TL;DR

• Use your data to break down performance by device type and time.
• Build your negative keyword list to cut wasted spend.
• Spilt test your adverts to get a new set of winners.
• Refine your ad groups and remove keywords that aren’t needed.

PPC ads can bring in paying customers for businesses of any size.

But when things aren’t working, paid advertising can quickly become an expensive waste of your resources.

If your Google Ads are underperforming, there seems to be a simple fix. Pause the ones that aren’t working. Then pump more money into keywords that are delivering the results you need.

Pausing things is simple. It’s quick and easy. But it’s not always the smart thing to do.

Here’s what you should do instead.

Get the information you need

Just like an astronaut exploring space, you must explore the vast expanse of data to improve your ads.

Google Analytics works alongside Google Ads to give you the information you need to make smart decisions. If they’re not hooked up, you need to fix that right now.

With Analytics connected, you get access to a dizzying level of insight. There’s tons of data to wade through. From a top-level view of your Google Ads account to the nitty-gritty of every single interaction.

And that’s half the problem.

Where do you start?

A good first step is to run a free analysis tool. The one we offer is the Google Ads Performance Score Report and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using it to identify problems (or just to confirm you’ve set things up correctly.)

Whichever report you use, you’re looking for a full breakdown of your account performance that’s easy to understand. You want guidance on the best (and latest) industry practice. You want to be able to pinpoint where you can improve with actionable insights.

If you do one thing, do that.

Free reports are designed to give you a top-level overview rather than showing you why changes should be made. Here we’ll explain why.

Quick Fix #1 – break down by device type

It’s ridiculous how often this one turns a struggling campaign into a winner.

I had a client selling handmade jewellery. Someone had set up a Google Ads campaign competently, but it was performing well below expectations. I made one big change that helped more than any other.

And it was so simple.

See, digging into the data I found that conversions on desktop were almost five times better than on mobile and tablet. Traffic was less for desktop but the customers who were clicking through on those ads were converting like champions.

We could have been lazy and just paused this campaign altogether. Instead, we turned off mobile and tablet and improved the ROI of the campaign fivefold.

Boom!

That said, it’s not a good idea to pause mobile and tablet traffic indefinitely. For example, let’s say a visitor to your site checks you out first on mobile at work and then later, at home, converts on desktop. Keeping mobile and tablet switched off permanently could hurt you in the long run.

Instead, you should take an underperforming mobile and tablet campaign on Google Ads as a symptom. Is your mobile experience poor? Do you need to optimise your PPC campaigns for mobile?

Pause them for an instant boost and then identify what’s causing the problem.

Quick Fix #2 – hours and days of the week

Normally, your account will throw up some interesting differences in performances across two different time segments.

First, hours of the day. Second, days of the week.

Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy.

I’ve seen a Google Ads campaign pushing board games that was doing really well on Mondays and tailing off dramatically towards the end of the week. I’ve seen an account selling will writing services that did poorly in the mornings and great in the evenings. I’ve seen jewellery selling smashing it on Sundays (traditionally a bad day for e-commerce) and the midnight-8am “graveyard hour” slot for holiday villas performing through the roof.

Point is, you need to look at your own data and make informed decisions. Be careful turning anything off altogether, but with ad scheduling you can start to tweak when your ads are displaying for better results.

Focus on outliers. If Monday mornings are doing great, increase how much you’ll bid there. If Saturday and Sunday are doing badly, decrease your bid for those days.

Review your results after one week and see how your optimisations have paid off. Check the data. Review, rinse, repeat.

If you want a quick and easy way to review all your campaigns at once, the Adzooma platform offers account management all on one screen. This means you can get can an overview of how your ads are performing across Google, Facebook and Microsoft and easily keep track of your results.

Quick Fix #3 – being negative for the win

Always think about negative keywords when things aren’t working.

“Broken boiler” is a good example of a search term that can cause problems. What’s the intention of this searcher? Do they want someone to fix their boiler? Do they want to replace their boiler? Do they need someone to fit their new boiler?

If you’re selling new boilers but you aren’t fitting them yourself, you aren’t going to want all of these people clicking your ads and heading over to your landing page.

In fact, your Quality Score is likely to be hit pretty hard if you’re bidding on “broken boiler”.

This is why you use negative keywords. These are keywords that prevent your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase. Your ads will never be shown to someone searching for that phrase.

In the example above, we focused on keywords like “buy new boilers” and set up negative keywords for “install” and “fix”.

This is why thinking about the intention of your searchers is very important. Think of the searchers you want; think of the searchers you don’t want. Bid on the appropriate keywords only using the keyword planner. Think carefully about negative keywords and set them up correctly. Most PPC managers I know use a negative keyword tool like Kparser.

Quick Fix #4 – winning and losing ads from split tests

You should always be testing different ad copy. Why?

Because if you just pause all your ads on a keyword that are underperforming, you’re hand-waving away the potential for big money.

Once, I was looking into some paid ads for holiday villas. A campaign had been paused because it wasn’t delivering. But, digging into the data, there were some ads that were performing way better than rival ads in the same group.

In fact, the cost per acquisition for one ad was ten times smaller than the majority of its rivals.

You see, great copy sells. In that campaign, we removed the failing ads and made new variations of the winner to test. Sorted.

Quick Fix #5 – too many keywords per Ad Group

This is a big one. Relevancy is gigantic for your Google Ads Quality Score. More importantly, it’s what matters most to your potential customers. Ads that are irrelevant to people who see them will always hurt you.

A good rule of thumb is this: check out any ad group that has more than 13 keywords. I call this fix Lucky Thirteen. Without fail, with thirteen keywords or over, you’ll find some that shouldn’t be in the same Ad Group.

Let’s say we’re selling blinds. There’s no good reason you should have keywords for vertical blinds, roller blinds and Venetian blinds in the same ad group.

