How to Scale Your PPC Campaigns

Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns operate much differently than SEO campaigns.

While you expect SEO campaigns to take their time to bear fruit, PPC(Pay Per Click) campaigns are expected to produce almost immediate results.

SEO campaigns are easy to scale, depending on the type of effort you put in.

When your paid ads start working, it is tempting to pour in more money and chase bigger results. But scaling PPC campaigns is not as simple as raising your budget and hoping for the best. PPC campaigns and ad spend can spiral out of control and take your PPC budget with it if you don’t properly manage them.

When the time comes when your campaign is successful, you’ll need to explore ways to scale it and make every dollar count.

A strong PPC strategy helps you grow without guessing. It gives you a clear view of your conversion rates, cost per lead, campaign performance, and the performance metrics that actually matter.

However, scaling your PPC is a concentrated effort.

To accomplish this task, this guide will teach you all you need to know about growing your campaign to new heights.

Questions to Ask Before Scaling Your PPC Campaign

Before you decide to scale your PPC (Pay per click )campaign, it’s important to make sure that everything is in working order.

Some campaigns look healthy at first glance because they generate clicks, impressions, or leads. But when you look closer, the conversion data may tell a different story. Maybe your conversion rates are too low. Maybe your total advertising cost is creeping up. Maybe the wrong search terms are eating your money.

Also, you need to be sure whether or not scaling your campaign is the best choice for your business moving forward.

Below are some essential questions you should ask and answer before growing your Pay per click campaign.

Is Your Website Built Properly?

One of the most common causes of PPC(Pay Per Click) campaign failures is that the landing page or website hasn’t been built. That means higher advertising cost, lower conversion rates, and a painful gap between clicks and customers. It can be frustrating to spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars every month, achieve impressions and clicks on your ads, only for them to visit your website and leave.

PPC campaigns are only a means to an end. This means that your website or landing page needs to actually work properly before continuing with your campaign. To make sure your website is working and heighten your campaign’s conversion rate, here are the following steps you should take:

• Perform a Website Audit — A website audit is a key SEO diagnostic tool that points out critical issues with your site that hurt conversion rates, while offering helpful recommendations for improving. This test will help you uncover areas where your website is falling short. This is especially important if you plan to run PPC campaigns across multiple ad platforms.

• Optimize Your Social Media Profiles — If you plan on advertising on social media platforms, make sure that your profiles are correctly optimized with your business information. People often check your brand before they buy, especially with lead generation campaigns.

• Maintain Mobile Responsiveness — Mobile optimization is no longer optional. Make sure that your website is completely mobile-friendly. This can have severe repercussions on how customers will view and experience your website. A smooth mobile experience can improve conversion rates and help reduce your cost per acquisition. Also look at your message match. Your landing page should reflect the promise made in the ad. This improves ad relevance, which can support a stronger quality score and better results.

Did You Setup Google Analytics to Track Conversions?

You wouldn’t believe how many PPC campaigns aren’t configured with Google Analytics. Some forget to install this feature, and others figure it’s not very important. Nonetheless, good conversion tracking is instrumental in tracking conversions down your sales funnel.

Before increasing budgets, make sure your conversion tracking is set up correctly. You need to know which ads, keywords, devices, audiences, and landing pages are producing real outcomes. You can also check on important SEO benchmarks such as dwell time (average session time), bounce rate, and more. It helps you understand which search terms turn into leads or sales, which campaigns waste money, and where your PPC optimization work should start.

Google Analytics is most important in observing how leads react to your website when they’re away from your ads. This is the type of information you won’t find on Google or Facebook Ads.

This is also where customer lifetime value matters. If a customer typically buys once, your target cost per sale may be lower. If they stay with you for months or years, your customer lifetime number may justify a higher acquisition cost.

Without clean conversion data, you are not scaling. You are guessing with a credit card.

Invest in a CRM Platform

When you run an eCommerce store, dealing with B2C clients, there’s no need for investing in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. After all, people are going to click on your ad, visit your store, buy, and leave.

