PPC advertising is effectively captivating the attention of an audience and driving traffic to a website. But since PPC campaigns aren’t free, you want to make sure that every dollar you invest offers a good return on advertising.

In this blog post we look at 10 essential tactics you can use to ensure a PPC campaign delivers a great return on advertising spend (ROAS).

10 strategies that will improve your PPC ROAS

1. Hyper-targeted keywords

Before launching a new PPC campaign, dive deep into keyword research to ensure the keywords you use to target those who are more likely to convert.

In other words, target keywords with high purchase intent. These are keywords potential customers type into search engines when they’re almost ready to take action.

2. Competitor research

Competitor research tools can yield valuable insights and reduce or eliminate guesswork.

We suggest using these tools to find out:

• Which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
• The type of copy, call-to-action, and offers that have lower bounce rates. 
• How your competitors’ ads are performing in the long term.

To lower your ad cost, you can also use keyword research or discovery tools to explore keywords that your competitors have overlooked, as their cost-per-click will be lower.

3. Negative keywords

Both Google Ads and Bing Ads feature a negative keyword tool. With this tool, you can create a list of keywords that aren’t likely to generate conversion straight away. When someone does an online search using those keywords, your ad won’t be shown to them.

Negative keywords are the keywords you don’t want to pay for. Let’s use an example to illustrate this.

Imagine you sell laptops and you launch a campaign for gaming laptops. In your negative keyword list, you could add terms like “laptop 500GB HDD”. Gaming laptops have a higher HDD capacity and therefore cost more, so there’s no point in getting clicks to a product that the user isn’t willing to buy.

4. Seasonality adjustments

In 2019, Google introduced a seasonality adjustment feature that can maximize PPC ROAS at specific times of the year. To use it, you need to know how a seasonal campaign performed in the past, for example by looking at year-on-year data for Black Friday.

Let’s say you find out that during last year’s Black Friday campaign, you got the highest conversion rates on Friday, but they dropped significantly on Saturday. Using the seasonality adjustment, you can invest more ad spend on this year’s Friday campaign, and less on Saturday.

5. Personalized landing pages

If your campaign targets more than one buyer persona, you can use different landing pages and personalize them to each persona. You can then use the keyword of geo-location filters to ensure the landing page copy changes dynamically based on who is seeing them.

Some studies show that conversion rates can be 25% higher when using dynamic landing pages.

6. Optimize every aspect of conversion

Speaking of conversion rates, you must make sure every aspect of conversion is fully optimized. This includes ad copy, the user experience, call-to-action-buttons, forms and check out pages, and abandoned cart re-targeting. 

7. Focus on local traffic

This is a good strategy for small businesses or those with a physical store. This allows you to target a smaller audience (so the ad costs are lower) while ensuring the audience is highly likely to convert.

To dial in your local PPC campaign, use location targeting or geo-targeting. You can find this feature in most campaign tools. Geo-targeting allows you to define who sees your ad, limiting it to users within a specific distance from your location.

8. Improve Ad Quality Score

Google lets you check how well your ad performs when compared to competitors. The ad performance is given a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best score you can aim for.

To improve your score, make sure your ads are hyper-targeted, relevant and useful.

9. Product Listing Ads

Conversion rates for Product Listing or Google Shopping ads are 30% higher than for regular ads. To drive more traffic to product listing ads, use all the strategies listed above.

If you create small product groups in your PLAs, you’ll have a more granular view of how your campaign is performing in case you need to make adjustments.

10. Analyze, analyze, analyze

Boosting your ROAS involves tracking and analyzing campaign performance constantly. Having a well-designed analysis strategy allows you to be agile and fine-tune your ad campaign as needed to get even better results. If  you’re having a hard time here sometimes it’s good to outsource PPC to someone that can provide good insight and value.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to improve the ROAS of a PPC campaign, don’t forget to incorporate these tactics into your 2022 marketing plan.

Author Bio:

Diarmuid Hennessy is the Operations Manager of HomeCheck. Since 2016, they have been providing property survey services to homeowners throughout Ireland. To learn more click here – https://homecheck.ie/.