This is because people are more likely to buy from ads that target them as specifically as possible. If you’re looking for Venetian blinds, the following ad is likely to perform better:

Than this one:

I once looked after a used car salesman’s Google Ads account. Initially, he had one ad group for all the vans he sold. There were sixty keywords in there. Ouch! We sorted that out and his ROI skyrocketed.

Look at your ad groups and identify two or more groups of words that will be better suited to a new ad group. For the car salesman, we started by grouping his vans by manufacturer – Ford, Mercedes, Fiat.

It worked a treat.

Remember, the golden rule with Google Ads is that we’re trying to target in on potential customers with laser-focus. We want to be scalpel-sharp, not smashing around with a mallet.

Just getting started

Getting the best out of Google Ads is hard work – but simple, faster, more effective Google Ads management is what we do. We do it for Facebook and Microsoft ads too, so wherever you’re advertising, you can ensure you’re getting the best ROI.

Our software is bursting with intelligent features: with an industry-leading Opportunity Engine, an automation tool that saves time and white-label, custom reporting that will knock your socks off, there’s lots to like.

Specifically, the Opportunity Engine will identify problems with your Google Ads account that include the above quick fixes and the analysis of over 240 other metrics too.

Get started with a free trial of the platform and see how our software can transform your results.

Adzooma’s Grouped Opportunities are live – and, again, it’s thanks to some great user feedback.

The update serves two main purposes for the Opportunity Engine:

• It saves you more time
• It gives you more context

Let’s dive in.

Finding the big wins fast

Adzooma is always looking for ways you can improve your account, which means the number of Opportunities available can soon stack up.

That’s why we’ve changed things up. Opportunities now group together in a list that’s easy to manage.

See at-a-glance where you can have the biggest impact on an account, focus on one area at a time – and get more done with less time. Simple.

See where you’re doing great

The second part of the update is about context. To run a PPC campaign right, you need to have the right information at your fingertips. That’s why we now show you everything we’re checking your account for.

It means you can be 100% certain about where your account is well optimised.

See all those zeroes? That’s because the PPC manager in charge of this account is smashing it out of the park in those areas. Or, if we’re being cheeky, it’s because they actioned a few Opportunities to fix these areas last week.

But that’s what Adzooma is all about. Helping you fix problems – and helping you keep on top of your account to maximise performance.

Improving the product is important to everyone here at Adzooma. If you’ve got ideas for features or even small tweaks that will help you do your job better, bring them up in the Adzooma Community Support Group on Facebook.

See you on the platform.

But, with Adzooma, it doesn’t have to be that way. And now it’s even easier for your whole team to use our platform.

Here’s the deal. You can now invite everyone from your boss to the intern who just put their first ad campaign live to Adzooma. Give them access to everything, or limit the accounts they can manage.

Introducing Adzooma Teams

It’s all about giving you more control about how you manage your team and your clients.

Here’s a nice and simple example team:

Thomas is the Owner. Richard is an Admin. Harriet is a User.

Here’s a list of what Admins and Users can do:

If you like, an Owner is a “Super Admin”. This means they can setup and delete Admins or Users as required. In turn, Admins can only setup and delete Users.

Inviting your team to Adzooma is easy. From the Team Management screen, hit Invite User. Pop their email in the box and choose whether you’d like them to be a User or an Admin. Hit ‘Send Invite’ and you’re done.

You can see a list of Pending Invites from the Team Management screen. You can also revoke an invite and resend to another email if required.

A Little Work For You, A Little Work For Me

Assigning accounts is another crucial piece of Adzooma Teams.

Every team works differently, and Adzooma can slot right into your workflow to make everything much easier.

In this example, the Director of Paid Advertising (Owner) can see all advertising accounts and make changes wherever they need to. Charlotte, a PPC Exec (Admin), handles Big Little Big Inc and Smashmouth accounts but can see her colleague’s accounts too in case her input is required.

Sully, the PPC Enterprise manager (Admin), invites Jaye, a PPC Junior Exec, to Adzooma and assigns her Topkia Photo and Ken Does Math so he can delegate work accordingly.

Jaye is a User, which means she can work on these accounts but can’t see any others. Jaye also can’t add or delete accounts or see billing information.

Later, Jaye is promoted to a PPC Exec. The Director of Paid Advertising, Maria (an Owner in Adzooma), promotes her to an Admin so that she can access all accounts, billing information and invite her new team as required.

It literally takes seconds to setup and then you’re on your way to easier optimisation, management, reporting and automation. Boom.

I’m already with Adzooma, will this mess things up for me?

Easy now. There’s no need to worry about any interruption to your workflow.

If you’re already with us, the original Admin will become the Owner. Anyone else you’ve invited to your Adzooma account will become a User, but will be automatically assigned to all advertising accounts they have access to right now. This means no nasty surprises.

Keep things exactly as they are, or try out Adzooma Teams whenever you like.

A big thanks for great feedback

‘Looks like an awesome tool for us with loads of time-saving features but, right now, it’s a bit too difficult to rollout to the team’.

If we hold our hands up, we have to say we didn’t anticipate the demand for this Adzooma Teams update.

But when we get feedback like this, we listen. And we deliver.

We hope this feature makes it even easier for you and your teams to start making big, quick wins for both you and your clients.

See you in the platform.

TL;DR

• There have been a ton of product updates in 2019.
• These updates have included a new Early Access Programme, Better Account Creation Experience, and launching Facebook advertising.
• We have more to come in 2020.
• Keep up to date with future changes with our new Changelog.

When looking forward, it’s always a good idea to have a little glance back.

Now, if there was one word to describe 2019 for Adzooma, it would be this: busy.

We have come a long way in a short period of time.

The increase is exponential. It’s meteoric. And it’s all down to a diverse team of individuals who have kept everything charging forwards at breakneck pace.

Now, our people are great, but this isn’t an article about them.

It’s actually about people just like you.

It’s a story about how Adzooma has gone from strength to strength on the back of great feedback. It’s also about the many features and updates the Product Team delivered this year. It’s a big, shouty piece jam-packed with our greatest hits of 2019.

