The start of the new year is a great time to evaluate ongoing PPC campaigns to determine if they are still the efficient search traffic drivers envisioned when they launched.  Start by considering what marketing, market and advertising changes have taken place over the past year. Consider new marketing initiatives and if there are new products or services that should be promoted. Are these changes reflected in current PPC campaigns? In addition to changes in the marketing goals, evaluate the paid search campaigns efficiency. Are the paid campaigns driving the right traffic?  Specifically, are they driving traffic that converts to sales or leads? I’ve come up with three simple guidelines to use in evaluating B2B search paid campaigns.   

1. Review search query reports. Check to see if there are terms that are being queried that are relevant to the products or services promoted in your PPC campaigns. The query report also allows you to check for terms that are not relevant. These reports can help determine if new keywords need to be added to existing campaigns. Query reports can give you insight on developing new campaigns around relevant keywords that are being searched on, and the easiest way to use query reports is by discovering keywords to add to the negative keyword list.
2. Review CTR & CPC data. When reviewing CTR & CPC data it is important to think about the type of keywords. Longer tail keywords typically have fewer impressions and clicks which means higher CTR and possibly higher CPC. Head keywords should have many impressions and a lower CTR and a lower CPC. It is important to keep in mind that there will be keywords that will have poor CTR and a high CPC, but they are not necessarily “bad” keywords. Examples of these “other” keywords would be competitors, branded terms and alternative options to products being searched. Basically these keywords are the ones that you have in your campaign for ads you want to appear as alternatives to what the person is searching on. The keywords that need the most attention are the ones with lots of impressions and very few clicks. To maximize the efficiency of your campaign, edits are in order; start by evaluating if the keyword is really one that your audience is searching on. Next consider changing it by adding descriptors or changing its match type. This will lower the impressions, and hopefully increase the relevancy to the actual search query, and in the end generate more clicks.
3. Take a good look at the traffic your PPC campaign is generating. Try to discover where your campaign has the best and worst performance. Look for the lows and highs for bounce rate, pages visited, time on site and of course, conversions. This can get very tricky. For example, a poor bounce rate could equate a bad landing page, but the real issue may be that the ad is offering something that is not paid off on the landing page.

In reality paid campaigns require constant attention, and you should be doing this type of evaluation weekly or monthly for B2B PPC campaigns. But using the start of the new year to take a fresh look at your campaigns is also a good idea. The good news is, after this initial evaluation and revamp, your paid search campaigns will be working much more efficiently. By continually evaluating and optimizing, you’ll be sure to see your PPC campaigns reach their maximum effectiveness, while continually focusing on current marketing goals.