This guide will look at what remarketing is, how it works, benefits, and costs so you get the most out of your remarketing campaigns and follow best practices.

What is PPC remarketing?

Remarketing is the practice of showing ads to people who have already visited an advertiser’s website.

While retargeting and remarketing are often meant as the same thing, remarketing can refer to collecting user information to create lists which are used for things like customer lists.

Retargeting is the act of displaying ads to people who have visited your website, reminding them of the benefits you are offering with a handy link to your landing page. It’s a fantastic way to acquire more leads.

As they are used interchangeably, we will carry on using “remarketing” for the rest of the article to cover both.

How does it work?

Commonly, when we browse on a website, a cookie box pops up, asking us to “accept” or “decline.” When you click “accept,” you are giving a business or company the permission to remarket products to you. When someone views your site, a few lines of code drop this cookie into their browser.

This cookie tracks the site visit without storing sensitive information like names and addresses. As previous website visitors browse the internet and see your banner ads, this is the cookie in action, giving you insight into their journey online. 

Google

Google uses a wide variety of tools such as the Google Analytics tracking code, which provides analytics data, such as a physical location and how long they’ve spent on your website, helping you to present the appropriate ads for them when they surf the web. There are other Google Ads remarketing features such as:

• Standard remarketing
• Dynamic remarketing
• Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs)
• Video remarketing
• Customer list remarketing

Each specific tool allows you to set custom preferences about the visitors of your site. The further you dive into this, the more beneficial the results.

Microsoft

Microsoft also provides remarketing tools through its advertising platform. While its options aren’t as comprehensive as Google, you can use Remarketing in Paid Search, which can allow you to serve your ads to a specific audience.

There are also options through Microsoft Ads to create remarketing lists around certain factors such as loyalty members and those that abandon their shopping cart. You can also make adjustments to your remarketing based on demographics such as age, gender, and location.

Facebook

While the larger search engines are preferable to help you target customers, it’s also possible to do it via social media platforms like Facebook using the Facebook Pixel. The Facebook Conversion Pixel works very similarly to traditional cookies, but the difference between Facebook Pixel and website cookies is that they track people, rather than the device.

For example, if someone visited one website using three different devices, they would be classed as three separate visits by three different people. Facebook can attribute multiple devices to one person who is more effective for personal insight.

Benefits of PPC remarketing

Remarketing is a fantastic way to promote products to people who are already aware of your existence. For various reasons, there are many people who don’t convert when they visit you for the first time.

Such is the way of the customer, they may need more time to browse, or they skipped your website are some of the many reasons out there.

As remarketing increases visibility, it becomes that gentle reminder to customers that you are still there and can provide a solution to their problem. This “top of mind” awareness (promoting yourself through familiarity) is a handy psychological tool.

The other reason remarketing works so well is that it can increase conversions by up to 70%. On average, of those that visit your website, only 2% of them will convert. Remarketing is your chance to convert the other 98%.

This goes back to that age-old approach of lather, rinse, and repeat with a bombardment of your imagery.

Types of remarketing

While remarketing is a way to target people who have visited your website, you can use remarketing to improve your performance in numerous ways, while still targeting the people that matter to you:

• Search Remarketing: where your ads appear at the top of the search engine results.
• Video Remarketing: where your ads appear as pre-roll video advertisements on platforms like YouTube.
• Display Remarketing: where your ads appear as display advertisements on other websites.
• Dynamic Remarketing: uses ads that include services or products that people have already viewed on your site.
• Social Media Remarketing: on platforms like Facebook, but there are other providers such as LinkedIn and Pinterest that use remarketing. This aims to serve ads to those who have visited your website while browsing other social media channels and websites.
• Customer List Remarketing: where you can upload lists of contact information from your customers.

How much does it cost?

One of the key benefits of PPC remarketing is its cost-effectiveness.

When you compare remarketing to search ads, using something like keywords, remarketing ad clicks can cost significantly less. For example, the average Google search cost $1.23, whereas a Display Network cost $0.66, a significant difference in costs. But as the potential conversion rate in remarketing is 1.86% in comparison to a search resulting in 1.81%, its cost-effectiveness is evident.

Case studies

Remarketing is incredibly widespread, and if you’re wondering if it works for your industry, there are case studies that highlight the impact of retargeting regardless of the industry:

1. World First, one of the UK’s most well-known foreign currency exchange services, reduced cost per acquisition (CPA) by 99% and increased full account signups in Australia by 105% (CXL)
2. Using Google Analytics, Watchfinder achieved an ROI of 1,300% and CPAs 34% cheaper than non-brand search campaigns using remarketing (Think With Google)
3. Lumension, a global leader in endpoint security software, increased lead volume by 81% and increased targeted influencer traffic by 10% by working with other media portals to retarget visitors who showed an interest in competitors (Small Biz Trends)

Conclusion

PPC remarketing is an incredible way to increase conversions using a wide variety of techniques.

The moral of the story is that even if someone has been to your website before and have previously been your customer, it’s always possible to get them back.

