Anyone who’s ever done strength training knows the challenge of overcoming a plateau. Once your body gets used to a certain regimen, it’s important to scale up your activity level — but without hurting yourself by doing too much too soon.
The same logic applies to scaling your PPC budget.
When your account is already performing well and receives a significant financial boost (like the one many brands will experience as we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic), it can be difficult to spend more while maintaining the same level of ROAS or CPA.
While it’s fairly simple, it certainly isn’t easy.
With that being said, here are some tips to help you to take greater control of your PPC budget without compromising on ROAS and CPA goals.
Manage your budgets better
If it sounds straightforward, that’s because it is. Effective budget scaling begins with making your marketing dollars work more efficiently, and a better understanding of where your account is experiencing the greatest returns and wastage.
Fortunately, Optmyzr gives you the tools to get where you need to go.
Spend Projection: This insight from Optmyzr predicts your account’s likely spend by the end of the selected time period (user guide).
Optimize Budget: Use this tool to identify budgets and campaigns losing impression share due to budget and optimize them to maximize ROAS (user guide).
Budget Simulator: Found as a feature in the Optimize Budget tool, this gives you intelligent suggestions for budget reallocation, including daily budgets. It tells you how much budget a campaign or shared budget can actually spend. This recommendation is based on years of historical spend analysis and current spend patterns.
If your current campaign setup and traffic don’t exhaust your budget, there are additional steps you can take.
Grow your account
Given the way your current campaigns are set up, you may not have significant opportunity to grow your account traffic. In this case, you’ll need to grow your account.
You can achieve this with a two-pronged approach.
1. Hone more keyword opportunities
Reviewing search terms with good performance can open up a world of possibilities that you may have neglected or been unaware of. Optmyzr lets you do this with a number of one-click optimizations.
Find search queries with conversions and high CTR using the Keyword Lasso tool. Add them as new keywords, or create entirely new ad groups.
Create and automate custom strategies to manage search queries using the Rule Engine (work with Google Microsoft, and Amazon advertising accounts).
The Rule Engine allows you to add keywords based on queries that are driving conversions or that have a better CTR than the associated keyword, or to add keywords of another match type.
2. Promote existing keywords, ad groups and campaigns
Sometimes, it’s not a question of looking for new opportunities, but optimizing the ones you’re already capitalizing on to yield better results. We can help you take performing campaigns up a notch without needing to do the heavy lifting yourself.
Use the Conversion Grabber to increase bids for converting keywords losing impression share due to ad rank.
The Optimize Target ROAS and CPA tool allows you to tweak target ROAS and CPA values at ad group level for ad groups losing Impression Share due to ad rank.
Apply bid adjustments based on time, location, gender, and audience to maximize campaign performance and better utilize available budgets.
The importance of risk mitigation
At Optmyzr, we believe risk mitigation is a vital component of any evolving PPC strategy. So while you explore these options to expand your account and promote existing inventory, be sure to have a safety net in place.
Acquire a list of expensive keywords or product groups, and update it on a regular basis. Keep an eye on these so they don’t accrue unnecessary cost, raising CPA and reducing ROAS.
Automate the process of adding negative keywords to search or shopping campaigns in order to limit clicks that don’t convert. Use the Non-Converting Search Queries strategy in the Rule Engine.
Maintain and monitor ROAS performance
Once you have the different pieces in place, it’s important to keep a regular eye on things. As humans, we can provide context that machines don’t have and increase the chances of a favorable outcome.
Alerts and budget tracking on the MCC dashboard will drop notifications if the performance for a metric falls below target — or even if it starts trending in the wrong direction.
When running a manual bidding strategy, establish and track target ROAS for keywords using the Rule Engine. If you prefer to use automated bidding, this piece by Optmyzr and Google might offer more relevant insights.
Conclusion
PPC strategy is never as easy as we’d like it to be, and challenges like the ongoing pandemic add variables that can affect performance overnight.
At a time when current data is volatile and historical data is unreliable, this ‘human context’ is more critical than ever to getting the most out of machine learning.
By regularly checking in on your automations, you’ll be able to exert greater influence over how and where your marketing dollars are channeled, giving you a better chance of seeing the results your brand is looking for.
