Even the most experienced PPC marketers sometimes struggle to spend their whole budget. This could be due to a myriad of factors, and even well-optimized campaigns encounter this problem. Here are some reasons your campaigns may not be spending as much as you’d like and how to remedy them.
A low quality score will lead to low ad rank, which will prevent your ad from serving as frequently as possible. You can check your score by adding the ‘Quality Score’ column to your Google Ads report. The score can range from 1-10, and a score of 8-10 is considered very good. If your score is below 8, there’s room for improvement.
To improve your Quality Score, start by increasing ad relevance. The easiest way to do so is by including your target keywords in your ad copy. Try to incorporate several target keywords into your headlines and descriptions.
It’s also helpful to include those same keywords in your landing page copy. The quality and relevancy of your landing page can significantly impact your score, so be sure that your ad messaging is aligned with what is on your landing page.
Your landing page's user experience also impacts quality score, so an LP audit could be a great next step. Key factors to consider are page load time and the strength of the call to action on your landing page.
Your call to action should be aligned with the copy in your ad. A common mistake is to send ads for specific products or categories to a generic page. If you are running an ad for women’s boots, for example, your ad should send searchers to a ‘women’s boots’ filtered landing page rather than a generic landing page that features all the shoes you sell.
Expanding keyword targeting will allow the algorithm to serve your ads to more people. Start by looking at your search query report. This will give you an idea of what people are looking for, and you can incorporate relevant search terms as keywords.
I had a client who kept increasing their campaign budget and loosening their CPA target, but spend stayed flat. We found that they were simply not bidding on enough high-volume search terms.
The process of manually combing through search terms reports to find new target keywords was tedious and kept getting put on the back burner, so they decided to automate it with Marin. The client gave us the criteria for what they would want added: keywords with at least ten conversions over the past 30 days and a cost per conversion of $30 or less. We applied those settings in Marin, and the platform now scans their search query report each week and adds any search terms that fit their criteria as keywords. Since implementing this solution, spend has increased considerably, and CPA is still on target. If that sounds interesting, you can learn more about Marin’s customizable automations here.
Also, consider match type expansion. If you are just targeting exact match keywords, add some broad match variations to get your ad in front of more people. This will also help with keyword research by generating new terms in your search query report.
Another way to conduct keyword research is to make a list of topics relevant to what you are advertising and then list the terms you think your target audience would search for to find information on those topics. You can also research competitors and see what kind of verbiage they are using on their websites and ads to get more keyword ideas. Google Ads Keyword Planner is also a great tool that you can use to discover more keywords and find out how popular they are.
If your bids are too low, your ads will not be served. Increasing bids can also result in a higher average position on the page, which will increase click-through rate.
For manual bidding, I’d start by increasing bids by 10-20%, then continue to make weekly increases in small increments until you reach your desired level of spend. If you are bidding to a CPA or a ROAS target, consider a less competitive target.
You could also switch to a maximize clicks strategy in Google or a target impression share strategy in Marin to rapidly increase traffic. These strategies will try to spend your full daily budget as efficiently as possible and will likely spend more than tCPA or tROAS since they aren’t restricted by an efficiency goal.
Implementing dayparting is another way to increase bids. You can strategically increase bids only during certain times and days of the week when you typically see better performance.
Also, people often forget about device modifiers. Removing any negative modifiers you have in place should increase spend.
Increasing location targeting can expand the reach of your ads to more potential customers. It may not make sense for every business, but it is worth testing for many. Some potential customers may be making relevant searches, but they are not within the campaign's target area. You can also consider reallocating some of your budget to other campaigns with more broad targeting.
You may have more campaigns than you need, and the campaigns you do have may not be built out enough. Consider consolidating campaigns that share similar themes and goals. When you consolidate campaigns, use top-performing assets for the ads and add some new assets and copy to test out what works best. When you consolidate similar ads into one campaign with one budget, Google’s algorithm will be able to distribute that budget across more search terms, leading to higher overall spend.
You can also try shared campaign budgets. With shared budgets, the campaigns getting the most traffic will have room to spend as much of your budget as they need. This way, you don’t have to worry about allocating a daily budget to each campaign.