However, not all of us know what we are looking for or even how to do it.

Google Analytics is a great tool to use to help you understand your website performance. But it goes beyond that. Optimising your landing pages based on Google Analytics data can help your business move forward. But what about optimising your Google Analytics account? This guide shows you how in 10 steps.

1. Create custom reports

One of the best tools when it comes to using Google Analytics is custom reports. You can customise them to suit the information that you want.

You may be wanting to check bounce rates, work out the times your website is most used, or what website pages are visited and how far your website visitors get on your website. You can even look at conversion rates and also how many unique visitors your site receives.

Along with keyword searches that are pushing people to your site. All relevant information with custom reports and providing you with options for change. 

2. Use RegEx to filter out unwanted data

Google Analytics supports regular expressions or RegEx so you can create more flexible definitions for things that you want to see. These include features such as view filters, goals, segments, audiences, content groups, and channel groupings.

You can also filter out any unwanted data that you need so that you can only see what makes a difference to you and your website. In the context of Google Analytics, regular expressions are specific sequences of characters that broadly or closely match patterns in your Google Analytics data.

3. Get familiar with the Audience tab

To better understand your audience, the audience tab in Google Analytics will help you to do this to ensure that you can do all that you can to target the correct demographic.

Highlighting your audience may also show you a gap in demographic so that you can ensure that your website content or keywords could reach others that it may not have reached before. Understanding your audience helps you to target people in the right way. 

4. Analyse your Behaviour Flow

Behaviour Flow displays the path that site visitors take from one page to another. A path can either be multiple pageviews or a single pageview during any page session. This is important to know because it shows what people are interested in, how they navigate your site, and how to improve the journey if it stops in a particular place.

5. Discover the best sources of traffic

Google Analytics will also help you to see the best sources of traffic, whether it’s:

• Organic
• Paid search
• Display
• Social
• Direct
• Referral
• Email
• Affiliates
• Other Advertising
• (Other)

Understanding this can give you options for improvement. Without knowing how people find your site, your reports will be missing vital information and areas of success.

6. Use Google Data Studio

What is Google Data Studio? Could you be making more of it? Google Data Studio is a free data visualisation tool that lets you build interactive dashboards and customised reporting.

This helps you to utilise the information that you want to see in an easy and accessible way, helping you to get the information such as bounce rates faster. 

7. Analyse site speed

You also need to analyse site speed. With so much competition in every industry, if the page speed is slow, then people are likely to get bored and move on.

For more information, read our guide on site speed optimisation.

8. Use site search for data analysis

Site search works like a mini search engine for your site where people can find content based on their search terms. It can also be tracked on Google Analytics for content opportunities.

Say you regularly get searches for a certain term but you don’t have a page for it (ie. they get a 404 page). That shows demand for a specific page that you can give to them. That page could bridge the gap between an abandoned cart and a conversion.

If your website offers a site search functionality, then you should set up ‘site search tracking’ in Google Analytics. This will help you to identify what people are looking for, specifically on your site, and help you to optimise your SEO and make the information accessible.

9. Set up goals

Looking at the option of ‘Goals’ in Google Analytics will help you to keep track of the actions your website visitors did or didn’t take. A goal conversion takes place when your visitors complete a specific action you are tracking.

This might be signing up for a newsletter, adding something to the cart or making that purchase.

Tracking this will help you to understand what you might need to improve and work on and enable you to make some further changes or call to actions on your website to fulfil the goal you are focusing on. 

10. Filter out IP addresses

Another fantastic tool to make more use of is to filter out IP addresses. This gives you a better understanding of who visits your website outside of the IP addresses that you may use in your business.

For example, staff and freelancers may be accessing your site for things like debugging or visual analysis. But you don’t want this data in your reports or you’ll skew your results, especially if the person is visiting pages multiple times a day

Conclusion

Taking advantage of Google Analytics and using the features mentioned above will give you better insights into how your site is performing, help you to make positive changes and benefit your business and your digital footprint.

You should also only collect data that really matters to your online site and business and ignore vanity metrics on their own, such as pageviews.

By following these 10 steps, you can improve your Google Analytics data analysis and optimise your site.

With that in mind, our guide looks at 7 ways to optimise your Microsoft Ads and get the most visibility on Bing.

1. Optimise your keywords and research

Keyword research and optimisation are fundamental elements of any Microsoft Ads campaign. Despite this, many business owners tend to undervalue keyword optimisation, favouring a set-and-forget approach.

Keyword optimisation can be a frustrating and challenging process at times but it’s a necessary task for the following reasons:

• A well-optimised keyword strategy will drive qualified traffic to your website by matching your ads with select search queries on Bing
• Analytical tools like SEMrush and Mangools Keyword Research Tool can make the job easier by measuring potential traffic and analysing popular keywords in your industry
• Writing compelling ads that incorporate those keywords will allow you to connect with potential customers

Find the best keywords to build out your ad groups in order to boost your campaign performance.

