The past year posed challenges for many businesses, including dental practices. The quarantine and social distance guidelines have largely shifted healthcare online, and everyone has needed to adapt to unprecedented circumstances. Still, you have survived this long, and now you can look forward to a new year of possibilities.
As we start the new year, why not take an audit of your PPC ads? A fresh look can help you optimize your Ads account to bring in as many customers as possible. A paid search campaign is continually evolving, so regular audits like these should be a part of your plan to maximize your return on investment.
Effective advertising campaigns start with clear objectives. So, ask yourself before starting a Google Ads audit: What’s the goal? Maybe you want conversions to increase, for instance. Make sure you know what success looks like for you before you start the audit.
Areas to Focus Your Audit
The ad itself
PPC ad copywriting can be tricky. The good news is that you don’t have to be a super-creative copywriter to whip up competitive ad copy. Make sure you know your competitors and start by looking at how they communicate with their potential customers.
Once you have this, find a way to stand out. Tell the searcher why you are giving them a better service than your rivals. Have a call to action to complete your ad, and make sure that it is bold and enticing to get them to click!
Keywords
This is a perfect time to analyze each ad group’s keyword collection according to your business goals.
There are various types of keyword matches, as well as search queries and negative keywords to remember. Take your time and begin with the keywords you are targeting at the moment. Do they make sense? Are they missing any? Are there keywords that have a high spend but possess low conversion rates?
Landing page
A landing page for a PPC is a standalone web page that a search user ‘lands on’ after exiting the search engine.
The best PPC landing pages contain only one goal known as a Call to Action (CTA). Dedicated landing pages are one of the best ways to maximize conversions from your paid traffic and reduce the cost-per-click of your PPC campaigns.
Look at your landing pages. Is a straightforward headline and call to action present? Are all the clickable parts functioning correctly? While these pages are theoretically external to Google Ads, a good landing page will dramatically improve your conversions.
Conversion monitoring
Conversion monitoring is one of the essential elements of any successful Google Ads campaign.
But, a new study found that only 29 percent of accounts in Google Ads correctly track conversions. In other words, 71% of accounts do not have their conversion monitoring set up correctly or even at all.
This basic concept is central to the success of Google Advertising and digital marketing. Otherwise, you won’t know if your ad campaigns have the desired effect. It’s almost impossible to know if customers are converting and at what cost without conversion monitoring. In essence, you are wasting money and learning little in return. For your money, you could produce almost no conversions, and you would have no idea as to why it’s happening.
Or worse, your tracking of conversions might be incorrect. It could even display conversion rates of over 100 percent. This error makes results opaque, and you have no real insight into what works and what doesn’t. We’ve seen conversion tracking tags put on landing pages and homepages before. This means that a conversion is registered every single time someone clicks on your ad. But that’s not at all a conversion. It’s just a visit.
PPC can be complicated, and it can take time to fix the issues involved with a Google Ads audit. If you’re looking for help straightening out your ads campaign, talk to us today!