But, above all else, it’s a love letter to great feedback. And if you’ve got it, we’re all ears. Because listening to people like you is what took us from good to great. And it’s people like you who can take us from great to greatest.

Let’s get to the good stuff.

Q1, 2019

Adzooma Early Access Programme

Early in January, we launched the Adzooma Early Access Programme (EAP). Coupled with our partnerships with Google, Facebook and Microsoft Ads, it’s one of the big reasons we’ve been able to develop the platform so quickly.

Pushed out through our groups on social, the EAP was an exclusive group of users that provided feedback on the platform and told us what they wanted us to build next.

The EAP gave users:

• Early access to new features
• Direct access to the product team
• Exclusive access to trials and discounts

Closing in April, the EAP was a huge success. We expected good feedback from engaged users who wanted to help us make things better, but we didn’t expect feedback that redefined our 2019 roadmap.

You see, the biggest takeaway from the EAP was that people using PPC software, and people running online advertising without any bespoke software built for the task, were far more dissatisfied that we expected.

We learnt that people in digital advertising didn’t have the toolkit they need to do their jobs in the best way.

Not only that, we learnt that there was a wealth of great feedback out there. We set up the right process to implement this feedback, worked smart and delivered high-quality features at speed.

Q1 Opportunities

Opportunities are the beating heart of Adzooma.

We’ve added a lot to the platform this year, but Opportunities are a core feature of the product. However big the product gets, we know that we can never back away from having an Opportunities tab that’s constantly updating and improving.

There were massive changes to the Opportunity Engine during Q1, beginning right after New Years’ Day. An entire section of our Product Team was assigned to making improvements and adding to the number of Opportunities we offer customers.

Back in Q1, these were Google Ads Opportunities. Back then, going fully omnichannel was more of a twinkle in the eyes of our directors. But clever work put in by our Opportunities Team allowed for a smoother rollout when Facebook Ads and Microsoft Advertising came knocking.

The Opps. Team are a bunch of unsung dev heroes. They work incredibly hard to deliver Opportunities that work for our customers. Frankly, I don’t know how they do it.

Multiple Google Ads Accounts

This one seems pretty wild to newer members of the Adzooma family.

At the beginning of 2019, Adzooma still operated on a one Adzooma account per Google Ads account basis. It had worked, but an overwhelming number of customers and potential customers wanted to add multiple ad accounts. We delivered this early Q1 and it opened many doors for us.

Rolled out in January, yours truly used “Same Great Software – Performing At Scale” as the strapline for the update.

It was a massive undertaking. We developed an easy account switcher, a better method for importing accounts automatically and a suite of tools that let users manage multiple ad accounts easily. We’re still improving this today.

Big Ol’ Database Migration

While “database migration” might not get your engine started, a small section of our team managed to do something that seemed impossible.

In just two and a half weeks, they managed to:

• Change over 24,000 lines of code
• Migrate 119,000 optimisation suggestions to a new database
• Migrate 17.5 million report stats to a new database

Without that work, we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did in 2019. So thanks for that, champions.

Q2, 2019

Automation

I’ve piped on about how small, disruptive businesses can win big before. It’s about being smart and deploying technology to supplement what you do.

And, when it comes to Adzooma, for this purpose Automation is tickety-boo.

Automation lets you eliminate time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Checking and adjusting daily budgets, pausing parts of your campaigns that are performing poorly, and much more.

It’s all here.

Initially, Automation was a simple stop/go affair that ticked a few big boxes for our users but didn’t do everything they wanted.

It’s improved massively since then, and we have even bigger plans for this part of the platform. Watch this space.

For more info, check out our initial Automation release update and learn more about automation.

Notification System

Released in tandem with Automation, the Notification System is all about making online advertising easier.

Here’s the deal. Set up your Automation for any online advertising account. Sit back, relax and Adzooma will email you when there’s a problem.

Adzooma’s Automation replaces unreliable scripts with the certainty of an always-on assistant. Change in your CPA? A spike in spend? Get notified, step in and take action before it becomes a problem. Or let Adzooma fix things for you automatically with the rules you predefine.

Picture this: you’re managing a client’s budget. You set up your Automations in Adzooma. When there’s a problem, you get pinged with an email and can alert your client before they even knew a problem existed.

Quick, easy and powerful.

The Great Refactoring Rampage

Restructuring existing code (known as refactoring in the development world) is an essential part of building any product.

This is because no one gets it perfect the first time around, especially in an industry that moves as fast as this. Refactoring allows us to go back and make these parts perfect, building a better product overall.

And we’ve got some young guns – and some old hands – who can refactor like nobody’s business.

When someone asks “but why aren’t you working on a new feature?” the refactoring answer can be a tough sell, but if something can be done better we won’t look the other way.

2020 will bring loads of awesome new features for Adzooma, but you can rest assured there’ll be a lot of refactoring too. And when refactoring goes smoothly, you’re none the wiser as a customer.

But here’s to the folks who make this happen for us when it’s time to refactor. It’s quiet, overlooked work that’s really bloody important – and absolutely essential to our platform.

After all, Adzooma is about optimising your online advertising. And we’re always looking to optimise Adzooma.

Better Account Creation Experience

In 2019, there was a lot of tinkering with the Account Creation Experience.

First impressions are insanely important, of course. And nowhere is this truer in the world of online advertising.

From complete novice to PPC maestro, people establish a way of working in online advertising quickly. That means introducing a new way of doing things (like Adzooma) can be tricky.

However easy we make Adzooma to use, there’s always going to be an initial learning curve. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy making the first part of this curve as seamless as possible.

I would like to say we’ve nailed it, but there’s always more work to do when it comes to creating a signup process that kicks butt.

New Marketing Website

Our website team get on quietly and deliver some great work.

There’s constant tweaking, tinkering, optimisation and testing that goes on with all our marketing flows, and these guys handle that without complaint.

But this was a whole redesign.