2. Optimise your ad copy

After you’ve identified your keywords and ad groups, you can begin the process of developing the ad copy. The importance of effective ad copy and the associated landing pages can’t be understated. Here are 5 tips I’ve extracted from our “14 PPC Copywriting Tips To Write Better Ads” article to help you:

1. Know your target audience – Demographic data can help you cater your ads to the right users. Whether your product or service is universal or niche, you can use certain words or phrases to personalise ads and increase your CTRs.
2. Address users directly – Narrowing the scope of your copy creates a friendlier experience for the user. By using a conversational tone, it can help potential customers convert and turn those impressions into clicks.
3. Maximise your space – Include as much information in your allotted space (see table below) and accentuate the copy with ad extensions where possible.
4. Showcase your USP – What is your unique selling point? Highlight what makes you unique to your competition and stand out from the crowd. You can do this explicitly or by using quirky copy (but only if appropriate and after split testing)
5. Use powerful CTAs – Make your CTAs strong and clear. Use time constraints to encourage users to get in touch quickly. Avoid cliches and give them reasons to click rather than navigate away.

Alongside that, you want to make sure there are relevant keywords in your headline and the opening line of your ads. You should also maintain a level of consistency across all platforms. The style, tone, and descriptions, as well as the offers, should all be coherent and pull in the same direction. Concentrate on the specific benefit of a product you offer rather than a general description, know your customer and speak to them directly in their language.

3. Optimise your demographic targeting

Paying attention to audience demographics can vastly improve the success of your marketing strategies. The more you know about your audience, the more successful you will be when appealing to them during an ad campaign. Furthermore, a more targeted Microsoft Ads campaign is more likely to produce results since your audience is in categories most likely to convert.

Researching your target audience demographics will offer you invaluable information such as:

• Online behaviour
• Device usage
• Shopping habits
• Age
• Gender
• Geolocation

The style, tone, and marketing strategies of the ad campaign can then be optimised for that targeted demographic of your audience. Similarly, the sub-category of behaviour will determine what style of remarketing you want to employ. Since 96% of site visitors leave without converting, you will need to analyse how long they stayed and what they clicked on to get a clearer picture of how to approach them in your retargeting ads.

4. Optimise your remarketing strategy

As illustrated above, it’s essential to implement effective remarketing strategies to follow up on buyer curiosity or target a specific segment of your audience. Microsoft Ads allows you to optimise your remarketing strategy quite easily with options or In-Market Audiences and Custom Audiences.

In-Market Audiences

In-market Audiences are curated user lists that desire a certain type of product. This is known as being “in-market”. They may have clicked on an ad and found your landing page, then left, or maybe they navigated to your website via an organic listing on Bing. These are called purchase intent signals, and these signals are noted by Microsoft Ads. Some of the benefits include:

• You can set up In-market Audiences in 5 minutes and you don’t need to tag your website
• Easily grow your audience with high-quality searchers who are ready to buy
• Focus on the bottom of the buying funnel
• Ads shown to In-market Audiences saw up to a 28% greater click-through rate and 48% greater conversion rate than non-In-market Audiences ads

Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences are similar to In-market Audiences but have certain segments you can use in remarketing lists, such as:

• Purchase history
• Time since last purchase
• Tenure
• Subscriber type
• Customer referrals

Customer Audiences are also compatible with Google Ads and other ad platforms so you can scale your efforts by managing audience lists for all platforms rather than one. Other benefits include:

• The ability to use data from sources like your CRM databases which are tailored to you (since it’s your data).
• Custom Audiences can also help lower your cost per acquisition (CPA) while increasing your conversion rate and return on ad spend (ROAS).

5. Optimise your bidding strategies

Now you need to organise your bidding strategies. Automation is an underrated feature of the Microsoft Ads platform and there are 6 bidding strategies to keep in mind:

• Enhanced CPC
• Maximize Clicks
• Maximize Conversions
• Target CPA
• Target ROAS
• Manual

You must monitor your ads during the campaign and optimise them as necessary. Microsoft’s algorithm will encourage more successful ads, but manual alterations can refine the process and ensure you are getting the best value for money.

Microsoft Ads has an excellent customisation feature that allows you to set distinctive bids for individual ad groups, user location, device, and time of day.

Read our article about Microsoft Ads automation and automated bidding strategies for more information.

6. Optimise your ad relevance

Ad relevance relates to how your ad copy and landing page match up with a customer’s search query. This is particularly important because it determines your quality score.

Ad relevance is scored as follows:

• Above Average
• Average
• Below Average

The lower the score, the lower the quality score, and that will lead to your competitors outperforming you.

To optimise your ad relevance, you need to grab the user’s attention with ads that match their search query and meet their demand. For example, if you’re selling ski equipment, you could create ad groups for each equipment type and add relevant keywords and ad copy:

• Create an ad groups called Ski Boots
• Add related keywords like “ski boots women” and “ski boots for wide feet”
• Include compelling ad copy like “50% off women’s ski boots”
• Link the ad to your women’s ski boots landing page

Tailored actions like this can go a long way to optimising your quality score and, by association, your Microsoft Advertising campaigns.

