March 15, 2023
Spring is in the air and it’s the perfect time to spruce up your Google Ads account.
While it might be that time consuming task that’s lingering around the bottom of your to-do list, the end result could bring performance uplifts that make it all worthwhile as you leap into the new season - why not take an afternoon to jumpstart a PPC Spring clean this week?
Here’s how our experts would tackle it…
Keyword Clean-up
It’s time to have a look at those keywords. You know which ones I’m talking about - the ones you think are relevant to the account, but just aren’t performing as well as expected. We tend to cling to these keywords as they feel safe and obvious, but the reality is, if they aren’t converting, getting impressions or clicks - then it’s time to take a deep dive and see if the impression share and budget can be utilised somewhere else.
Now that Google has removed the ability to use broad modified match keywords, Google is now showing ads for ‘close variants’ for both phrase match and exact match keywords. This unfortunately means that more issues come with spend and Google will now be showing ads for what they consider to be a ‘close variant’ of that keyword, rather than phrase match or exact match keywords that are performing well!
This also comes with the dilatory chore of trailing through actual search terms reports and adding those irrelevant keywords as negatives. But trust me - if you haven’t had a good root through the actual search term report in some time, the time is now my friend… I mean, only if you want to improve impression share AND cut back on spend.
Refresh your landing pages
So sometimes, you can do everything in your PPC power to optimise keywords, get a decent amount of clicks but still no conversions. This usually means there’s an issue that’s preventing people from converting - maybe a refresh of the landing page is necessary…
The critical elements of a landing page that need to be perfected are:
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User friendly - landing pages need to be easy to navigate and understand.
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CTAs - Call to actions need to be strong, does the user know where to click and what action you’re expecting them to take on the landing page? If they don’t, they’re going to bail, fast.
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Is the landing page targeted enough? Would it be worth building a more targeted landing page from scratch?
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Forms - if the forms on your landing page aren’t user/mobile/desktop friendly, you’re going to run into trouble!
If you’re going in circles and can’t quite pinpoint exactly what’s blocking your conversions, maybe a test is in order?
If you get enough traffic from one campaign, you can then set up an experiment to test the control vs a new landing page, to see which performs better.
Recommendations tab
Anyone else sick of the constant reminders in Google Ads to look at the Recommendations tab? So, I know we all ignore it 99% of the time, but whilst we’re doing our Spring clean, it couldn’t hurt to look!
If you open the recommendations tab, the account will show an ‘Optimisation score’ - everytime you complete one of those truly annoying recommendations pop ups, the score increases. Some have very little benefits, however others can really send that score up!
Takeaways
Hopefully we’ve left you feeling motivated and ready to give your accounts that Spring clean they’ve been in desperate need of. Whilst this presents a great opportunity to be more organised and ready to optimise some killer results - this kind of clean-up is extensive and as said previously, time consuming, so allow yourself enough time.
Going forward, we recommend blocking out some time in your calendar monthly to analyse and clean up your Google Ads accounts on the regular. Rather than neglecting accounts and allowing them to build up, best practice is to check in regularly and keep your head afloat and stay on top form.
Happy Spring Cleaning PPC’ers! If you're in need of a helping hand with your PPC Management or optimisation of your Google Ads, get in touch with our experts using the button below!