Our old website was fine, but it was time to make it better. The triforce teams of content, design and product got together and they delivered in a big way.

This isn’t even counting the excellent work that goes on for our landing pages designed to get people “through the door” and using our product. That goes on throughout the year.

Custom Reports

While reports existed as part of the Adzooma platform, they didn’t allow for much customisation.

We changed all that with the full release of custom reports.

This made building reports for any online advertising account quick and ridiculously easy.

Choosing layouts, adding custom logos and graphics, and showcasing the data important to you (or any of your stakeholders) doesn’t get any easier than this.

A simple widget-based system, which we have refined twice already, is discussed as part of the product tour.

Facebook Advertising Launched

Becoming omnichannel has been a consistent business goal for Adzooma.

Alongside a partnership with Facebook, Q3 was when the product team made this a reality.

This was a monumental task. Getting Adzooma and Facebook to interact with one another sounds wonderfully easy on paper, but buy any of our Facebook Team devs a drink at the pub and they’ll give you a few home truths.

Adding Facebook accounts, importing, previewing ads and providing an overview of Facebook accounts were deployed first as part of a beta.

This early step required massive amounts of work from a diligent team who worked hard to deliver for our users.

From initial build, through waves of testing to tidying up and release, our guys just kept plugging away. And from the beta, we took the good and the bad to work on and improve what we had.

With the building blocks in place, it was time for the Opportunities team to get involved. This has been an ongoing project throughout 2019 and there’s even more work to do in 2020.

Q3, 2019

Multiple Adzooma Users

Since launching the product, there had been plenty of demand for adding multiple users to the same Adzooma account.

For example, there might be a team of PPC managers at an agency managing multiple advertising accounts wanting to use the same Adzooma account to get things done.

There’s one admin account at the top of the pile and they can set up users with permissions as required. In one fell swoop, it was easier for teams to use Adzooma. Boom.

Microsoft Advertising Phase 1

Q3 marked the beginning of our Microsoft Advertising integration.

With the bigwigs working closely with Microsoft, the guys on the ground started to get our architecture in place.

A full plan and internal roadmap were deployed and the hard work started in the UK heat of August.

Opportunity History Log

A big part of any job is justifying what you do. An important request from many of our users was an Adzooma Log.

They wanted to see all the changes that had been made to the account. Time was found in Q3 to deliver the first version of this feature.

It’s great. It gives you feedback and the Opportunities you’ve applied and includes the ones you’ve dismissed too. Moving forward, we want to provide even more context and feedback on how the changes you’ve made to your online advertising account have helped improve your online advertising.

Proposal API

One of the most hush-hush of the Adzooma has been something we called the “Proposal API”.

It’s pretty damn big and, if we’re wholly honest, a gamechanger for Adzooma.

Here’s the elevator pitch: let customers build and publish a complete Google Ads campaign in minutes.

The key points are as follows:

• A user can punch in a few quick details about their business – industry, location, website, Facebook page, etc. – and then get a full Google Ads campaign setup and ready to roll. This includes all their ads, too.
• This is great for big companies who manage lots of customers who aren’t comfortable running online advertising alone.
• It’s a great way to offer an automated system to customers who want a done-for-you service.

If you know anything about PPC, you’ll know that this has been a gigantic project.

Some of the best and brightest devs working in the UK today have been beavering away on it for ages now and I can’t wait to be able to champion what they’re doing.

Some very big names are using the Proposal API, and it’s not hard to see why.

Product Tours & Videos

A more engaging onboarding experience that makes new customers excited to try out all of Adzooma’s bells and whistles is essential.

While there’s still lots of work to do in this area, Q3 was when Adzooma finally got time to start taking things seriously.

Before, it was too difficult for people to unlock the massive benefits Adzooma offered. It was too hard for them to find out where things were, and why they should use them. That’s changing, and every time Product Tours get worked on it gets a little easier for new users.

2020 will involve making things even easier for new users to get around and become Adzooma experts. Because once you know what you’re doing with our platform, you can take your online advertising to the next level.

Q4, 2019

Microsoft Advertising Phase 2

Phew. If Phase 1 was a doozy, it had nothing on this.

The Beta launch of Microsoft Advertising was initially handled on a small number of early adopters. Importing accounts, previewing ads, ensuring management and opportunities displayed as intended was no mean feat.

And, of course, the team rose to the challenge.

Learning from what went well and what didn’t from previous releases allowed us to get Microsoft out of the door with incredible speed.

There’s still plenty of work to do with Opportunities, but we’re delighted with the initial deployment.

2020 will be an exciting time for Microsoft Advertising and Opportunities in general.

King & Queen of Context (Even Better Opportunities)

Linked to the above was a massive amount of work on Opportunities.

In line with creating new Opportunities for Microsoft Advertising, the Opportunities team improved our existing Google and Facebook Opportunities to provide more context for users.

The demand from customers was more explanation for their Opportunities. More control. More informed decision making.

Hard to argue with that, right? We agreed, and we delivered. But there’s still plenty more work to do in 2020 when it comes to making things even easier to understand and action. Quicker decision making for our customers is a win for you, and a win for us.

Google Ads Smart Creative & Google Display Ads

Responsive Search Ads and other Smart Creatives were tested and deployed in this period.

At the same time, Google Display functionality was added to the platform keeping Adzooma right at the cutting edge of what’s working in PPC right now.

Management Tab Updates

This is a catchall heading for major updates to our management tab.

We added the bulk edit feature, better filtering and sorting and a handy search box.

The aim of the game was to make things even quicker and easier to view at-a-glance.

You can read more about the management tab here, and see a demo of it in action right here.

Major Demo Updates

When customers see Adzooma in action, they’re generally in.

That means a large part of our sales funnel involves a working “dummy” version of Adzooma using realistic-looking data.

This allows users to dip their toes in the water without importing any accounts or having any formal relationship with Adzooma whatsoever.

We’re no fools, and neither are our customers. Importing your online advertising data to a platform you might have just learnt about is a very big ask, and the demo is a good way of assuaging some of these fears.

