Two out of three people click on Google ads, according to Search Engine Land. The digital advertising giant, which processes more than eight billion searches per day and shares ads across millions of websites, says advertisers receive double their investment on average, the platform reports. While these statistics make the potential seem endless, most businesses see their results plateau at some point. Take heart if your business has reached this critical junction. It usually means you’re doing well. However, you can still squeeze more revenue from your digital advertising initiatives by scaling your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Give us a few minutes, and we’ll walk you through best practices for expanding PPC campaigns and provide a few PPC scaling tips to help your efforts start generating more momentum.
Signs You’re Ready to Apply PPC Growth Strategies
Perform an honest assessment of your current status and PPC results before implementing PPC scaling strategies. The techniques outlined on this page will only be effective if you’re at a genuine plateau. If your results have stalled because you’re not applying best practices or there are issues with your strategy, your issues will carry over to your new initiatives and will scale, too. What may be a small revenue leak now will become a deluge if you scale prematurely. Minor inefficiencies in your process will amplify when you replicate them.
Ensure your business can genuinely say the points below are true of your current PPC strategy before you expand.
You’re Organized
You have defined processes for creating and maintaining your PPC campaigns. Your accounts are tidy, with individual ad groups in each campaign limited to small keyword groups with a tight focus.
You’ve Performed PPC Campaign Optimization
While optimizing PPC for growth is an ongoing process, you’re applying best practices. You’re diligent about adding negative keywords and A/B testing. You have already pruned low-performing ad groups, keywords, and ads and have seen positive results.
Your Ad Quality Scores Are Strong
Your ad Quality Scores are a measure of the user experience you provide. They significantly impact how your ads perform during auctions, so they play a role in ad placement and spend.
You’re Meeting Benchmarks
You’ve reviewed ad performance benchmarks for your industry. Your campaigns are delivering average or above-average results in terms of:
- Cost-per-click (CPC)
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate (CVR)
You’re Receiving ROI from Paid Advertising
You can quantify the value your ads are delivering and receive a positive return.
Signs You’re NOT Ready to Apply PPC Growth Strategies
Again, if you begin PPC growth strategies prematurely, any problems you’re currently experiencing will amplify. If any of the following apply to your business, correcting deficiencies before you begin is better.
Your Campaigns or Processes Are “Complicated”
Imagine that you’re training a new PPC specialist or onboarding an agency. Would you have a difficult time explaining your campaign structure or processes? Would someone else have difficulty understanding them? If so, tidy things up before leveraging growth strategies in PPC.
You’re Not Dedicating Time to Optimization Regularly
Three in five ad agencies spend at least two hours per week performing ongoing maintenance, per WordStream research. If you aren’t doing this, it’s better to spend some time optimizing your current campaigns before you expand or bring in an expert who can dedicate the time.
You’re Not Meeting Benchmarks or Getting ROI
Sometimes, businesses that aren’t getting results from their PPC try to move the needle by expanding their efforts. It rarely works. There’s a reason why your campaigns aren’t performing, and if you don’t identify and address the underlying problem, you will carry it with you to any expansion projects.
Growth & Expansion Strategies for Scaling PPC Campaigns
Once your current campaigns are optimized and performing well, there are really only two ways to scale your PPC:
- Expand your existing campaigns.
- Develop new ad campaigns.
We’ll cover PPC strategies that fit into both these categories below.
Boost Your Budget
One of the simplest PPC growth tactics is to increase your budget. Check your PPC analytics for lost impression share (IS) to find out if this is warranted. This figure is usually calculated at a campaign level and indicates the percentage of time your ads didn’t show due to an insufficient budget.
If you’re getting good results but your lost IS indicates impressions are being lost, increasing your budget should boost impressions to increase clicks.
Broaden Your Keyword Strategy
Keywords are another simple way of expanding your digital advertising. If you aren’t doing so already, try to find gaps in your keyword strategy and additional long-tail keywords through a keyword research tool or competitor analysis.
Experiment with Ad Position Targeting
Conventional knowledge suggests that you get better results with higher ad visibility on a page. This isn’t always true. Review your analytics to determine how the average position of your ad impacts revenue earned and revenue per mille (RPM), or revenue per thousand impressions. If you discover that your RPM is higher with lower positions, use the ad position targeting options to focus your budget on those.
While this strategy fits more into the advanced PPC techniques category than paid search campaign scaling, it can help free up more of your budget and boost your ROI.
Leverage Remarketing
If you’re trying to increase PPC performance, remarketing and retargeting are great places to start. Dynamic remarketing, for example, doubles conversions and reduces cost per action (CPA) by 60 percent, according to Google.
With this approach, you’ll create specialized campaigns for people who have already engaged with your brand in some way. For instance, you may show product ads to someone who added an item to their cart but didn’t check out, or you might target people who have clicked your ad but didn’t convert and encourage them to take the next step.
Expand into Other PPC Platforms
If you’re scaling display or paid search campaigns, don’t forget to leverage Microsoft Advertising, too. As our Google Ads vs. Microsoft Advertising comparison shows, this often allows brands to reach the same audiences at a lower cost, though the volume will likely be lower.
Depending on your goals and audience, you may want to experiment with other PPC platforms, such as Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Expand with Other Ad Formats
While many brands begin with paid search, alternatives such as display and video ads often fit into growth-focused PPC strategies nicely because they can build on awareness, allow you to reach a different audience, and convey concepts more effectively.
Run Seasonal Campaigns
Depending on your industry and audience, it may be worth exploring seasonal PPC campaigns. These can allow you to zero in on keywords that explode at certain times of the year, reach new audiences, and get a burst of additional traffic.
Get Help Scaling Your PPC Campaigns
If your business needs help implementing any of these PPC expansion methods or you’ve realized you’re not quite ready to scale your PPC yet, it may be best to connect with a PPC pro. An experienced agency can analyze your current campaigns and troubleshoot them to help you achieve better results, map out a PPC expansion strategy, and help you implement changes efficiently. To learn more or get started, request a complimentary PPC consultation.