If you manage a lot of campaigns, it can be difficult to keep track of all those budgets. It’s also challenging to keep up with market trends and understand which campaigns have potential to spend more. That’s why we created Marin Ascend, an AI-powered tool that automates the process of reviewing daily budgets and distributing spend across campaigns. It predicts each campaign’s future performance to determine where your money should be allocated. Just set one monthly spend target for a group of campaigns and Marin will take it from there.
I had a client who had one budget for a group of campaigns and wasn’t sure how to split it up. I showed them Marin Ascend and explained that it would decide how to distribute budget based on past performance and forecasted future performance. We were even able to review the forecasted results before enabling the tool, and since the predictions looked great, my client decided to give it a go. Ascend then shifted their budget between campaigns throughout the month based on its AI-powered daily performance forecasts. After using Ascend for a month, my client finally hit their monthly spend target, and overall cost per conversion decreased by 76%!
To learn more about Marin Ascend, check out our client success stories.
If you are only using one or two campaign types, it may be time to expand. Different campaign types will help your ads connect with people in different places. It is best practice to run search campaigns alongside additional campaign types. For example, you can run a search campaign and a PMax campaign that target the same topic. The PMax campaign will reach people across more areas of the web, which will build brand recognition and result in more clicks or searches later on. You could also test a video, display, or Dynamic Search (DSA) campaign. Running new types of campaigns can be an effective way to spend your remaining budget and is a good way to test if those campaign types work well for your business.
If after trying out these solutions you still are unable to spend your budget, it may be time to expand to other publishers. Marin makes it easy to copy campaigns from Google to Microsoft if you’re looking to expand to Bing. You can manage campaigns from all your publishers directly in Marin to keep track of budgets and performance in one place. You can even have shared budgets across different publishers.
I had a client who wasn’t able to spend their monthly budget, but they were achieving over 90% impression share on Google. I suggested that they expand their paid search ads to Microsoft. Thanks to Marin's Copy Tool, this was a simple process for their team. They copied a few of their top-performing Google campaigns to Microsoft and immediately spend started to increase.
Marin Ascend enabled their Google and Microsoft campaigns to share one budget so that they never missed an opportunity to spend. The tool’s optimization suite made it easy for them to manage an additional publisher by setting up automations in Marin that optimized campaigns in each publisher simultaneously. Interested in learning more? Click here to schedule time with a member of my team.
Advertisers are starting to see great success with their Performance Max (PMAX) campaigns. They have been growing in popularity in Google Ads and are now available Globally in Microsoft Ads, too! Many Paid Search managers now consider it best practice to have at least one Performance Max campaign running in their Google Ads account. They are great for finding high-converting customers not only on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) but across all of Google’s other channels like YouTube, Display, Gmail, and Maps.
PMAX campaigns learn as they go. While they take around 6 weeks to mature, they’ll continue to get more efficient over time. That said, there are several ways to speed up their learning process and set up your campaigns for success. Follow these 5 tips to get the best possible results from your PMAX campaigns.
Adding high-quality assets is one of the most important steps in setting up a successful Performance Max campaign. Advertisers should add a variety of asset types to ensure that their ad can serve on many different channels and placements.
Text assets include the headlines and descriptions for your PMAX campaign’s text ads.
First, you will want to add headlines. You can add up to 15, and filling all 15 slots with headline variations will allow you to include more keywords in your copy, which will improve ad quality. Think about the keywords that you would want to target if this were a traditional paid search campaign. Then, incorporate those keywords into your ad copy. The more relevant keywords you include, the higher the likelihood that your ad will serve.
Once you’ve optimized your headlines, you can add up to 4 descriptions. It is best to include a call to action in each of them. Descriptions can have up to 90 characters and it is best to use as many characters as possible to take up more space on the page and include as much relevant information and keywords as you can.
Next, let's talk about graphics. There are two different types of graphics to include in a PMAX campaign: Images and Logos. It's best to add multiple variations of each type of asset so that they can appear in a variety of placements with different ideal image sizes. It is important that all images are high-quality.