But Adzooma moves fast. It changes a lot. That’s just the nature of the PPC industry.

Keeping our demo as close to the live product as possible is no small task. It requires experienced and junior developers to come off building awesome stuff for our product for our existing users to work on a demo for potential customers, which can seem like a strange use of their time.

But it’s vital to our business model. Trust me, I’m a marketer (poor choice of words, right?)

The demo is constantly updated, but Q4 saw a particularly heavy workload from the product team and that’s why I’ve slotted it in here.

Thanks for bringing in our customers and showing them how awesome the platform is.

Free Report Suite

A big ol’ pivot comes up last on the update wagon.

Initially a contentious idea among the Adzooma team, this one turned out to be a golden goose.

As 2019 raced on, we decided to change the way we bring in new customers. And a big part of that change was the free report suite.

Frankly, they’re a bloody great version one. And there’s a whole heap of work planned to make them even better.

You can see them in action here, and while I’m obviously biased I recommend hooking up your online advertising accounts to see what insight they can provide.

I’ve been dipping my toes in the PPC waters for years, and I’ve found plenty of insight in these free reports to improve my setup.

These function well as quick weekly snapshots for how your advertising is doing. They replaced the Adzooma Health Check, which worked well enough at bringing people in but was separate to our platform in ways that confused customers.

Our Report Suite is the bee’s knees and I hope 2020 makes them even better.

The Changelog

Still with me? Well, thanks very much for coming along for the ride.

There’s a whole heap of stuff I left out to keep the article from becoming ludicrously long, but I think you’ll agree we got a lot done at Adzooma in 2019.

One final thing: we’ve launched a changelog where you can get all of Adzooma’s updates as they’re released.

TL;DR

• Adzooma has now partnered with Microsoft.
• We’ve joined the prestigious Microsoft Advertising Parner Program as one of the most qualified partners in the advertising space.
• Soon, Microsoft Ads will be landing inside the Adzooma platform.

Well, here’s a spicy hot take.

The good: Adzooma is now partnered with Microsoft.

The great: Our doors are now open for Microsoft Advertising users.

The awesome: Quick, easy ad optimisation and management for more customers.

What does this mean for us?

Specifically, we’ve joined the Microsoft Advertising Partner Program. This means we’ve been recognised as one of “the most qualified technology Partners” in the advertising space.

It gives us access to exclusive training, technical, marketing and sales resources.

We know this approach works. No question, our partnerships with Google and Facebook have allowed us to grow rapidly. They’ve let us deliver an outstanding platform to our customers quicker than anticipated. And now we can do the same for Microsoft Advertising users.

Ultimately, we want to make Adzooma the all-in-one ad management and optimisation platform. A one-stop shop for everything online advertising.

Coupled with Google and Facebook Ads, our new Microsoft integration will power us towards that target.

What does this mean for you?

Of course, this is just the beginning of the journey. But watch this space closely.

Our Product Team have just:.

• Rebuilt the codebase to ensure Microsoft Advertising accounts can be imported into Adzooma quickly and easily.
• Crafted 12 Opportunities (our flagship feature) for Microsoft.
• Reworked the platform so Microsoft Advertising accounts can use the same great management, automation and reporting tools that our existing customers can.

And, frankly, with all of the other ongoing work we’re doing at Adzooma, they’re drinking a lot of coffee too.

The partnership with Microsoft is great news for us, and it’s great news for anyone in online advertising.

Because… Adzooma is the platform you need to optimise and manage all of your paid advertising.

What’s next?

Our goal remains the same: make online advertising accessible, easy and effective for businesses of any size. Adding Microsoft Advertising into the mix ticks all the right boxes for us.

If you’re keen to see what Adzooma can do for your Google or Facebook Ad accounts, step right up and try the Adzooma platform.

And if you’re just looking for some powerful (and completely free) reports that will tell you exactly how your ads are performing, we’ve got you covered.

TL;DR

• Adzooma have just launched a full product tour on the platform, complete with new explainer videos.
• They show you where everything is and how it works, making Adzooma easier than ever to use.
• The videos are available to everyone on our YouTube channel.

It’s time for a big one.

Adzooma is the quick and easy way to manage and optimise your ad accounts. But now it’s even easier to get started.

We’re pleased to announce that Adzooma now has a full Product Tour, complete with some snazzy explainer videos that showcase our platform.

Why This Matters To You

In a nutshell, the Product Tour is designed to be a quick rundown of our platform’s features. It shows you where everything is – and how it all works.

For each tab, you can watch a short video and then get a step-by-step walkthrough of what to do first.

Start to finish, it only takes a few minutes.

There are five steps to the tour.

Available Right Now

Everything will launch automatically when you next visit the platform. If you’re not interested, you can always hit the Skip button.

You can also hit the blue question mark in the bottom right at any time to get access to any part of the tour.

It’s also worth noting that you can watch the tour in any order. And you don’t need to watch the whole thing if you’re not interested.

As usual, with Adzooma, you’re in full control.

Just here for the videos?

If you’re just interested in watching the videos, you can find them right here:

• Welcome To Adzooma
• Management
• Opportunities
• Automation
• Reports

Just the beginning

This is a good starting point, but there are lots of explainer vids and other video content in the pipeline. Watch this space.

We’re always listening to your feedback. If you have ideas for how our videos could be improved – or other content you would like to see made into a video – please let us know.

TL;DR

• Google’s Responsive Search Ads are coming to Adzooma.
• Set up and track your RSAs right from the Adzooma platform.
• So far, they’ve improved CTRs by 25% and converstion rates by 26%!

Machine learning that makes sense

People throw about terms like machine learning without having a clue what they’re talking about.

But Google’s Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) are a great example of how machine learning can be used to deliver something great for you – and your customers.

In case you’re not sure about them, here’s a quick rundown of how RSAs work.

You write 3-15 different headlines. You write 2-4 descriptions. You provide your URL.