When you’re targeting B2B clients, you have to groom them before they’re ready to buy. Before you scale your campaign, you have to make sure that your business is ready to deal with a sudden influx of new prospects.

Thus, be sure to research and invest in a premium CRM platform that aligns with your business’ needs.

A CRM helps you see what happens after the lead comes in. Did the prospect answer the phone? Did they book a consultation? Did they become a real customer? Did they generate enough revenue to justify the ad spend?

This matters because not all leads are equal. A campaign with cheaper leads is not always better. Sometimes the campaign with the higher cost per lead produces better customers, stronger close rates, and more revenue over time.

If you want to scale responsibly, connect your CRM data to your PPC strategy whenever possible.

How to Scale Your PPC Campaigns: 10 Easy Steps

Once you’ve made the decision to begin scaling your PPC campaign, it’s time to put in the work to make your changes happen. By following these 10 convenient steps, you can begin the process of growing your PPC campaigns and improving as new performance data comes in.

Invest in a Dynamic Landing Page:

If you haven’t done so already, invest sufficient resources into creating a landing page that can visibly attract prospects delivered from your paid ads and convert them into paying customers.

Landing pages are the most important aspect of any PPC campaign, as they are responsible for improving conversions. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to hire a proficient copywriter and UX designer to ensure that your landing page design is a success.

A strong landing page should match the ad, explain the offer quickly, build trust, and make the next step obvious. For service businesses, that might mean a quote request or consultation form. For ecommerce, it may be a product page with strong images, reviews, clear pricing, and competitive pricing.

When your landing page is complete, conduct regular A/B tests and perform tweaks to make sure that it will perform it’s best over time.

For Amazon PPC campaigns, your product detail page acts like the landing page. Your images, title, bullet points, reviews, and pricing all influence conversion rates.

Keep testing:

• Headlines

• Calls to action

• Form length

• Page layout

• Trust signals

• Offer language

• Product images

• Testimonials

A small lift in conversion rates can make a major difference once traffic volume grows.

Increase Your Budget:

This may seem obvious, but increasing your ad budget is one of the most sure-fire ways of scaling your PPC campaign. The more you’re willing to spend on PPC ads, the more placements you can earn on the internet and social media.

Let’s say that your competitor is spending $1,000 a month on Google Ads. If you’re not prepared to match or exceed their investment, then you can’t expect to achieve similar results.

Granted, you can achieve remarkable results with any reasonable ad budget if you’re creative enough. But, if your competitors are allocating more money towards foundational keywords that are bringing in vast amounts of traffic, then you’re always going to be at a disadvantage.

As a result, make the decision to increase your budget at a rate that’s financially feasible for your business.

The better approach is to increase budgets gradually. Raise spend in small steps, then watch your performance data. If conversion rates remain steady and your cost per lead or sale stays profitable, you can continue scaling.

If performance drops, slow down and investigate.

You can also use automated bidding or smart bidding when your account has enough conversion volume. These bidding strategies can help optimize for conversions, revenue, or return on ad spend, but they need reliable data to work well.

Try Remarketing:

A lot of businesses spend a lot of time, effort, and money targeting new prospects. Depending on your industry, some people may not be interested in learning more about a product outright.

After all, paid ads aren’t really considered to be an inbound marketing strategy. You’re essentially paying for your ads to be placed in front of a person if they type in a familiar keyword.

This doesn’t mean that the person is automatically interested in buying a product or service. For this reason, you need a contingency plan to subliminally keep your business in the minds of prospects who aren’t yet ready to convert.

Remarketing in PPC campaigns helps you to achieve this. Google Ads allows you to structure existing campaigns to retarget people who have viewed your ads and are on different websites:

This allows advertisers to use an internet user’s cookies to send ads even when people are on completely different websites:

Remarketing adds a “moving ad” effect to a PPC campaign. This works across search, display, video, and other ad platforms. No matter where a prospect goes online, your ads can follow. Be sure to create a cookie policy to stay GDPR compliant and respect your audience’s privacy.

