This blog post was originally written at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but we've updated it to be more applicable for 2024.
Visibility has never been more important right now. And there are few better forms of visibility than PPC – your company’s name is right at the top of Google.
So you can target users with ‘sit forward’ advertising that matches your message to their query at the crucial point of search.
Done right, PPC works – even in a global pandemic. One of our B2B manufacturing clients is this month enjoying a 536% return on his PPC investment (April 2020). Another in professional services is seeing 487% ROI (and April 2020 is outperforming April 2019).
The secret of this success is to give people very real reasons to want your product or service when their first instinct in lockdown is to hold back and avoid spending.
You must also be sure your PPC is working correctly. Here are some potential snags that could undermine your campaigns’ performance. And how you can fix them…
Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is fabulous when it works – and it usually does. All those juicy conversions roll in and your heart soars. But then one cold, dark day your campaigns stop converting. Or they convert less well and at a much higher cost.
Many years ago a colleague and I used to call this PPC pain the ‘icy claw’. It’s an insidious feeling – as if a freezing talon has reached into the pit of your stomach.
You struggle to find the problem. It can feel as if all hope is lost; you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders as you try to pin down what went wrong (something a Marketing Opportunity Analysis might help with).
Fear not. We feel your pain. And we’re going to make that pain stop – by showing you some solutions that can help you if:
Yes, PPC is an ad auction which – in the run-up to Covid-19 – was becoming more competitive and more expensive… reducing return on investment. After all, you’re not just competing against humans anymore. Today you’re up against more automation than ever before.
And yes, at a basic level PPC comes down to three questions. Are you getting enough:
But let’s pop those fundamentals to one side for now and look at some harder-to-diagnose problems…
And you can’t figure out why. You’ve checked last year’s performance and your current malaise is not due to seasonality. This time last year your conversions were increasing every month – but now they’re falling. So it’s not seasonal.
You see that the decline is gradual, but there’s a definite downward trend. Every month for the last quarter your conversions have been dropping. Your campaigns are slowly bleeding to death but you don’t know why; you can’t find the ‘wounds’.
I have an expression for this phenomenon; ‘the tide is going out’. That’s because the atrophy is so subtle that at first, you don’t see it happening. Only after a few weeks do you realise that you’re being left high and dry…and that the flood of conversions you once enjoyed is now ebbing away.
So what’s causing the problem? The answer is impression share – ie ‘how often your ads are showing’.
For those of you who haven’t heard of ‘impression share’, it’s arguably the most important PPC metric of all because if your ads aren’t showing, you’ve got nothing. No ad impressions means no clicks – which in turn means no conversions.
Through no fault of your own (other than perhaps ‘PPC over-enthusiasm’) you can get drawn into a vicious circle that looks like this…
Here’s the bottom line: if your impression share is only 50% then your ads are showing only half the time. You’re fishing only half the pond…and what if all the fish you want are in the half you’re not fishing?
That – in one paragraph – is why impression share is so crucial.
You must find out how much impression share you have – and where you are losing it. Check the following:
Your Impression Share, ‘IS lost to budget’ and ‘IS lost to rank’ should all add up to 100%.
You have several choices. The lazy option is to invest more money by boosting your campaign budget. Google might secretly love you for this but your financial director won’t. You’re just papering over the cracks.
The more cost-effective option is to focus your impression share on the keywords that are working best for you. Optimise each campaign by concentrating your impression share on the best converting:
You can pause keywords that aren’t converting. Or you could (and should) dig deeper to find out why they aren’t working. Is it down to intent? Or unappealing ads? Poor landing pages?
Or are you simply attracting the wrong kind of traffic? In this case, some well-applied negative keywords will save you from racking up unwanted impressions and costly extraneous clicks that are never likely to convert.
There’s a lot you can do before you decide to make Google richer than it already is.
Again the easy option is to hose money at the problem by bidding more. And, yes, bids are important. But there’s something else you should look at first – the keyword Quality Score.
Like Impression Score, Google’s Quality Score of 1-10 for each keyword is crucial: get a 10 and you’re laughing; get a 2 and your ads won’t show.
Your Ad Rank – which determines your ad’s position on the page – is based on Bid x Quality Score (actually, there’s a little more to it than that but let’s keep it simple).
And it doesn’t take much of a drop in Quality Score to ruin your day. At best your ads will be outranked (and your costs will rise as you bid more to hold position). At worst your ads will not appear…and the low QS keywords will gradually start to ‘infect’ your good QS keywords and turn them rotten too. A bad QS keyword is like a bad apple that spoils the barrel.
So how do you fix the problem? It’s time to delve into the fascinating world of Quality Score…
A lower Quality Score means a lower Ad Rank, which means your ads will appear in lower positions.
This in turn means that you’re more likely to lose impression share due to rank. Ouch.
Quality Score runs from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) and it matters a lot because – aside from ad rank – it directly affects how much you will pay for each click.
It sure feels that way. And we look at keyword Quality Scores pretty much every working day.
Yes, increased competition may indeed be as much (or more) to blame.
But there is something that makes me look beyond this: Quality Score on brand keywords….
There shouldn’t be much competition for your brand keywords. True, it’s an age-old PPC trick to bid on a rival’s company name – but this is seldom worthwhile because the low QS that you’ll get makes the process expensive. It may not convert that well either.
So there is less competition on brand keywords. This means you should have a much greater chance of getting a QS10 on your brand keywords:
So why is Google now less likely to give QS10s across the board? A couple of years ago, every keyword in your brand campaign would have been a QS10. Now it’s possible to see a QS9 or QS8 sneaking in.