Then, Google gets to work.

Essentially, RSAs serve up your headlines and descriptions in various configurations – and tracks which perform best.

Testing me, testing you

Google’s Machine Learning Technology determines the right ad for the right customer. It ensures they get served with the right combination of your ad assets to get that all-important conversion.

Now, everyone here at Adzooma is a big believer in testing. And you should be too. Testing stuff to find winners and losers is how we get better. In this case, Google is offering to do everything for you.

42% of the ads you see now are responsive ads, and the number keeps climbing as time goes on.

Initially, advertisers were muted about RSAs and reported limited gains. But, not surprisingly, Google and the technology behind RSAs have come a long way very quickly.

We know that better than anyone. Since deploying RSAs in our own PPC advertising campaigns, our Clickthrough Rates have increased by 25%. Our conversion rates have increased by 26%. That’s gigantic!

Test your stuff without the hassle

If you weren’t using a platform to manage your ads, RSAs would be much easier to set up than a variety of expanded text ads that you test manually.

But if you’re using Adzooma, things are even simpler for you. You can do everything from within the platform with just a few clicks.

That’s because our flagship Opportunity Engine now supports RSAs, and you can set them up and track your performance from right within the platform.

How to use RSAs effectively

Whether you use our awesome platform or not, here’s some advice for getting the best out of RSAs.

RSAs are a time-saver. They allow you to deploy some powerful testing and optimisation with minimal effort on your part.

And Adzooma allows you to deliver this with even less effort.

Optimise, automate, win. We like to say that here. We love what RSAs bring to the table and we’re happy to add them into the Adzooma platform.

TL;DR

• Add or remove accounts in Adzooma in just a few clicks.
• Modify your columns and add filters on your account page.

Easy to add new accounts, easy to remove accounts

Good news, it’s now easier to deactivate accounts within the Adzooma platform. In fact, it takes just a few clicks.

Simply hit the … button next to any account you want to remove, and then select “deactivate”.

That’s it. You’re done.

Add or remove clients as you require. Or, if you’re just testing the waters on our free Adzooma trial, add an account to see what you think and remove it if you need to. No bother, no fuss, no hassle – like everything else Adzooma.

An Account page that works your way

Up second, you can now modify your columns and add filters on the Account page.

This makes managing multiple accounts even easier. Get the top level data you need to make switching between accounts a simple decision. Or pinpoint the accounts you want to check with the filter function.

Nice and easy.

TL;DR

• PPC management services are built to save you time and money – not make you spend more on your ads.
• They help simplfy management and give you options to apply changes with a single click.
• They give you cost-effective customisation based on your PPC needs for you to up your ROI.

Used correctly, technology is capable of increasing your productivity and slashing the amount of time you spend performing manual tasks.

PPC management services have developed the tech to handle these jobs. But AI, no matter how powerful, has gotten as good as you and your strategy.

It’s time to start using highly advanced PPC software to supplement the work you do. It’s time to get much more done with the same amount of hours.

Here are five reasons you need a PPC management service right now.

1. PPC management services are in it for you

The advertising giants make good money from your advertising, and they want to continue doing that. That’s no big surprise.

This means one of their motivations is to make you spend more money. For example, if you’re making £5000 from your £1000 advertising budget – then an ad giant will probably tell you to start spending £2000 so you can make £10000.

You win, and they win too.

But there are other ways as all PPC software is different. Adzooma’s Opportunity Engine is about optimising your budget. It’s about doing more with whatever budget you choose.

That’s why the platform incorporates suggestions from Google Ads and Facebook so that you can do everything within the platform. But, more importantly, it has its own custom-built opportunities too.

We’re here to save you time and get more from your ad budget. This subtle difference in motivation makes a very big difference in practice.

Adzooma, as a platform offering PPC management services, can optimise your budget regardless of the size.

2. You can apply changes with a single click

The Opportunity Engine

A significant benefit to PPC software is how quick it makes PPC advertising.

This is useful whether you’re running one account for your business or working as an account manager for other businesses.

See, if you’re running your own account it gives you more time to actually run your business or upskill elsewhere – which are both vitally important if you’re going to remain competitive.

If you’re looking to scale up the number of accounts you manage, then getting everything set up for a client you’ve just on-boarded in minutes rather than hours is a huge bonus. Better yet if scouring their account for opportunities and applying them takes minutes rather than hours.

Automation

But a key element to all PPC management services is this: automation.

Put simply, automation allows you to specify rules and then set up automatic action when they trigger. Or, best for most account managers, set up notifications.

This means you’re not manually checking an account to see what’s going on. You don’t need to trawl through the same accounts for hours every day.

Instead, you sit back, relax and wait for Adzooma to warn you when there’s something you need to do.

3. They help simplify things

In PPC marketing, the time you spend managing Google, Facebook and other ad accounts can be immense. Pouring over data, searching for ways you can optimise and improve your ads, tweaking this setting and fiddling with that metric can feel neverending.

It gets worse if you’re trying to scale up your operation. Ad managers only have so many hours in the day and if they’re spending the majority of it buried in spreadsheets, they’re not getting much done that increases your bottom line.

If you’re micromanaging all the time, then where are you making time for high-level strategy?

Year on year, PPC management has become increasingly complex. PPC jargon is hard enough for newcomers, but even seasoned pros are struggling to keep up with smart bid management, automation and the huge amount of data that needs analysing and implementing.

Adzooma’s way of account management simplifies the process and makes life a lot easier. You can connect multiple accounts and optimise performance in one fell swoop. The platform also gives a clear overview and budget adjustments on a single screen.

4. Customisation for your PPC needs

Ever heard of a white-label reporting in PPC marketing?

It’s a way of using producing reports that can be used by different companies. Adzooma offers custom white-label reporting.

You want customers to understand the data you’re producing so they know what’s working, what isn’t, why, and where things can be improved. This takes time. That’s where a management service comes in handy. They let you run concise reports, with a customised builder, and you can add your logo and send it to clients. Simple as that.

