and irrelevant queries.

 

Review Ad Copy

As you’re writing your ad copy, it can be easy to default to write headlines and descriptions that sound nice, but ultimately they might not be what Google is looking for. You need to have a strategy behind your ad copy and that’s why it’s important to review your ad copy after you’ve launched it to see how it is performing and how it works with the other aspects of your ad. Sometimes it’s time for an ad copy refresh.

• Take a look at your landing page copy. Search impression share lost due to rank contributes to your overall ability to show in the auction. To reduce SOV lost due to rank, you need to improve your ad quality and optimize your landing page. Is your ad incorporating key points of differentiation from your page? Does your landing page have what users are searching for?
• Look at how your ad copy is performing. Is there a headline that’s rising to the top? Is there a specific callout that might be affecting that? How can it be incorporated into other headlines?
• Does the ad have a strong CTR? Is it related to what people are searching for?

While Google’s automation can help learn the landing pages and serve your ads to users looking for your service/product, you know your business better than anyone. Don’t be afraid to pull the levers and optimize to make your campaigns work most effectively for your goals and make your budget go as far as possible.

Interested in our expert opinion?  We’d love to meet up and talk about how paid search can help grow your business. Just tell us a little more about your goals in this FORM.