For ecommerce and Amazon PPC campaigns, remarketing can help push warm shoppers back toward products they already considered. For service brands, it can help nurture prospects who need more trust before booking a call.

Your remarketing message should feel helpful, not creepy. Show proof. Answer objections. Remind people of the benefit. Use better ad creative than a generic “come back” message.

When done well, remarketing can improve conversion rates and lower your cost per acquisition.

Create Different Ad Groups:

If you’re going to scale your PPC campaigns, chances are that you plan to advertise several more products and services your business offers. The problem is that you can’t group all of these potential ads together.

This makes it very difficult to track results and measure your campaign’s ROI.

When scaling your PPC campaign, you’ll need to create distinct ad groups for different products and services.

Create tighter ad groups and, when needed, separate campaigns for different goals. You may want separate campaigns for different services, product categories, locations, audiences, or funnel stages.

For example, let’s say that you sell home security equipment. If you’re planning on advertising both home security cameras and alarm systems, then it’s best to place these products in different groups.

Why? Both of these products are very similar.

The reason is because when you separate different products and services into distinct ad groups, you make it easier to target hyper-specific keywords. This way, you can not only create keyword-rich ad copy, but you can develop ads that are just what your audience is looking for.

The same applies to Amazon PPC campaigns. You may use automatic campaigns to discover new search terms, then move the winners into manual campaigns or dedicated campaigns for better control.

When you segment campaigns properly, it becomes easier to track results, improve ad relevance, and make smarter bid adjustments.

Analyze Keyword Demand:

When designing a PPC campaign, it can be tempting to just target the low-hanging fruit. After all, there’s no harm in bidding for low-cost keywords that can net minimal traffic for your website or landing page.

The problem is that all traffic isn’t good traffic. Just because your ads are gaining impressions online doesn’t mean that they are successful. Even if you’re targeting keywords that total hundreds of thousands of traffic, your ads will never be completely efficient.

As a result, make sure that you analyze the demand of your targeted keywords before moving forward. That is why your keyword strategy needs to consider volume, competition, intent, and profitability. This goes beyond determining how much traffic a standard keyword receives.

You can analyze the demand of a keyword by using external solutions, such as WordStream, SpyFu, SEMRush, and Ubersuggest.

Look for relevant keywords that match what your audience is actually trying to solve.

Use a mix of match types:

• Broad match can help uncover new opportunities.

• Exact and phrase match can give you more control.

• Exact match keywords are useful for proven terms.

• Broad match keywords can support discovery when paired with strong negatives and good bidding.

• Long tail keywords may have lower volume, but they often bring more specific intent.

The best accounts usually use both control and discovery. Use broad match carefully, then review the search term report to find what is working.

For Amazon PPC campaigns, this process is even more important. You can use automatic discovery, identify converting search terms, and then move those into manual campaigns with tighter bids.

Build Keyword Lists:

Do you know how many keywords you’re targeting? Are they organized accordingly so you can monitor their performance? If not, then you better get busy in establishing a keyword list.

Google Ads already shows you a complete list of the keywords you’re bidding for. Though, if you plan to use any of the external keyword research tools mentioned before, you’ll need to explore these keywords into a list.

Group keywords by theme, intent, product, service, and funnel stage. This makes it easier to write better ads, improve quality score, and keep your landing pages aligned with user intent.

Your keyword list should include:

• Primary keywords

• Secondary keywords

• Branded keywords

• Competitor keywords when appropriate

• Long tail keywords

• Exact match keywords

• Phrase match keywords

• Broad match expansion terms

• Negative keywords

For ecommerce and Amazon PPC campaigns, your keyword list should also include product-specific terms, category terms, and high-intent buyer phrases.

A messy keyword list leads to messy results. A clean list makes PPC optimization much easier.