7. Optimise your ad groups

Ad groups on Microsoft Ads works in the same way as Google Ads and you can even import them from Google Ads. You have an account, create a campaign and add as many ad groups as you need, containing both the ad copy and keywords you want to target.

But there’s more to it than that. Your ad groups need to be well organised. For example, a good structure is essential. Order everything in a way that reflects how you organise your inventory.

Also: know your limits. Microsoft Ads has restrictions on how many items you can have at each campaign level. This is especially important if you plan to import a campaign from Google Ads.

Conclusion: is Microsoft Ads worth it?

In 1962, Robert Townsend, chief executive of Avis, the car-rental company, put out an ad campaign titled “Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us?” It was a risk as it openly admitted the gulf between themselves and the No. 1 car rental company, Hertz. Avis never overtook Hertz but that didn’t stop them from succeeding and promoted Hertz to respond with their own campaign.

Microsoft Ads is in a similar position compared to Google Ads in that sits behind the online advertising giants but can still offer a great deal to its advertisers. By optimising your Microsoft Ads in the right way, and using the cross-compatibility features, you can also manage your ads efficiently.

But there’s an extra bonus.

Adzooma can help you manage your Microsoft Ads and Google Ads together under one platform and one management screen (along with Facebook Ads if you run paid social). And the best part? It’s absolutely free.

Head to our Features page to find out more about how you can save time and money with your Microsoft Ads campaigns today.

Further resources

• How To Get Set Up on Microsoft Ads
• Integrating Microsoft Ads with Shopify
• 3 Reasons Why Your Google & Microsoft Ads Aren’t Converting And How To Fix Them
• 5 of The Best Microsoft Ads Experts in 2020
• 5 of The Best Microsoft Ads Experts in 2020How Effective Are Microsoft Ads Compared To Google Ads?

While we’ll get to those points shortly, it’s important to note that a branding agency has nuanced differences to broader marketing agencies. This list caters a lot to offline marketing as well as online marketing, and their client lists include the likes of Airbnb, Deliveroo, Twitter, Google, and Mailchimp.

What does a branding agency do?

Branding agencies help brands establish, plan, and communicate their message, often through a variety of media. The brand of your organisation could be defined as the style and identity that makes the organisation recognisable. It incorporates everything from the name to the reputation, implied values, and the visuals and language used to communicate it. Agencies harness all of this and bring the most out of them.

What are the best branding agencies of 2020?

Of course, there are a host of branding agencies out there (and on Adzooma Marketplace) so we will update this list over time but without further ado, let’s look at our pick of the 11 best branding agencies of 2020.

1. Every1

Location: Lancaster, UK

Every1 was built from traditional print and branding foundations. They pride themselves on developing creative solutions that people want to engage with. Whether you’re reinventing your company image and need a new identity or introducing yourself to customers for the first time and require a brand launch, their branding process is proven to deliver an engaging brand story.

Every1 is a digital branding agency that’s passionate about brands – committed to every aspect of the branding design process. They will guide you through every step of your journey to create a brand that gives you the edge.

Here’s their process on how they will apply branding and design to your business:

• Brand strategy
• Brand identity
• Guidelines & design systems
• Research & understanding
• Brand execution
• Brand guardianship

2. Verb

 Location: Liverpool, UK

Verb is a marketing, web development and design agency based in Liverpool city centre. They have a dedicated team of specialists in each field so that they can offer a full range of marketing to clients whilst maintaining a high standard of work.

Verb will provide you with a dedicated brand manager and offer unlimited design revisions to take your brand in a new direction and business to the next level. They can create brand guidelines to ensure that your branding is only ever used in the correct way, and your employers and advertisers will be guided on how your branding is to be displayed.

They will also ensure your brand is complete with all the relevant social media banners, icons and imagery to support your social media mix.

3. Phable

Location: Hampshire, UK

Phable specialises in design, branding and content creation for technology companies. Phable will be on hand from the initial naming and logo design to continuous brand deployment through frequent releases of design and content to help your business reach the right clients.

Their main speciality is producing a steady flow of on-brand marketing and sales content ranging from:

• Blog posts
• Long-form ad copy
• White papers
• Infographics
• Illustrations
• Animations

4. Intimation

Location: Newcastle, UK

Intimation has over 10 years of experience and a 13-strong team, focused on what makes each and every client unique. With clients all over the UK and overseas, they strive to create a relationship where each client communicates directly with their designers and always has access to their studios.

They are dedicated to delivering your message to your audience, by using brand, strategy and creativity. From their studios, they have created compelling brand strategies that communicate your message authentically to your audience.

5. Ketchup

Location: Leicestershire, UK

Ketchup marketing offers a wide range of branding services, whether you want to create a new business brand or develop your existing brand by giving it a new personality.

Whether you are looking to rework your existing brand design and messaging or increase its appeal to a wider audience – their experts will do it for you. Their brand strategists will carefully examine the consumer perceptions surrounding your brands identity, services, products, people and website, and look for opportunities to build on them.

