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The biggest challenge of digital marketing is the dynamic and constantly evolving environment that forces marketers to look for more and more alternative ways to work with the audience, based more on new interfaces and algorithms than on the experience they have gained. To improve account performance marketers must keep their finger on the pulse of current trends and find hidden levers that have great potential but have not been used by competitors yet. This article in the ADVAdvantage blog is about alternative, but no less effective ways to work with PPC.
1. Targeting the audience of competitors
A well-known, but rarely used lever in working with audiences, targeting competitors’ audiences, can be found in the Audience Manager in your Google Ads account. In addition, this feature is integrated by default in Performance Max (PMAX) and display campaigns, but is not available for a separate search target. Targeting competitors’ audiences allows you to select audiences that have interacted with competitors’ websites and similar resources, and the location exclusion tool blocks ads from being placed on unwanted pages. Such marketing efforts provide access to the share of the audience loyal to the competitor and generate conversions from it.
2. Report on search words
Although the usefulness of the search term report decreases over time, identifying priority keywords compared to actual keywords allows you to get the most effective version of a keyword. Anyone can use the suggestions of the keyword planner, but analysis and selection by attribute or specific term opens up a wide range of really effective search terms, as well as negative keywords that protect ad groups from unwanted paid traffic. The same applies to close matching options.
3. Minus words as a way to combat close variants
Less experienced marketers often forget about the use of negative keywords in their ad campaigns, but professional PPC practitioners know that these terms can limit ad campaigns from close queries that are not relevant in the end. Negative keywords play the most significant role in the budget allocation process, when marketers have to reallocate the budget between different campaigns. In addition, the use of negative words can protect against budget overruns, optimize campaign costs, and properly allocate resources in the future. This practice requires constant review of the negative word trail for relevance and effectiveness.
4. Audience optimization
When generating a report on the performance of advertising campaigns, it is not good to find gaps in the target audience or placement locations. Insufficiently precise audience targeting allows you to capture people who will never even become potential customers. Displaying ads to this traffic pool is a waste of budget that could be prevented by more detailed settings, including:
Visual content exclusions. Precise inclusion can be achieved by manually switching between content topics, locations, and keywords. Additionally, the Where and When
Ad Served report provides access to statistics on locations that should be targeted or excluded.
Edit audience signals in PMAX. The most effective way is to combine Google’s audience signals with data from existing ad campaigns.
Audience library. Your own audience primarily consists of those who have already made conversions, so separating them will allow you to get additional conversions in the future.
5. Detailed settings on different advertising platforms
The Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads platforms are fundamentally different in terms of ad group hierarchy, so fine-tuning them is crucial. Whereas Google Ads emphasizes campaign-level prioritization for schedules, budgets, location targeting and downsides, Microsoft Ads and Meta offer more flexible tools at the ad group level. Understanding the specifics of each platform’s settings opens up the possibility of creating truly flexible advertising strategies.
6. View hidden reports
Reporting in Google Ads has a powerful underutilized value. For example, the Change History Report shows exactly who and how has made adjustments to your campaigns, including blind acceptance of automatic recommendations. The Call Extension Report allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of phone calls by listening to them or analyzing their duration. The usefulness of the Search Terms Report has already been described above.
7. Attributes of purchases in Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center frequently adds new attributes to diversify the look of the feed. Monitoring, updating and adapting your feed at least once a month can make your ad campaigns stand out from the competition and increase your return on investment (ROI).
Conclusions
The above tips may seem too complicated to understand and their feasibility may be questionable, but it is the details that can tip the scales in your favor. Ad networks always promise huge changes, but they can only be achieved by precise and verified decisions at the stages of setting up and understanding user behavior.
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