PAID MEDIA

Google Ads: 4 Strategies To Optimize Stale Evergreen PPC Campaigns

Admit it: You have a cereal box or bag of chips in your kitchen right now that’s been there for a very long time.

Whether you put your cereal in a Tupperware container or tie that bag of chips with an industrial-strength hair clip to keep it fresh, we all know that stuff has been sitting there unattended for a long time.

It’s likely that no matter how good they were to begin with, and how well you prepared them for long-term storage, they were no match for daddy time.

Anything can go wrong – and everything happens eventually.

This includes your evergreen Google Search Ads campaigns.

But the good news is that, unlike cereal and chips, there are things you can do to refresh all of your evergreen Google Ads campaigns.

Let’s get it in.

What campaigns are stale and evergreen

First, we need to get on the same page about what exactly constitutes old and permanent.

Define evergreen PPC campaigns

Evergreen PPC campaigns are always-on campaigns that you run primarily because they have key target keywords common to your business, industry, or product you’re selling.

The demand for the Evergreen PPC campaign is generally constant throughout the year. While they may have occasional sales spikes, they generally pay only a small portion of their attention from factors related to seasonality.

Evergreen’s campaigns get a huge amount of searches month after month and year after year.

In case it’s still not clear, here’s an example.

A retail store that sells clothing and a restaurant that sells pies will have consistent search volumes on some campaigns. However, they will have noticeable spikes during times like Christmas or Father’s Day.

These are natural and considered evergreen because users will be looking for these items all year long, even without those holidays.

On the flip side, companies may campaign rental Santa costumes or snow plow services.

Since these campaigns will be highly dependent on seasonality, even if you leave them running all year round, they will not count as true evergreen campaigns, because the vast majority of their searches will take place in a very short period of time during the year.

Identify stale PPC campaigns

The definition of a stale campaign can vary from person to person, or even campaign to campaign.

However, in this case, I’m referring to campaigns that have been running for a long period of time and are no longer getting improvements in traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:

  • Click Per Action (CPA).
  • Return on advertising spend (ROAS).
  • Search impression share (IS).
  • Cost per lead (CPL).
  • Or any other important metric for a given campaign.

Perhaps these campaigns are becoming stale because you haven’t done anything to improve them for a few months, because you don’t receive enough incoming data to make decisions (or hundreds of other possible reasons).

The point is, they’re mission-critical campaigns that don’t bring in the amount of traffic they used to, the conversions are of lower quality, or they’re getting more expensive to get conversions at all.

Why Evergreen PPC Campaigns Are Important

Evergreen campaigns often make up the majority of the PPC traffic a business receives week to week. This traffic generally comes from your entire per click marketing effort base and contains 60 to 80% of your weekly clicks and conversions.

If you are like many PPC professionals, you have probably spent weeks creating your permanent campaigns. You’ve added to them, improved them, refined them, and maybe even given them almost all of your attention so that they perform well and deliver the conversions your client, boss, or business needs.

But after that, I started building other campaigns. And time passed. The market is starting to change, competitors have changed, and your campaigns have changed.

As we know, PPC campaigns don’t magically improve on their own; It only gets worse if it is ignored for long periods.

Evergreen campaigns are likely to bring in the most digital marketing clicks, conversions, and sales.

It is almost impossible for these campaigns no To bring in the bulk of your important digital conversions because they are always on, and may have a small number of keywords that make up the vast majority of your top KPIs.

4 Strategies for Modernizing Your Evergreen Google Ads Campaigns

Strategy 1: Shock the algorithm

In my experience, algorithms are like people. They become lazy, stop working, or stop trying to improve themselves without someone pushing them to do better.

That person is you.

Shocking the algorithm that controls your permanent campaign is essential to restart optimization.

Here are some improvements you can focus on that will get your algorithm back in the gym:

  • Add more conversion actions.
  • Change your bid strategy.
  • Add new keywords.
  • Add a new ad copy.
  • Change device bid adjustment.
  • Value improvement.

Even Google itself supports and mentions this strategy Additional things you can try:

“[You] It might tweak your ad creative, improve your landing page, or design a better mobile shopping experience on your retail site. All of these improvements will help improve the performance of the automatic bidding algorithm.”

Now, you don’t have to do all of these things – but if you give one or two of these tactics a chance, they can give the algorithm new information.

As a result, your sleep algorithm may come to life again.

Screenshot from Google Ads, November 2022

Something as simple as changing your ad text can reignite your algorithm. Check out this SEJ article to learn how to write great PPC ads.