Their creative team wields their skill to choose the perfect words and shape the sharpest pictures in your marketing communications to ensure your new branding gains the attention and recognition it deserves.

6. Phacient

Location: North Carolina, United St

Phacient is dedicated to small to medium-sized businesses with one goal in mind — making them more efficient and competitive. Their efficiency-driven approach enables their clients to operate like a much larger organisation to scale accordingly.

Phacient provides a wide range of branding expertise to their clients, including:

• Logo design
• Taglines
• Messaging
• Overall look and feel
• Global branding consistency

7. White Camino

Location: London, UK

White Camino work with challenger brands and those who are in the business of positive change for social or environmental good. They offer a range of services, including brand strategies, insights, marketing to help you take your brand to the next stage of growth.

White Camino will bring fresh energy and new perspective to examine where your brand is and refreshing any dusty propositions or even creating new brands from scratch. They have helped a wide range of clients with their brand narratives which becomes the blueprint before they take your brand to new heights.

8. Sphere

Location: Bangkok, Thailand

Sphere is a creative branding agency who will gain an understanding of your client, your industry, competitors, key points of leverage and understand any issues with your current branding. Sphere offers a range of branding services, including:

• Logo design
• Visual elements design
• Corporate brand design
• Audience research
• Values Strategy

9. Edison Media

Edison Media works with all levels of budgets to deliver clicks, sales, branding and improve any businesses current market position. With over 40 years of collective experience within their team spanning across all media formats and environments, they know everything there is to delivering successful media campaigns.

If your business needs a facelift or wanting to launch a new brand altogether, then Edison Media can help. From concept through to implementing brand guidelines and designing logs, their dedicated design team can offer advice and services throughout every step of your branding journey.

Although they are a small team, they are dedicated and will go above and beyond for their clients.

10. S’more

Location: Washington, US

S’more offer an accelerated branding process that gets you up and running in up to two weeks. During the two day ‘Brand Camp’, you will experience a counselling video chat where they will dive deep into your business. Next, they will send you a custom ‘branding survival guide’ which defines your business and acts as your ‘road map’ before heading on to day two.

Day two consists of an intensive virtual day where they will build the visual elements of your brand. By the end of the day, you will have a fantastic logo and an amazing website along with a complete print and digital identity package that includes everything you need to get your brand out there.

‘Brand Camps’ can be completely customised to fit your needs and budget.

11. SBDE Web

Location: Folkestone, UK

SBDE Web will help you make authentic branding, websites and marketing without the hassle and to help you build an unmissable presence online and off. They offer a wide range of design and branding and design services, digital and content services:

• Graphic print design
• Advertising and web
• Logo design
• Brand design
• Business cards
• Stationary

They will design beautiful branding, excellent printed materials and responsive websites for your business.

Do you need a branding agency?

If you want to start building recognition, trust, and loyalty, then a branding agency can play a key role in the growth of your business going forward.

A good brand can help your products stand out when customers are marking purchase decisions, it can mean that when they think of certain products and services, they think of you first, and it can improve the kind of loyalty and life-time value you can expect from customers.

Your brand can strengthen your business, and a branding agency can help that happen.

With the spotlight provided on the branding agencies above, you hopefully have a better idea of what kind of services and approach you need.

Take the time to understand what your aims are and to what end you want to use branding and choose the team that best aligns with those aims to ensure the best results.

We have a fantastic list of even more branding agencies on the Adzooma Marketplace, so take a look today.

No matter how much time you spend on your PPC marketing or how many new customers it creates, there is always something you could be doing better. You should continually strive for perfection, rather than just resting on your laurels and being content with your present success.

There may be opportunities for vast improvement or small mistakes that will create problems further down the line. For this reason, all businesses should conduct a regular PPC audit to ensure all aspects of their campaign are optimised for peak performance.

What is a PPC audit?

A PPC audit is an in-depth analysis of your paid marketing activities, aiming to find areas for improvement and ways to maximise performance. The best way to carry out a PPC audit is to go through an extensive checklist of each aspect of your marketing and evaluate your success and where you can make improvements before moving onto the next thing.

When and why do you need one?

PPC audits can be carried out at any time but for the best results, I recommend conducting an audit:

• Every six months
• Whenever you start managing a new account
• If you’re experiencing significant performance issues but never less than 3 months after making changes

Auditing this way will identify where you may be going wrong and find ways you could tweak your activity to reach your goals. But you should never restrict an audit to times when your campaign is underperforming. Even when things are going well, there’s always room for improvement or ways you can experiment with new strategies.

Scheduling a 6-monthly review is an excellent way to stay on top of things. Additionally, if you take on a new account that has been managed by the same person or has followed the same strategy for a long time, it would be wise to have an audit to see what you can do differently. Best practices don’t always lead to the best results.

A checklist for carrying out a PPC audit

The following checklist is a helpful guide to some of the areas you will need to dive into during a PPC audit.