For image assets, there are three different options to consider:
Landscape assets should have an aspect ratio of 1.91:1, meaning the width should be 1.91 times the height. The minimum size is 600 x 314 pixels, and the recommended size is 1200 x 628 pixels. The maximum file size for a Landscape image asset is 5120 KB.
Square assets must have an aspect ratio of 1:1, meaning the width and height are equal (it’s a square, after all!) The minimum size is 300 x 300 pixels, and the recommended size is 1200 x 1200 pixels. The maximum file size for a Square image asset is 5120 KB.
Portrait assets must have an aspect ratio of 4:5, meaning the height is equal to ⅘ the width. The minimum size is 480 x 600 pixels, and the recommended size is 960 x 1200 pixels. This asset type doesn’t have a maximum file size limit.
You can include up to 20 images for each type of image asset, and it’s best to provide as many asset variations as possible. While 20 portrait, 20 square, and 20 landscape images are ideal, it’s not always possible to produce that much relevant creative. It’s critical to have at least one of each type of asset in your campaign, but the more, the merrier!
You should also add logo assets to make your brand more recognizable in your ads. The options for logo assets are:
Landscape logos are horizontal and must have a 4:1 aspect ratio, meaning the width must be four times the height. The minimum size is 512x128 pixels, with a recommended size of 1200x300 pixels. The maximum file size is 5120 KB.
Square logos, like their image counterparts, must have a 1:1 aspect ratio. The minimum size is 128x128 pixels, with a recommended size of 1200x1200 pixels. The maximum file size is 5120KB.
You can include up to 5 logos for each type of asset. Like their image counterparts, including as many logo variations as possible will improve ad performance.
Then, there is the option to add video assets. If you don’t add a video asset, Google will create one for you using your headlines and images. Though these videos can see positive results, they may not always reflect your vision of how you would like to present the brand, so it’s best to create your own.
There’s only one video format for PMAX campaigns, which is specifically designed for YouTube ads, though video ads can also serve on the Display Network. You have the ability to include up to 5 video assets per PMAX campaign, and it’s best to include as many as possible. Videos must be at least 10 seconds long. You can choose between horizontal, vertical, and square aspect ratios. Note that Google may resize your videos automatically to make them fit in different placements.
Keep in mind that when setting up asset groups, you will not be able to control which assets get served together within the group. For example, if you sell both sandals and boots, these different product types should have separate asset groups because you wouldn't want a headline about boots showing up with a picture of sandals. Therefore, you want to make sure all the assets within a given group are cohesive. Separate asset groups will also allow you to set up different targeting for each type of product. Make sure that every asset group has video, image, and text assets.
Once your PMAX campaign has run for a while and has gathered data, you will be able to check the Asset Report and see how each different asset is rated. It will state low, good, or best. However, if there are not enough impressions for Google to calculate a performance category, then it will state that there is not enough data. It is best to switch out low-performing assets with new ones and continually test new assets. But be sure to wait a few weeks before switching out assets so that they gather enough data to receive an accurate quality rating.
While setting up your assets, you should also include ad extensions. Treat the ad extensions as you would in search campaigns and make sure that they are relevant to the campaign and to any asset combinations within the campaign.
Adding targeting when setting up a PMAX campaign will help speed up the learning process. You can use data from existing campaigns with similar products to help decide what targeting to apply. Depending on your goals, you can target more specific audiences that you know will convert, or you can include audiences that have similar interests to expand your reach.
Adding audience signals to Performance Max campaigns helps guide the algorithm. The algorithm will use these audience signals as suggestions when selecting the right users to serve ads to. Adding all of the possible audience signals is not required, but it will speed up the learning process. To select the right audience signals, use data from active campaigns and audiences and incorporate successful audiences and demographics into your PMAX targeting.
You can use industry knowledge to select interest categories that are related to the products you sell. Adding interest categories is a good way to capture your target audience as well as audiences that may have similar interests.
There are other targeting options, such as demographics, that you can add right away. Or you can let the campaign run, analyze the data, and then set the demographics based on the results. For example, you may notice a specific age range is more likely to convert, and add that age range as a demographic target. And, of course, you can use data on users who previously interacted with your site, such as website visitors, to create retargeting audiences.