Strategy 2: Use smart bid strategies

Not long ago, there was a time when using modified broad match type for keywords and manual CPC bidding was a good strategy. This strategy often outperforms Google’s automated “smart” bidding strategies.

Google ended the broad-match modified keyword match type in August of 2021. Many PPC managers, myself included, had to explore the available options, most of which were Google’s Smart Bidding strategies.

Having tried almost every bid strategy Google has to offer over the past 18 months, Google has made great strides in the automated bid strategy department, and the results have been promising in most campaigns over the past year.

Ensuring that your evergreen campaigns use Smart Bidding strategies, especially if you’re using broad match keywords in the campaign, allows Google to use machine learning and thousands of customer data points to deliver the right lead.

I highly recommend a smart bidding strategy for every evergreen campaign, however only if The campaign meets the following criteria:

  • Increase conversionsMinimum 15 transfers per month.
  • Maximize conversion valueThere is no minimum for conversions, but be sure to assign values ​​to each conversion action according to its value to your business or customer.
  • Target CPAMinimum 30 transfers per month.
  • TroasMinimum 15 transfers in the last 30 days.
Google ads conversion valueScreenshot from Google Ads, November 2022

Make sure you set a value if using “Increase Conversion Value”. Discover road More on conversion value here.

Your campaigns must meet the requirements of the bidding strategy you choose because although smart bidding strategies may contain effective algorithms, they must contain data to use them. The more conversion data you provide, the better.

Make sure your budget supports the campaigns so that you can earn enough conversions each month to support your Smart Bidding strategy.

Strategy 3: Implement offline conversion tracking

Implementing offline conversion tracking (OCT) might be the best way to breathe new life into your stale and meaningless Google Ads search campaigns.

To be clear, here How would you describe Google OCT:

“Sometimes advertising does not lead directly to selling online, but instead starts the customer down a path that ultimately leads to selling in the offline world, like your office or over the phone.

By offline import Transfersyou can measure what happens in the offline world after your ad results in a click or a connection to your business.”

One caveat about OCT is that it is technical to set up and not a walk in the park, even for those who have established OCT contacts before.

However, while it is undoubtedly difficult to set up, the rewards are worth it.

Google claims that OCT can reach 30% Cost effectiveness and 20% increase in revenue from connected campaigns.

Here are the first few steps to get started:

implementation of octScreenshot from Google Ads, November 2022

Get a full tutorial on performing OCT here.

And the absolute best part about performing OCT is that it doesn’t cost any money. You don’t have to raise bids, add to your budget, or do extra work for an extended period.

Just by providing Google with additional information about your customers and a little further down the funnel, you can get noticeable efficiencies from your evergreen campaigns that have been running for years.

Strategy 4: Extract your own data

One tried and true way to optimize any search campaign, including evergreen PPC campaigns, is to mine first-party data.

You can do this to gain an advantage for a single campaign or build an entire customer profile based on previous users’ actions and information.

Not only does Google Ads collect a large amount of information automatically about every user who has ever interacted with your ads, but there are different places to access them without leaving the Google Ads platform.

Once you have collected and analyzed all of the data, you can use this information to make a variety of optimization decisions that can improve your legacy evergreen campaigns.

Where do you find all this data? two places.

It may seem obvious, but some Google Ads sidebars provide access to an incredible amount of information about how your customers behave and what they desire.

Here is a list of the platform side menus that are most likely to contain basic and actionable information about your client:

  • Announcement schedule > Announcement schedule.
  • hardware.
  • Ad performance.
  • LP performance.
  • masses > audience segments (Click the Show Table arrow to see audience performance.)
  • masses > demographics.

You can discover a lot by viewing the data that Google Ads provides you with in the lists of different campaigns.

However, the insights can get deeper if you delve a little deeper into the platform using the submenus or the tools and settings menu.

This information can be found at the following sites:

  • Tools and settings > Shared library > Audience manager > Your data insights (see picture below)
  • Tools and settings > measurement > attribution (and all submenus in it)
  • Account, Campaign or Ad Group tab > Keywords tab > Three points > diagnosis Key words > Run the diagnostics.
Google Ads Data InsightsScreenshot from Google Ads, November 2023

How incredible this information is!

Learn how all this data is used here.

Conclusion

The industry is constantly changing, so must our campaigns.

As a significant player in providing clicks, conversions, and sales, evergreen PPC campaigns are always worth your time.

Take the time to apply some of these techniques and breathe new life into your evergreen Google Ads campaigns.

More resources:

  • How to improve Google’s Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)
  • PPC Real Estate: Tips for Optimizing Your Google Ads Campaigns
  • The biggest PPC trends for 2023, according to 22 experts

Featured images: Pasuwan/Shutterstock

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button