• Tracking: The first thing to check is that your Google Ads tracking code is installed correctly on every page you wish to be tracked. If not, then your data will be incorrect and you won’t be unable to accurately measure the performance of your PPC campaign.
• Google Analytics linking: Is your PPC account linked to Google Analytics? Analytics will enable you to drill down into customer behaviour on your site once they click your ads. Make sure it is set up to track conversions and goals.
• IP exclusions: Have you excluded your own IP address from your analytics? Ensure that the IP address of your office or staff who work from home is omitted to avoid misleading data and costly clicks.
• Account structure: Make sure that your account is appropriately organized for easy access. Campaigns and ad groups should follow a logical naming structure to help with reporting and make things easier for your client to understand when the account is handed over. Campaigns should be split by themes (using single theme ad groups) and branded keywords in a separate campaign to non-brand keywords.
• Budget: Are you using your budget effectively? If some campaigns are limited by their budget, you may need to increase it or re-evaluate the campaign altogether. If you find your budget is being used up on low-conversion traffic, you may need to adjust some aspects of your campaigns. Consider optimizing ad schedule, improve your audience targeting strategy, lowering bids, using fewer broad keywords, and adding negative keywords. 
• Keywords: Identify keywords that are converting well and those that are not. High-performing keywords could be optimised further by adding them as exact match keywords, to make ad copy highly relevant to searches. Add any irrelevant and poorly-performing searches to the negative keywords list to filter out low-quality traffic. Look at a breakdown of your quality score and identify areas for improvement.
• Targeting: How could you improve the targeting of your PPC ads? What could you change to refine your audience and reach a higher number of people in your specific target audiences? Are you taking advantage of remarketing to reach existing site visitors and customers? Are your location settings optimized to eliminate unnecessary costs? Are your ads appearing on the device types you want them to?
• Bid Strategy: The next step is to drill down into the bid strategy you are using and how well it aligns with your specific goals. Whether your objectives are to maximize conversion, impressions, or clicks, your bidding strategy should be adjusted accordingly to reflect that.
• Ad Evaluation: The final and most crucial stage of your PPC audit is to evaluate the effectiveness of your PPC ads. Ensure the message of your ads is correct and consistent across campaigns. They should all feature a call to action, be keyword-optimised, and be compelling enough to stand out. If each ad group only has a small number of ads, consider adding more variations to improve testing. The best way to determine the success of your ads is to look at the Ad Rank. A low Ad Rank means you may be losing impressions, so see how you could improve this by improving the ad’s relevance, making the landing pages more captivating, or optimising the keywords.

For more helpful suggestions to improve your PPC campaigns, why not try Adzooma? Its Opportunity Engine has 40 opportunities to boost your paid performance, based on machine learning techniques and your current campaign data.

What are the next steps?

Now that you have undertaken your PPC audit, you will most likely have a list of considerations that require your attention. If this is your first audit, it may be a long list.

Your next task is to prioritize the action points according to importance. If your review was in response to a specific problem, you would first want to address whichever actions can fix this issue and then move onto the others. However, if your was part of a standard six-monthly audit, a good strategy would be to prioritize your list by what would impact revenue the most, or the amount of time and resources required to complete them.

A common tool to use for prioritising tasks is the Eisenhower decision matrix (below):

By splitting the tasks into these four quadrants, you can see what needs to be done, when it can be done, and why it should be done. Or you may find that a task doesn’t need to be done at all and that can be eliminated

One thing to be wary of is making too many changes in a short timeframe, particularly if a massive overhaul is needed. Take things slow and make one change at a time. Otherwise, you may end up doing more damage than good.

What is the Microsoft Audience Network?

In 2019, Bing Ads was rebranded as Microsoft Advertising, in a move which would put people at the forefront of marketing, while leveraging big data, automation and AI, to give the modern marketer a much more effective way to reach profitable leads.

Microsoft Audience Network is a native advertising solution, like Google Ads or Facebook Ads, offering advanced audience targeting and brand-specific native ad placements. It’s informed by Microsoft Graph and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), giving you a great way to reach millions of relevant customers outside of search, while creating more personal ads and really connecting to your customers’ choices.

What is Microsoft Graph?

The Microsoft Graph is a network of data sets that spots trends and insights for advertisers to use in their campaigns. You could think of Microsoft Graph as the core of the Microsoft Audience Network, or indeed every available Microsoft platform. Microsoft Graph connects multiple Microsoft platforms, including the Windows OS and Office 365, but also external platforms such as Android.

Microsoft Graph data sets include:

• Search history
• User activity
• LinkedIn profiles
• Demographics
• In-market Audiences

The main advantage of Microsoft Graph is the ability to reach more customers based on qualitative data. Combined with Microsoft’s state-of-the-art machine learning, you can turn that reach and those impressions into better clicks and leads.

Why should you use Microsoft Audience Ads?

Microsoft Audience Ads can revolutionise your marketing campaigns. If you are already using Facebook and Google Ads, you might wonder what difference Microsoft Audience Ads can make, so here’s a look at some of the benefits.