Arrange Your Negative Keywords:

A major part of building a keyword list is deciding which keywords you don’t want to target. This may not seem important right now, but you could possibly be wasting money on irrelevant keywords that won’t net any bang for your buck.

If you’re attempting to scale your PPC campaign, the first step is analyzing areas where your ad budget is being wasted. Here are some effective ways to optimize your ad spend by creating a list of negative keywords:

• Use Google Keyword Planner — This tool is capable of discovering any negative keyword that could be inhibiting your campaign.

• Run Regular SQRs — By performing consistent search query reports, you can observe all of the keywords people are using to find your ads. If you see any keywords that are completely irrelevant to your business, add them to your list.

• Know the Difference — There is a strong difference between negative keywords and poor-performing ones. If a keyword just isn’t working well for your business, you should place it in another campaign rather than deeming it irrelevant.

Perform Consistent Competitor Analysis:

If you’re going to be successful in scaling your PPC campaigns, then you’ll first have to spy on your fiercest competitors and understand how they’re structuring their campaigns. Your competitors are trying to win the same clicks, leads, customers, and market share.

In fact, this is one of the most important steps of building a PPC(Pay Per Click) campaign in the first place. Competitor analysis is the crux of both SEO and paid search. The good news is that there are several tools available to get a sneak peak into the campaigns of your competition.

Auction Insights via Google Ads, SpyFu, SEMRush, are all great tools to utilize in this regard.

You may also notice opportunities in Microsoft Ads, where competition can be lower in some industries. Testing Microsoft Ads can help you reach a slightly different audience and sometimes reduce cost per click compared to more crowded channels.

For ecommerce brands, competitor analysis also matters in Amazon PPC campaigns. Product titles, reviews, images, and competitive pricing can all affect performance.

The goal is not to obsess over competitors. The goal is to understand the landscape and make better decisions.

Optimize Your Ad Copy:

Don’t fall into the trap of spamming keywords into your ad copy and headlines just to improve its quality score. While your ads will appear for relevant searches, it will fail to compel potential customers to click.

Remember, ad copy is for people, not Google or other. Make sure you are communicating clear and concise information to your target audience, such as your offer, contact information, and buzz words (such as buy now). It also should match the landing page, which improves ad relevance and can support a better quality score.

For lead generation, mention what the user gets after clicking. For local businesses, mention service area, speed, or availability. For ecommerce, mention pricing, shipping, reviews, or product benefits.

The important thing when writing ad copy is to always write for the end user.

Nail the CTAs

Like the ad copy, the call-to-action (CTA) is also one of the most important structural components of any campaign. Therefore, pay close attention to the verbiage and contact information you use in your CTAs.

If you’re selling products, you should strive towards attracting your audience to “buy now”. On the other hand, if you’re selling services, it would be best to convince your audience to “learn more”.

These are clear differences, as most online products are geared toward consumers who have natural impulses to splurge in comparison to key decision makers who are interested in a service.

Since your CTAs will impact your entire campaign, place them in rigorous A/B tests to ensure they are effectively converting your target audience.

You can also adjust bids based on CTA performance if certain campaigns, audiences, or keywords produce better actions. If one CTA brings more qualified leads, that insight should shape your next round of bid adjustments.

Grow Your PPC Campaign Today!

Scaling your PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign will ultimately require a great deal of experimentation, time, effort, and money.

When you choose to do all of the work yourself, you can run the risk of wasting your valuable investment and ruining your campaign.

In such cases, it’s time to fire your PPC agency.

A smart PPC strategy gives you that control.

Start with clean conversion tracking. Watch your conversion rates. Review your search term report. Improve landing pages. Build separate campaigns where it makes sense. Test Microsoft Ads, performance max, discovery campaigns, and Amazon PPC campaigns only when your foundation is strong enough to support them.

Remember, advertisers pay for every click. That means every click should have a job.

Nonetheless, if you’re still interested in growing your Pay per click campaign, then you’ve come to the right place. Contact us today to receive a free proposal to begin scaling your campaign.