“Our Two Cents Worth” offer Mostly Media’s insight into the world of advertising.  This week Tom, our Digital Media Manager, has written a handy blog with 3 invaluable tips to help companies improve ROI for paid search activity.  Keep reading or chat with Tom on 01225 302 270.

Whatever your campaign goal is with paid search activity, improving ROI will always be a factor in what is deemed to be a successful digital marketing project.  The aim might be to increase brand awareness or drive more telesales but success in those areas will usually need to be costed against the revenue generated.

With that in mind, we have put together a list of 3 tips to try and help improve ROI for paid search and get campaigns firing on all cylinders.

Account structure

Simple yet effective.  This should be at the top of any list when it comes to creating and improving a PPC campaign.  It boils down to organising things in the right place – you wouldnt put a clean pair of socks away in the oven, or dirty for that matter, so don’t do the same with your keywords.

Make sure that the account set-up follows related themes across each ad group and group relevant keywords together, making sure the traffic is landing on the most relevant pages.

Once you have this set-up, you can take this a step further and split the different match types into individual ad groups.  This not only gives you better control over the ad copy but allows the use of clever negatives across the ad groups, which will show customers the most relevant message.

It will give you a much clearer picture in terms of what works and what doesn’t so you can focus on reducing cost per sale and increasing ROI.

Using your common sense with this is paramount as over-complicating set-ups will just end up a massive headache.

Ad group optimisations

We can not stress enough the importance of utilising the data from existing campaigns.  This section focuses on stream-lining ad groups without any negative impact on sales.

Cull lazy keywords – get rid of any poor performing keywords.  These will just clutter up your campaigns and waste valuable spend.
Keyword mining – regular checks of what search terms are being picked up by your broad match keywords is really important.  Negative match any non-relevant terms that you think aren’t likely to lead to a sale.  This comes hand-in-hand with good account set-up and making sure keywords are in the right place.
Ad copy optimisations – testing new ad copy variations and working this back to the highest click-through-rate will deliver more clicks to your site and increase sale opportunities.

Remarketing

Remarketing lists for search ads is a great way to target customers that have already visited your site.

When customers leave the site without buying anything, for example, remarketing lists for search ads will help to re-engage with those customers when they continue to look for what they need on Google and Bing.

Sitting in a higher position on these campaigns and serving a custom message to an audience already interested in your products or services, is a quick and easy way to increase ROI.

While all of the above points may not transform a campaigns fortunes, they are all really straightforward, and if you aren’t doing them, what have you got to lose?

Call Mostly Media on 01225 302270 today for advice on getting the most out of your digital marketing budgets.