What’s more, you can tailor reports to only show the necessary data. It’s always best to filter out the jargon and convey messages in the cleanest way possible.

And, keeping the theme of automation and optimisation in mind, there are helpful templates you can save to speed up the reporting process.

Customised PPC reports just look better. They’re professional, styled, and branded, and give clients the best impression of your business.

5. PPC management is cost-effective

Budgets exist for a reason. They’re there so you don’t go over them (ideally). But they can be adjusted depending on your performance.

But how can you find out how well your PPC ads are doing? It’s much harder doing it natively through Google Ads and Facebook Ads. They also want you to spend more.

The idea is to maximise profits with smart PPC investment. That’s where a management company would help.

Take a local newspaper for example. A small box ad might cost £100+ per issue. PPC advertising for a local business, that £100+ could generate 500-1000 clicks depending on your competition and keyword.

A print ad might not be cost-effective and may never figure in a customer’s mind but PPC ads are always the first thing you see on a search engine results page (SERP). Print ads are for anyone who picks up a newspaper or magazine and sees the page it’s on. PPC advertising is tailored specifically to the customer base you want.

What PPC software like Adzooma does is find out which keywords are the best, with the right level of competition to maximise conversion rates. No need for guesswork or printing and hoping.

Conclusion

There are plenty of reasons to hire a PPC management expert alongside the 5 listed.

Your ad copy needs to be perfect, the keywords need to be the right ones, and the best tools to marry them all together.

That’s why PPC management services are crucial to online businesses.

Adzooma takes care of the boring bits so you can focus on the things that matter and report the results back to your clients.

Whether you have PPC marketing experience or not, you could end up wasting money by trial and error which isn’t recommended.

Choose an expert like Adzooma to handle your PPC management and see your success sky-rocket today.

TL;DR

• Setting up Facebook campaigns isn’t as complex as it looks, just follow the process step by step.
• Start by creating a goal and setting up objectives in Facebook to help acheive it.
• Input your audience targeting and how much you want to spend.
• Build your ad creatives and you’re good to go!

Find out how you can create a Facebook ad campaign – but also how to ensure that it’s successful. We’ll start with the basics and then dig into how to avoid the common mistakes that often plague newcomers and waste money.

A quick side note – page optimisation

If you’re ready, let’s find out how to find, target and convert the potential customers hiding among Facebook’s 2.38 billion monthly active users.

You won’t see the crucial “your ads” section on Facebook without first having a Facebook Ads account. You should also create a business or public page first before getting started. This is because it’s extremely likely that your Facebook Ads will perform worse without one. There’s a great guide to creating a Facebook page on Buffer.

This isn’t the place for discussing how to optimise your Facebook page. Get your campaign set up by following this guide and then go elsewhere to make sure everything is optimised before you hit the go button.

That said, you must optimise your landing page. This is whatever location someone who clicks your ads will turn up at.

Facebook is pretty user-friendly: it’ll give you page tips, and you need to follow them because parts of the Facebook Ads’ algorithm incorporate how optimised your pages are. There are tools like Canva and guides on how to optimise landing pages and the best image tools available to help you get this done for images.

But we’re here to talk about the campaigns. Let’s go!

What the Facebook Ads manager does

The Facebook Ads manager is billed as the all-in-one tool for creating and managing ads. It’s designed to be powerful and feature-rich but also approachable for newcomers. Here’s just some of the stuff you can do with it:

• Set up your Facebook Ad campaigns
• Create your ad sets and ads
• Manage Facebook Ad bids
• Pinpoint target audiences
• Optimise your ad campaigns
• Analyse the performance of your campaigns
• Split test your Facebook campaigns

How to use the Ads Manager

There are three main ways to log onto Ads Manager:

1. Login from the Business manager webpage.
2. Click on the drop-down arrow in the upper-right corner of your Facebook page and select “Business Manager”.
3. Use the Ads Manager mobile app (on Android and iOS) and to access and manage your ad campaigns wherever you are.

There are four tabs to concern yourself with. They are:

• Account Overview
• Campaigns
• Ad Sets
• Ads

Think of this setup as a forest and its trees. The overview is the forest. The Campaigns are the trees. The Ad Sets are the branches. The Ads are the leaves.

The campaigns are what give your account structure. The Ad Sets are what allow you to precisely target your audience. The ads are responsible for bringing in your growth.

This will do for now, but if you want to know more right now about structure head over to Facebook’s advertising campaign structure guide or look at specific differences between campaigns, Ad Sets and Ads.

Let’s look at an overview of the Ads Manager.

Admittedly, there’s a lot to take in here. Take some time to click around and get familiar with where everything is. When you’re ready, find the Ads Manager navigation menu in the top left and then select “All Tools” towards the bottom of the window. Here’s where you find a raft of settings but, importantly for us, the ad creation tools.

How to create an effective Facebook ad campaign

Again, Facebook Ad Campaigns are the trees of the Facebook Ads forest. To create one, navigate to the “campaigns” tab. From there, click on the green create button.

Step 1: Campaign objectives

No sensible person ever sets out to spend money without any idea of what they want to get in return (better known as “Return on Investment” or ROI). Facebook Ads is no different, and it’s important to choose a campaign objective that aligns with your goal.

“What’s your marketing objective?”

There are three categories:

• Awareness (including brand awareness and reach) – You want people to know the name of the new brand of trainers you’re launching
• Consideration – You want people to be interested in buying your brand of trainers.
• Conversion – You want people to click the ad and buy your brand of trainers right now.

It’s best to think about this in terms of what you want someone to do. For example, if you’re looking to capture email addresses, you’re looking for lead generation under conversion. You want someone to click the ad, drop on your lander and then convert by typing their email address.

If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to focus on lead generation under conversion. You’re looking to get people to give you their details.

A few exceptions might be if you want to:

• Generate traffic to your web site. That’s coming under consideration > traffic.
• Get the most page likes or event responses. That comes under consideration > engagement.
• Get the most app installs. That’s under consideration too.
• Get the most video views. That’s under consideration as well.

