The budget devoted to online advertising can weigh heavily on the finances of a company, particularly an SME. If a good acquisition campaign is a growth accelerator poorly managed, this budget can quickly weigh down your expenses. Also, we have decided to go back to basics by (re)giving you five basic but essential tips to optimize your CPC bids accurately and get maximum performance from your Google Ads and Bing Ads campaigns.
Determine Clear And Structured Objectives For Your Campaigns
Multi-channel and multi-lever CPC advertising offers a vast choice and the possibility of achieving a wide range of objectives. Also, it is essential to know where to go before you embark on the path to acquisition. There’s no secret to this: your first step is to define clear and quantified objectives for your CPC campaigns. This is all the more important for advertisers with a limited budget since this step will allow you to define your priorities and prioritize your campaigns accordingly.
Do you want to increase brand awareness? Generate more sales? In the first case, Google Ads display or YouTube video campaigns are good options. In the second, turn more to Search or Google Shopping campaigns. Whatever your objective, adopt a funnel approach to target more or less advanced profiles for conversions. The more restricted the budget, the more it is recommended to rely on “straight to the point” campaigns!
Create Readable And Structured CPC Campaigns
The structure of your account on Google Ads, like Bing Ads, is essential to obtain good performance at a lower cost. Also, it is necessary to be precise and rigorous when creating CPC campaigns to offer relevant ads in line with user requests. To do this, structure your campaigns and ad groups around your objective, but also so that your ads fit perfectly with the chosen keywords. Let’s imagine that your online store sells t-shirts. You would benefit from structuring your campaigns around ad groups:
- T-shirt
- Women’sWomen’s T-Shirt
- Men’sMen’s T-Shirt
- Children’sChildren’s T-Shirt
By doing this, you gain readability. It is easier to know which campaign performs the best and, therefore, which product is popular. But also, which target audience is the most receptive: here, men, women or children. Ultimately, campaign optimization is made more accessible, and the breakdown of CPC bids is much more efficient. At the same time, structuring your CPC account on this model allows you to offer better-targeted ads, which generate more clicks and sales. The Internet user receives an immediate response to his request. He is immediately redirected to the landing page corresponding to his query, and he, like you, gets closer to the desired objective more quickly!
Trust Long-Tail Queries
Google Ads or Bing Ads, CPC campaigns are based on an auction system where advertisers compete to obtain the best-exposed space. The more resources we have, the more freedom we have to raise the stakes and position ourselves. Thus, in specific markets, conquering star queries requires investing a significant budget. This is the law of the CPC! That said, what if your online marketing budget is unlimited? Well, focus on long-tail queries!
Deemed less efficient, they are subject to much less competition, which gives you a little more latitude in setting your CPC bids. For the record, we talk about long-tail queries to define queries that contain more qualifying keywords and draw less volume. We often forget that they are also more precise, which is a good indicator in favor of conversions.
Your long-tail searcher usually knows what they want. The intention behind the keyword is more explicit. It is, therefore, further along in the tunnel… and less expensive to purchase! By bidding on long-tail queries, you generate less traffic but a better-targeted audience with a much lower CPC. Do your calculations!
Geographically Limit Your Targeting Area
Geographic targeting is often neglected because we think that with E-Commerce, we can sell everywhere, all the time. This is true but only sometimes relevant significantly when reducing the CPC cost of auctions. Here again, it’s worth getting out your calculators! For your brand, is it more relevant – and profitable – to broadcast your ads throughout the country, within the limits imposed by your budget, or to target only your star markets with the necessary resources?
To obtain the answer, analyze your Google Ads reporting to compare performance by zone. But, consider factors such as the cost of delivery, brand awareness, and the quality of the audience about your core target … Will you sell as many balcony vegetable gardens in Lozère as in Paris or Lyon? Not sure!
Don’t Let Your Google Ads / Bing Ads Account Wither Away…
Over the years, Google and Microsoft have significantly simplified access to online advertising. Campaigns that are easier to configure, a good dose of automation, a smoother interface… So much so that some advertisers, particularly those with limited budgets, launched CPC campaigns and then… nothing! Of course, these campaigns live independently, are self-sustaining at a minimum and even generate some conversions.
However, without examining your account, we can say you are losing money! Because you have lost control of your spending, leaving the algorithm free to exaggerate! It is essential to support your CPC campaigns towards performance by adopting a continuous optimization approach.
To do this, you need time and relative expertise to point out, one by one, all the shortcomings that hinder conversions and unnecessarily waste budget. However, it is a safe bet that if you have yet to be passionate about managing your CPC account, more than this article is needed to motivate you! In such a case, the most sensible thing is to entrust your CPC budget to a dedicated agency such as JVWEB.
Does this remain reserved for large accounts? That these services are out of budget? You would be surprised to see how good management of your campaigns can finance the benefits of your SEA agency! And this, without even mentioning the time saved on your schedule and the development of your business. It is only sometimes necessary to have the most significant budget to perform on Google Ads and Bing Ads; contact us to study together the first avenues that can guide you straight towards performance!
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