Search themes are words or phrases that you expect your audience to search. These are similar to keywords, but they will be used as a suggestion to the algorithm rather than a requirement. The algorithm can still serve your ad to people who are not searching for those words or phrases. Adding search themes will improve targeting for new campaigns and for campaigns whose targeting settings aren’t specific enough. These are optional but are a great way to provide additional guidance to your campaigns.
When creating asset groups, it's important to optimize your product feed. Make sure that the products in each group match the assets. If your assets are split up by content category, then the products in each asset group should be split up the same way.
Product titles should provide an accurate description of the product, as any confusing language will decrease the click-through rate.
If there are products that are consistently driving low ROI, you should either exclude them from the asset group or put them into their own campaign with a small budget.
Also, be sure to regularly check that your feeds have been approved.
It is best to use performance max campaigns alongside search campaigns. Using both will maximize visibility.
Search campaigns offer more control and the ability to target exact keywords. With PMAX, you can’t control which search queries your ads are served on. Rather, PMAX’s AI-powered technology analyzes your landing page content, product feed, and assets to decide which queries are relevant to your ads. Therefore, it’s best to target specific keywords with search campaigns and allow PMAX to drive incremental conversions with its AI-powered targeting.
When selecting a bidding strategy for a new performance max campaign, choose either Maximize Conversions, which will aim to get as many conversions as possible within the provided budget, or Maximize Conversion Value, which will aim to get high-value conversions. The latter may drive fewer conversions, but the conversions it does drive will be more valuable.
Using Target ROAS or Target CPA is still an option, but it is best to wait to use them until the PMAX campaign has matured and gathered sufficient revenue and conversion data for the algorithm to reference.
We highly recommend testing performance max campaigns to understand what they can do for your advertising program. To ensure the best outcome, set up your PMAX campaigns with quality assets and relevant audiences. The learning period can take up to six weeks, and making changes to the campaign during this period will make it take longer, so try to sit back and let it do its thing.
If you’re looking for a solution that enables you to manage your Google and Microsoft PMAX campaigns in one place, look no further than Marin. In our centralized interface, you can analyze, optimize, and report on all your cross-channel campaigns. Marin can even track your campaigns' performance for you and provide unique, publisher-independent recommendations for improvement. To learn more, click here to chat with a Marin Rep!
Many of the tasks that used to be done on a desktop have become just as easy on a phone. Shopping, as an example, is accessible the second a consumer thinks of something they want or need to buy. They can look it up on their smartphone, check out without even needing to grab a physical credit card, and have the peace of mind that the item will be delivered to them within just a few days.
Over the past several years, we have seen more and more consumers make purchases right from their phones, and e-comm businesses are responding with company apps, an influx in SMS marketing, and various promotional initiatives associated with a mobile-first consumer experience. Because of this, mobile advertising and app advertising are a must in many industries if you want to maximize revenue potential.
Creating a mobile ad will be different than creating a desktop ad. Here's what you need to know to start an impactful and effective mobile ad strategy:
Mobile users have different patterns and utilize other features than desktop users. Touch screens are a big part of this user experience as a touch screen inherently creates a different way of navigating your site, such as zooming in or swiping side to side.
Some ways to do this effectively include:
Mobile advertisements have a lot of potential to showcase your company creatively. There is a lot of opportunity to show off products and services. Here are a few ways you can ensure the design of your ads is as impactful to potential customers as possible:
To effectively advertise on mobile, it's crucial to understand the different types of mobile ads, such as app ads, social media ads, mobile banner ads, in-app display ads, interstitial ads, SMS ads, native ads, video ads, and audio ads.
Mobile ads on platforms like Spotify, TikTok, Facebook Stories, and Instagram Stories have proven effective in reaching and engaging audiences. Implementing interactive mobile ads and utilizing formats like Facebook Collections ads can also boost user engagement. Next, we'll dive more into mobile and app advertising specifics on each social media platform.