Quickly: video ads are generally the cheapest option for advertisers right now. This is because Facebook is looking to disrupt the dominance of YouTube when it comes to video advertising.

Done right, you can do some pretty great things with video ads. But you should be extremely careful of people who say that Facebook video ads are the only thing that makes sense right now in online advertising because they’re so cheap.

That’s rubbish.

But if you’re just getting started, please consider the following. Be very careful using awareness. Brand awareness and reach might put your advert in front of people who don’t really care about what you’re selling, which means you don’t want to use this until you’re very big and have money to burn on brand awareness and reach (which are notoriously difficult to measure and test).

And, you should definitely be testing everything you’re doing to make sure it’s delivering on your objectives.

Step 2: Name Your Campaign

Keeping your campaigns organised is essential. It may seem like a silly step initially, but as you scale up you need to be able to easily identify each of your campaigns at a glance. It also helps to simplify the reporting process later.

Here’s a good naming convention: De Brugg Hotel – Over 50s affluent women – Video – De Brugg 20% Off Spa Breaks.

In turn, it covers:

• The client name or website (De Brugg Hotel)
• The target audience/location (over 50s affluent women)
• The creative type: video, carousel, collection, etc. (video)
• The specific Facebook page your ad is linking to. (De Brugg 20% off deal)

Step 3: Set Up Optimisation Or Split Tests

You should always be testing your adverts and optimising. Run experiments, collect data and see what performs – never assume anything.

For a newcomer, this comes really early in the process. Skip it for now – but definitely come back later when you have everything else set up.

Remember the rhyme: if you’re not testing, you’re just jesting. Horrific isn’t it? Almost as horrific as running ads without testing to see if they could be doing better.

Step 4: Set Up Audience Targeting

Literally, the number one benefit of online advertising is your ability to pinpoint your audience. What’s the point of showing half a million people your TV ad if the vast majority don’t care?

Online advertising allows you to target people who are likely to be interested in your ad.

Facebook gets terrifyingly specific about this. Want to know why Facebook’s 2018 revenue was upwards of $55 billion? It’s because people volunteer a gigantic amount of information about themselves for free.

And that’s a big win for advertisers.

Their age, gender, how much they make, whether they like dogs or coffee or pizza or city breaks or horses. Click around for a short while and you can see how insane it gets.

Closely monitor the “too specific / too broad” gauge. Aim for the middle ground and you will struggle to go wrong.

Either:

• Create a new Facebook target audience
• Reuse one you have previously saved

And remember to give every audience you create a sensible name so you can save yourself some work later.

Step 5: Set Up Your Ad Placement

If you don’t mess with the settings, Facebook will serve your ad to Facebook, Instagram and its Audience Network. It will try and optimise your placements for the best results.

If you have some data, you can tweak this. But if you’re just getting started, it’s strongly advised that you leave Facebook to its own devices.

When data starts coming in about how the placements have done, you can start tweaking.

Step 6: Set Up Your Campaign Budget and Bidding

Let’s quickly recap: campaign, Ad set, Ad = tree, branches, leaves.

A campaign (tree) can contain several Ad sets and has a unique campaign objective.

For example, let’s say you had two goals: sell more trainers on your website and increase the number of likes on your PlutoShoes Facebook page. These would best be organised in two different campaigns.

A Facebook Ad set (branch) can include multiple ads and can have unique audience targeting, budget, schedule, bidding and placement. They’re the best way for you to split test ads. Create an ad set and then test variations of your ad within that ad set.

The Facebook Ad (leaf) is the smallest component and probably the piece you’re creating right now.

Knowing this makes setting up the campaign budget easier. There are two key options:

1. Daily budget –  Facebook will spend this amount every day delivering ads in your campaign. It’s a little weird because Facebook optimises for best results. That means, technically speaking, Facebook could spend up to 25% more than your budget on certain days when it identifies opportunities. But, don’t worry, this will average out month-on-month. It might just be that people buy more guitars or ladders or candles in your area on Tuesdays.
2. Lifetime budget – Facebook will divide a total budget across specified campaign dates. If I set January 1st – March 31st, it will spread my spend out across these dates.

For people just starting out, it makes the most sense to set a daily budget with unlimited duration so that you can tweak them as and when you like.

Ad delivery optimisation comes right after setting up the budget. So, make sure they align with your goals.

In our example above, we were focused on lead generation under conversion. So here we would choose “conversions” optimisation goal as we want people to come to our landing page and leave their details.

It’s too much for us to cover here, but here’s a full guide on Facebook Ads bidding and scheduling. Keeping it blunt: we recommend going for lowest cost bidding models for your first campaigns.

Read: How Much Does Facebook Marketing Cost?

Step 7: Set Up Your Facebook Ads

This is what people will actually see. Trying to cover all the various ingredients that make a good Facebook Ad here won’t work, but there are other places that cover this information. 

Quick rundown? Make it look good, use free (or paid) software to help ensure all of your ad sizes are correct and run lots of variations of your ad to get plenty of split test data.

Step 8: Publish

You’re finally ready to hit the green button. Double and triple check everything and hit go. Try not to sit there at the computer hitting refresh to see if you’ve got any data yet.

What to do next

Running Facebook campaigns is hard work and it’s ongoing. At least every week, you should be checking your results. Which ads are performing and which are lagging behind? Are there some new creatives you can test? Can you tweak your audiences to make them broader or more specific?

Never adopt a “set it and forget it” attitude when it comes to your Facebook Ads. There are always little tweaks you can be making and tips you can be following.

This is why platforms like Adzooma exist – to make optimisation easier for you.

Adzooma analyses your account data 24 hours a day and pinpoints where you can optimise your campaigns. Many of these improvements can be applied with a single click.

Not only that, you can automate repetitive online ad tasks and also manage your Google Ads in the same beautifully designed place.

Join Adzooma for free today.