Additional volume

While Google search accounts for over 3.5 billion searches every day, Microsoft Ads still manages to capture 24% of the US search market with over 4 billion searches every month and 63 million people that Google doesn’t reach. If you are only focusing on Google, you are missing out on a vast ad reach. Using Microsoft Audience Ads can help you to boost both impressions and click-through rate, and remember, using Microsoft Ads doesn’t take away from your Google Ads success, it only adds to it.

Changeable metrics specific to your business

The Microsoft Audience Network gives you access to multiple business-specific metrics, giving you the tools that you need to grow your business, not just generic devices that won’t work for everyone. These metrics relate to important areas such as:

• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Conversion
• Subscriptions from ads
• Customer loyalty
• App downloads
• Sales
• Engagement

An increase in high-quality clicks

By using advanced targeting, Microsoft Graph, and AI, you’ll reach the people that need your business, increasing high-quality clicks, and so boosting conversion, sales, and engagement.

More reach

Working with Microsoft means that you reach customers on MSN, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Edge, and other Bing Syndicated Partners.

Targeting with LinkedIn data

Utilise LinkedIn data to understand your customers’ interests and preferences, giving you incredibly accurate targeting based on their interests, industry, company, and job role.

Affulent demographic

Microsoft Ads generally have an older and more affluent demographic. The people using Microsoft over Google, have got money, and they are ready to spend it. So, why not let them spend it on your business?

Cheaper CPC

Advertising on Microsoft is significantly cheaper than Google, with a 30-50% lower cost for each advert. Microsoft also offers a 29% lower cost per sale, $0.49 average mobile CPC, lower than the industry average of $0.58, and a 35% higher conversion rate than the same CPC using Google.

Microsoft Audience ad types

Using the Microsoft Audience Network, you can create two types of responsive ad formats:

Image-based ads

Image-based ads are more engaging, especially if you use eye-popping images. Because the assets are compatible with different platforms, you can use them on Google Ads and Facebook Ads (and all three platforms are compatible with Adzooma!)

Feed-based ads

You can use Product Audiences for remarketing based on products they viewed or abandoned in their shopping carts. Promoting those products is known as dynamic remarketing.

How to create a Microsoft Audience ad

The good news is, if you have experience of any other ad platform, you should find setting up Microsoft Audience Ads a walk in the park. Microsoft ads are cost-effective and extremely easy to use, and as soon as you’ve set up your Microsoft Advertising account, you are ready to go.

Microsoft Audience Ads are displayed on Microsoft properties such as the Microsoft Edge browser, MSN, and Microsoft Outlook.

Note: At the time of writing, this Audience Ads are only available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. If you’re advertising in any of these countries and wish to opt in, contact Microsoft Advertising customer support.

1. Select your goal

When you are ready to set up your first campaign, you’ll need to begin by selecting a goal for it. What do you want to achieve? This could be website traffic, increased sales or conversion, email subscriptions, calls to your business, or one of many other options. Different campaigns can have different goals, so don’t worry too much if you’ve got plenty that you’d like to achieve.

2. Select your audience

Once you’ve clicked on your goal, a pop-up will ask you to select your audience for that campaign. This could be a wide demographic, or a tighter niche, depending on your goal and the specific needs of your business. Again, each campaign can have a different audience.

3. Set your budget and campaign name

Next, it’s time to set your budget and name your campaign. Once these basics are out of the way, you can start to look at the targeting of your campaign. Spend time selecting the locations, age, gender, and even company, role, and job title using LinkedIn targeting.

4. Set your ad creatives

Then it’s time to look at the ad itself. First, add images via Image Extensions and test it on specific sized ads. You’ll have the option to crop and make changes if necessary. Once you are satisfied, you can add text and links. It’s wise to add a short title, content, and some information about your business.

5. Set your bid amount

When you are happy with your ad, you’ll move on to setting your desired bid for your audience ads. Microsoft will take this bid, as well as the daily budget that you set earlier to give you spend estimates for monthly clicks, impressions, and CPC averages. You can experiment by adjusting your budget and bids to suit the goals that you’d like to hit. Now all that’s left is to save and schedule. Simple.

It’s also worth doing the following to ensure maximum performance

• Optimise your Audience Ads by adjusting your audience ads bids.
• Optimise your audience targeting on search by using remarketing, In-market Audiences and Custom Audiences.
• Use and update your UET tag.

Summary

The Microsoft Audience Network can be a great addition to your marketing campaigns. It’s a cost-effective way to reach a targeted audience without having to learn a whole host of new skills or commit too much of your precious time and our Microsoft advertising tool is here to help.

A “hopeful” strategy wastes time, money, and resources, and that’s why you need the data to show you where your strengths and weaknesses lie. In this article, I’ll be looking at what PPC data is, why it’s so important, and look at the key metrics and KPIs you need to focus your efforts on.

What is PPC data?

PPC data refers to information and statistics collected for analysis from PPC campaigns. This type of information is represented by various metrics, including cost-per-click, click-through-rate, or impressions (which we’ll discuss later). As PPC is one of the most effective marketing techniques out there, it’s essential to understand your data to make the most of your marketing strategies.