Why? Well, it doesn’t take much of a QS drop to make you push up your bids (and make Google richer) – especially if you spark a bidding war with your competitors.
All this can feel like ‘shrinkflation’ when confectionery manufacturers reduce the number of sweeties you get in the packet but don’t cut the price. Shame!
Or when government ministers impose a sneaky stealth tax on pensions. They’re hoping you won’t notice.
But we do.
Google scores Expected Clickthrough Rate (CTR) as below average/average/above average. CTR is the big determinant of quality score. It’s a huge incentive to make your ads better (and thus improve the user experience for searchers).
But it feels as if the pace has hotted up in recent years. You’ll have to split-test your ads more often than you did before.
You may even be forced to do so before you’re comfortable with the amount of data you have – because if you wait too long your keyword may already have dropped to QS2 (aka ‘dead’).
And because it is an ‘expected’ clickthrough rate, it can feel as if Google is penalising your keyword before it has given it a proper crack of the whip.
Quality Score Ad Relevance (below average/average/above average) is self-explanatory. And it can bug you.
Google can still penalise you for ad relevance even when your ad headline, final URL, display URL, display path, and description all contain the keyword!
It feels nuts! C’mon Google…how much more relevant could such an advert possibly be? How could the bleedin’ obvious be somehow less than 100% relevant?
There are various possible solutions:
Always think about the end user – what would they want to see in your ad? What would make them click and convert? Make the call to action on each ad awesome! (Try popping a CTA in the headline!)
Landing Page Experience (below average/average/above average) matters so much for both the user and for Google.
Offering searchers a ‘below average’ landing page experience is like going into battle with one hand tied behind your back – you’ll never get much more than a QS7 if your landing pages are poor.
Like so many aspects of PPC, landing page optimisation and conversion rate is an entire blog post (or series of blog posts) in its own right.
But here are some basic pointers:
Set up your ad groups badly and your ad relevance will suffer – hitting your Quality Score, Ad Rank, and impression share.
For this reason, you should obsess about ad group granularity.
Google’s official recommendation is that you can have up to 20 keywords in each ad group.
But your Quality Scores should improve if you ‘go granular’ with:
At this point, we could go off on a tangent and discuss the merits or otherwise of separating keywords by match type but let’s keep it simple…
Keyword Quality Score is like freedom: the price is eternal vigilance.
To preserve good QS across your account, you may be forced to delete some keywords, ads, and even entire ad groups for the greater good (“the greater good”).
That is because it only takes one bad apple to eventually spoil the barrel. A QS2 keyword is like a zombie; it’s dead (it won’t enable your ads to show)…but it can still infect the living.
Ignore the problem and eventually, that zombie QS2 could turn other perfectly decent keywords into zombies too.
Here’s the tragedy. A QS2 ‘zombie’ may be a great keyword that you once knew and loved. But now it’s dead/undead.
There may be a faint chance of getting it back to a QS3 or QS4. But most of the time it’s likely to remain a zombie QS2 or QS1.
So you must delete it. Be strong. Do what has to be done.
In the worst-case scenario, all your PPC campaigns suddenly stop converting. Day after agonising day you get nothing.
And you don’t know why.
Remember that icy claw feeling? This is a seriously sub-zero situation! It can be a real panic-inducer if you’ve never experienced it before and don’t know what to look for.
One possible reason is ‘the Dropped Gclid’ – you changed your website without changing the final URLs in your PPC ads.
So what is the Gclid? It’s the Google Click ID – the little auto tag that tells Google that your PPC conversions came from PPC and not organic search, direct traffic, referrals, or even social media. (Yes…really…even social media traffic does convert sometimes!)
You may think that everything will be fine if you follow the correct SEO practice and do a 301 redirect to tell Google that the page has moved. And you’d be right from an SEO standpoint…but you’d be wrong PPC-wise.
Doing a 301 redirect is vital for your SEO so that users are directed to the new page and so that your organic Google rankings are preserved. But it won’t help your PPC because the redirect will drop the crucial Gclid that says: “Hey Google, this is a PPC conversion.”
Sometimes – like the ‘tide going out’ – it can take a while to spot because you’ll still see clicks and impressions in your Google Ads interface…but you just won’t see any conversions.
Yes, people are still going to the landing page and filling in the form – so you’re still getting conversions. But they’re just not being attributed to the PPC. So you think your PPC is tanking when in reality it isn’t.
And to make matters worse, it can sometimes take a while for the penny to drop. During this time you may have misinterpreted the PPC data that you see. You might have been fooled into pausing or deleting ad groups, keywords, and ads that in reality were performing well! It can be heartbreaking.
So what’s the solution? Easy, use the correct new URLs from your website as your PPC final URLs. Be meticulous – check every ad in every ad group!
Occasionally we still come across PPC advertisers who are still not measuring their success properly because they haven’t set up conversion tracking. It’s rare but it still happens.
All they’re seeing is how many clicks and impressions they’re getting – not the conversions they’re generating.
What’s more likely is that someone:
Once the only way to track conversions was to paste some code on a Thank You page (and Thank You pages can still be useful – not least for cross-selling). But now you may prefer to import your goals from Google Analytics because:
It’s gorgeous because it’s so easy to measure:
Remember…without proper conversion tracking you’ll never get a true picture of how your PPC is performing; you’ll never be able to calculate your ROI.
And without true ROI, what have you got? Online invoices from Google, a bunch of clicks and impressions, a few hunches. Hopefully some phone call enquiries…maybe.
But you need more than hope – because hope isn’t a strategy.