Social media has become a popular pastime for adults, with growing numbers of daily users. This presents a valuable advertising opportunity, allowing you to reach large audiences, increase visibility, and engage with users through your social media presence. Look at some of the complexities that go into each social media platform's available advertising placements.
This is a great example of creating an ad that goes along with the patterns of smartphone users. If a user clicks through stories and your ad comes up, they will most likely pay attention to it since they anticipate something new with each click. Some ways to make a great story ad include: maximizing fullscreen usage, highlighting your call-to-action, incorporating text overlays, using audio enhancements, making your ads interactive, consistently branding your ads, and incorporating motion.
Snapchat ads are a great way to introduce your organization to a new audience. Snapchat may have different users than other platforms, which is beneficial for retargeting. You can also have your own filter showcasing your brand or product. Many users look through filters to find new or creative ones, and if they choose to use them, they create more reach when they share their image paired with the filter on their personal profile.
Recently Snapchat has introduced a set of instructions for devising potent Snap Ad campaigns to assist businesses in connecting with its 375 million daily users, primarily composed of Gen Z and millennials. Essential advertising principles the company highlighted involve prominently displaying products, adopting a sound-on design, and employing goal-oriented bidding. In reaction to Apple's iOS 14 update, Snapchat suggests widening targeting scopes, underlining the importance of suitable content for the most valuable leads.
YouTube has a large audience reach, and people use YouTube for many different reasons. Video ads can help you connect with your audience as you show more about your brand. There are also options for retargeting.
The best strategies to creating an effective Youtube ad are: surprising the viewer with unexpected content; improving on competitors' ad concepts; continuously testing and adjusting content; using storytelling to draw in viewers; incorporating user-generated content; emphasizing the benefits of the product or service being advertised; and optimizing content for different viewing devices.
Like any other story ad, you can increase reach significantly with Facebook story ads. This type of story ad will take up most of the smartphone screen, just like Instagram. By creating an immersive experience, the goal is that your content will captivate the audience's attention.
Creating story content is quite straightforward, involving choosing the type of content, customizing it, adding custom links and buttons, and sharing it. Businesses can further optimize their use of Facebook Stories by creating exciting, time-sensitive content, making it interactive and actionable, sharing third-party content, and regularly tracking performance to polish their strategy.
For this ad type, you will want a high-quality, interesting image to draw in your audience. You can create custom audiences by using pixels and tags to target the same people across different platforms.
Keep the design simple and instantly readable, use buttons wisely, and ensure a clearly defined frame for your ad. Animations can improve performance, but they should not distract from your message. While your ad should complement the website it is on, it still needs to be distinctive. Consistency with your brand is crucial, as is instilling a sense of urgency. Images, if used, should be directly related to your product, and the colors chosen should evoke the right emotions in your audience. Keep the file sizes small for faster loading and use appropriate formats such as JPG, PNG, GIF, or HTML5.
You can grow a larger audience on Twitter by promoting your tweets. This should boost your followers, and then these users will continue to see your organization's tweets over time.
To effectively use Twitter Ads, it's essential to follow five critical steps. First, research your competitors to understand which strategies have been successful for them, and take note of the types of offers that generate the most engagement. Second, gather social proof by initially advertising to less expensive audiences to increase engagement before targeting your primary audience. Third, use A/B testing or split testing to determine which elements of your ad perform best, testing one variable at a time. Fourth, avoid including hashtags or mentions in your promoted tweets to ensure your call to action remains the only clickable element. Lastly, create a specific target segment for mobile users, as they comprise about 80% of Twitter's monthly active users. Remember, the goal is to create ads that attract attention and encourage user interaction.
Apple Search Ads (ASA), first introduced in 2016, have recently expanded significantly. The new ASA inventory includes two additional placements: the Today tab and the bottom of individual app product pages. The Today tab is the landing page for users upon opening the App Store, and the new ad placement allows developers to promote their apps alongside daily editorial content. The guidelines for these ads are comprehensive, including a limitation on promotional messaging to 50 characters or three lines of text. Also, the ads must use app screenshots as their main feature. These new placements are expected to increase exposure due to their visibility and broad reach.