Why is PPC data so important?

Every PPC advertising campaign has goals, and some of the most common goals include:

• Increasing conversions
• Improving brand awareness
• Gaining leads
• Driving traffic

PPC data is crucial because it’s the data that indicates how effectively you are working towards your goals. Using this data, you’ll know which steps to take to move in the right direction.

Key PPC metrics you should know

The following are some key PPC metrics to keep an eye on when analysing your campaign:

Impressions

Impressions are key performance indicators (KPIs) referring to how many times an ad is shown. For instance, one impression is counted when your advertisement comes up once on the Google Network or the search result page.

You can use your impressions to improve your performance in the following ways:

• If your impressions are high, but your conversion is low, this data means that you may have a problem with your audience targeting or the style of your ads. Conduct a multivariate ad test to see what’s going wrong.
• If your impressions are low and your conversions are high, you can scale your campaign. Use your report on impression sharing to inform scalability.
• You can look at your impression share to understand your performance. For example, if your impression share is 40% for a particular keyword, this indicates that your competitors have gained the remaining 60%.

Clicks

In the world of PPC marketing, “clicks” are simply the number of times your ads are clicked on. Imaginably, if you’re not getting enough clicks, you’ll want to go back to your keyword research and bidding, see if you can make improvements. A neat way that businesses can boost their click rate is by using PPC software to find out which keywords your competitors are using, and start including these in your ads.

CTR

CTR stands for “click-through-rate” and it measures the rate at which your advertisements are clicked on. It’s the percentage of individuals who saw your ad and then how many of these continued and clicked. The CTR percentage is calculated by dividing the total clicks by the total impressions.

Your click-through-rate will be represented on your PPC dashboard. If your CTR is low, don’t fret – there are many ways you can improve. For example, you can increase visibility with ad extensions, include your keyword within the URL, or use an engaging call to action.

ROAS

ROAS stands for “return on advertising spend”. This metric aims to measure the overall efficacy of an advertising campaign. Using your ROAS, your business can evaluate which advertising methods are effective and how your campaigns can be improved in the future. ROAS is helpful in evaluating ad campaigns quantitatively and assessing how these campaigns contribute to a business’s bottom line.

CPC (Cost-per-click)

CPC can mean two things, but in this case, it stands for “cost-per-click”. It describes the amount that an advertiser is charged when someone clicks on their ad. The CPC can be calculated by dividing the overall cost of clicks by the number of clicks in total. You can use CPC data in several ways, including:

• Choose ad styles: perhaps your CPC isn’t proving cost-effective for certain styles of ad? In this case, you can use the data to implement change.
• Improve paid campaigns: Using CPC data, you can compare the revenue generated to the expenses involved in your paid ad campaigns.

CPC (cost-per-conversion)

The second CPC stands for “cost per conversion” and it means the total cost of a paid ad compared against the success of that advertisement. To calculate cost per conversion, you figure out the total amount spent on generating traffic and then divide this by how many conversions were achieved. With PPC metrics like this, your business can rework your budget, or seek to improve conversion rates.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate means the percentage of site users who completed a desired step. The desired step might be signing up to a service or buying a product. If you’re converting plenty of visitors, your campaigns are likely cost-effective. However, if you’re failing to convert, it’s time to focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO).

How can PPC data help other channels?

PPC data isn’t just for paid advertising. The information you obtain has insights for every marketing channel you use because it features fundamental data about users. The obvious channels that can use PPC data to increase performance are SEO and social media.

SEO

Visually, organic and paid listings on search engines are very similar. Because of those similarities, it can be hard to tell the difference between the two. Using PPC data can give an indication of what seems to attract clicks and a good meta description can help. Optimising your descriptions by incorporating a marketing message can encourage a click-through. Take the opportunity to see what converts well in your PPC campaigns.

Another thing you can do is pay attention to your search query report in Google Search Console or Google Analytics. This report can help you discover both long-tail and mid-tail ideas for content. Location data can also help your SEO campaigns. For example, if you take a look at the ‘dimensions’ tab, you can check out the locations which have already gained clicks and impressions.

Social media

PPC campaigns use cookies to track user behaviour so if the user does not convert, you can use the data for remarketing purposes. For example, by using the visitor information to show them one of your ads on their Facebook account.

You can also use Facebook Ads to test out ads and use PPC data to power your strategy. Not sure on the best CTA text? Try it out on Facebook. Although paid search and paid social are different media, there can be a lot of overlap and one set of data can enrich the other.

Conclusion

As you can see, PPC data can be utilized in many ways to drive success. The most important thing is to review your performance consistently. If you’d rather calculate that data and manually generate reports yourself, Adzooma can help. Our platform contains a powerful reporting tool with a choice of 6 reports:

• Performance Report
• Funnel Report
• Device Report
• Best & Worst Performers
• Cross Channel Report
• KPI Report

Simply log into your Adzooma account, click Reports and choose the one you want.

Interested in finding out more? Head over to our Features page and see how Adzooma can help your business today.