Last Updated: January 1, 2022
Advertisers pay for every click that their ad gets on a search engine platform. But at times, the cost per acquisition (CPA) of the campaigns can be higher than expected. Here are a few PPC campaign management tips to keep in mind while optimizing search engine campaigns to obtain a lower CPA.
Have a Connection Between Your Ad Copy and Landing Page
One reason why people don’t convert on a landing page is because there is a disconnect between what the ad copy is talking about and what the landing page is about. For example, suppose your ad copy talks about the benefits of downloading a software. But, suppose the landing page is around the user downloading a report about the software being the market leader. While both the ad copy and landing page are talking about the software itself, the ad copy is misleading in terms of what the user might find on the landing page. Because of this, there is a lesser chance that a person would download the report (which is the conversion item in this example), leading to a lower landing page conversion rate. Because lesser people convert, this leads to a higher CPA.
Improve the Quality Score of Your Campaign
The quality score is a score that Google’s algorithm provides to each campaign and ad group. It takes into consideration things like:
- Ad copy to keyword alignment
- Landing page to ad copy alignment
- Landing page user experience, among other factors
The better the quality score of your campaign, the better your CPA.
Align Keywords with Ad Copy Text
Adding keywords within your ad copy text helps improve the quality score of your campaign because it helps improve the relevancy of the ad copy. Due to this, the user experience improves, leading to an improvement in multiple PPC campaign metrics such as:
- Number of impressions
- CTR
- CPC
- CPA
- Conversion rate
All of these metrics can be improved by something as simple as ad copy messaging. (We’ve tried and tested this ourselves!)
Device Bid Adjustments
Once your campaign has been running for a few days (or weeks), you will have statistically significant device data available. (How quickly you hit statistical significance depends on your PPC campaign budgets.) You can view all of the campaign metrics broken out on the basis of devices. On the basis of this, search engines like Google allow you to increase or decrease bids at the device level. So, if there is a device leading to a higher cost per acquisition, simply reduce the bids for that device. Similarly, if a device is performing particularly well, increase the bids for this device.
Modify Location Targeting and Bids
Is there a location that has spent a lot of money but has not led to any conversions? Consider pausing that location down in your campaign to allow more spends in locations that are actually leading to conversions for your business.
Also, similar to device bid adjustments, Google and other search engines allow advertisers to adjust bids for locations. So, feel free to increase or decrease location bids on the basis of past performance.
QA the Conversion Tracking Codes
At times, there may be a situation where a web developer was working on something on the back end and accidentally edited the conversion tracking code. This may lead to the tracking not working properly. So, if there is an abnormality in cost per acquisition, consider checking if the code is in place or not.
Want to QA the code on your end and don’t have access to the back end code? No issues! With the help of Google Tag Assistant, you can check the Google tags set up on any webpage on the internet without having any backend access.
Keyword Analysis
What keywords you are targeting play a crucial role in the campaign’s CPA. Here are a few questions to ask yourself during a keyword analysis:
- Do the keywords align with the campaign goal(s)?
- Are there any keywords with a lot of spends and no conversions? Can these keywords be paused down?
- What search terms are the keywords triggering? Are they relevant to the campaign ad copy/landing page? If not, consider adding them as negative keywords.
- Are there any terms I do not want my ad to show up on? If so, add them as negatives.
- Are we targeting keywords that are more awareness related rather than them being something a person lower in the funnel would search?
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