The second new ad placement is located directly within the product pages of individual apps, appearing under the “You Might Also Like” section. This provides developers the opportunity to place ads on the pages of other apps. Unlike the Today tab ads, these do not require a custom product page for ad creatives; they are created using the assets already uploaded on the App Store product page. However, due to their location at the bottom of the page and considering that many users download apps directly from search results without visiting product pages, the impact of these ads might be less than those on the Today tab.
Universal App Campaigns (UAC) is an automated ad type offered by Google Ads, providing an efficient way to advertise mobile apps across Google's extensive ad networks, including search, display, YouTube, and the Google Play Store. UACs utilize machine learning to showcase the most relevant and high-performing ads to users, driving conversions and app installs. The ad campaigns are generated using supplied text lines, images, videos, or HTML5 assets, and over time, the best-performing combinations are identified and displayed to users. UAC ads can run across different Google properties such as Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network, as well as on both iOS and Android devices.
Creating a UAC requires manual inputs, including a daily budget, a target cost-per-install (CPI) or cost-per-action (CPA), target location and languages, and up to four text lines. Further, optional media assets can be added to aid in the creation of the ad. When setting up a UAC, selecting the right campaign objective is crucial: "Install Volume" for attracting new users and "In-App Actions" for users likely to complete actions within the app. Google suggests different budget strategies depending on the chosen goal. Finally, setting up UAC involves selecting a device type, adding text ideas, setting location and language targets, defining the campaign goal, budget, and bid amount, and establishing a campaign run date.
Test ads across multiple platforms and determine what works best for your marketing strategy. Advertising across multiple platforms can help increase brand awareness. As mobile devices have become more needed for day-to-day routines, it has created a great opportunity for phone ads. Mobile advertising and app advertising strategies have made it easier for marketers to make ads more personalized for consumers. It can give consumers insight on the brand and what they have to uniquely offer.
To optimize your mobile and app advertising strategy, start working with a MarinOne expert today.
Advertisers know how important optimization is, whether it’s major changes or several small changes throughout the week. With Marin Insights, making these regular optimizations is easy. Our Insights are designed to save you time and to catch important details that may have been missed.
Many advertisers are used to looking through multiple publishers and making adjustments within each of them. With the recommendation engine in Marin, you can easily make adjustments to multiple publishers at once. Whether that is downloading the Insight and re-uploading with the desired changes or using the one-click implementation that will seamlessly adjust each publisher included in the Insight. Leveraging data from multiple publishers can be useful for advertisers as well.
In Marin's “Duplicate Keywords” Insight, the MarinOne tool will look through your account and find keywords with the same text, publisher, match type, location target, and audience. Instead of looking through the account to find these, they will automatically be searched for every day and show up in the Insights section. We have now made the process of this Insight and several others easier by adding a one-click implementation. Saving more time with the click of a button, rather than manually updating these.
In the “Keyword Expansion” Insight, artificial intelligence technology looks at top-performing keywords across publishers and recommends adding them to other publishers. If Microsoft has great performance with a specific keyword, our Insight AI will pick up on that and suggest it be added to Google as well.
We have years of digital experience that we’ve applied to perfect these algorithms. Every day automated machine learning will search your publishers, seeking out new opportunities for performance improvement. Using the Insights tab can save advertisers time, effort, and money. There are also separate sections of the Insights page that divide the Insights by category. Insights are a key initiative, and we are continuously working on creating new Insights and finding the best way to implement them.
Our one-click implementation Insights have been created for ease of execution, you click the button and we’ll do the rest. The one-click implementation Insights currently include;
There are many other Insights that we have within the platform as well. Some will eventually have one-click implementation, while others require more analysis. Advertisers have the ability to download any Insight on the page for a more thorough review if desired. We have set up our tool to include complete transparency on how we define an Insight which allows you to understand why specific recommendations have been made; and you will be able to implement Insights to several publishers from one page. By utilizing this tool, you will have more effectively optimized accounts and more time to focus on the real building blocks of your business.
To learn more about our automated paid media management Insights or any other campaign management quandary you may be facing, schedule a consultation with a MarinOne expert today.
