Running a paid ads campaign can be challenging work. Putting together an effective strategy can take a lot of brain power when it comes to setting your overall goals, deciding on the right keywords to target and making a decision on your spend.
Once you’ve got your campaign up and running, there are a few things you might want to consider to make sure your campaign continues to perform.
Avoid overbidding on branded keywords already in the first rank
Overbidding on first rank brand keywords can lead to overpaying without much gain. Keywords where this is happening can often be identified by having your max cost per click bids set much higher than the average cost-per-click paid.
Instead of dropping the bids in one hit, slowly reducing max bids on these keywords over time can save money whilst seeing little drop in rankings.
Split your shopping campaigns by brand and non-brand
Google Shopping ad campaigns don’t use keywords to target users as regular paid search adverts do, so splitting your campaigns based on keyword context is not possible. However, shopping ads are triggered by search terms, so activity will be a mix of brand names and non-brand terms.
To split these out, you can duplicate your campaign and then set one set as “Non-Brand” and set this to a high priority, then add your brand term(s) as a phrase match negative to these campaigns.
Set the other set of campaigns as “Brand” and set this to a lower priority. Then when someone searches for a non-brand term, they will trigger the non-brand campaigns as these are set to a higher priority. However, if they search for a brand term, it will skip over the non-brand campaigns as these have the brand terms as negatives and only trigger the brand campaigns.
Consider changing attribution model in Google Ads
Google Ads will default to a last click model regardless of whether you are using the Ads pixel or the Google Analytics conversion import.
This means that if you have a multi-click journey you will only give credit to the last keyword in the journey. This can often discredit upper funnel activity that drove an initial visit but didn't convert straight away, such as non-brand terms. As a result, this may devalue this activity and stop running it, which can then have an impact as it reduces your upper funnel traffic.
To avoid this, there are different attribution models in Google Ads that you can choose and this means that you can then share the credit across multiple touch points. By choosing a position-based model which splits the credit, you can optimise upper funnel activity more effectively, along with other touch points that led to a conversion.
It is important to remember that these tactics may not necessarily work for every campaign, so you should review them on a case by case basis. For more advice and help on improving your campaigns,
get in contact with the experts at AdPilot today.
