The start of a new year is always a great time to refresh your vision and resolve to find new ways to get results in your PPC campaigns.
As we head into 2024, a few themes are shaping the way I’m approaching my clients’ campaigns:
Remember to ask the bigger questions. Evaluate your options for engaging your audience as the search landscape diversifies. Be creative and resourceful in the way you engage your audience. Watch for automation (and make sure those pesky algorithms aren’t enabled to spend where and how they shouldn’t).
These topics can be broken down into a list of helpful reminders to both keep your campaigns efficient and stay on top of new growth opportunities.
1. Consult with clients and/or executives to set business goals for the year
January is a good time to review your business goals and make sure your marketing campaigns are aligned.
Organizations will often reassess goals for a new year. There may be major (eg, prioritizing profits over revenue) or minor (eg, testing a new demographic) goal changes that marketing must support.
2. Zoom in periodically
Focusing on incremental growth and performance gains on a day-to-day basis is easy and comfortable. A new pair of eyes may be needed.
Even so, from time to time it is important to do a readjustment to assess whether:
Your strategies align with the overall goals. There are great tests (channels, audiences) that you should consider doing. Maybe it’s worth reconsidering things you wrote a while ago.
A good example of reconsideration: If you wrote off Facebook’s lead generation a couple of years ago, it’s worth trying again, given the targeting improvements in their algorithm over the past year.
3. Make sure you’re testing meaningful things
New ad creative, targeting options, platform and channel betas.
There’s always something new to try, especially as the search landscape expands from traditional search to SGE and emerging channels like TikTok.
I like to make sure we have at least 2-3 tests on each platform at a time, not to test for the sake of testing, but to find new ways to engage with high-value users.
When setting up a test, make sure you can articulate what you want to learn or gain: if you do it right, every test, even one that hasn’t failed, can be a valuable source of information.
Type of bonus: There will be a lot of AI noise and an increasing amount of AI-generated creativity in 2024. Try approaches like humor or augmented empathy with audience challenges to emphasize the humanity behind your brand .
4. Make sure you are sharing learnings and communicating with all relevant teams
Paid search and SEO teams should collaborate, sharing information and supporting each other. This includes adjusting paid search budgets for keywords dominated by large domains. Similarly, paid search and paid social teams should update each other on innovative messages.
Marketing teams should prioritize open communication, ensuring information flows seamlessly between marketing, product and sales teams to incorporate valuable customer feedback and avoid working in isolation.
In 2024, make sure you have regularly scheduled meetings and/or debriefings with other teams whose insights can keep your efforts moving (and vice versa).
Dig deeper: 3 steps to effective PPC reporting and analytics
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5. Check your Google Search Partners settings
This would have been high on my list before Adalytics broke its third major 2023 report on Google ad suite phishing placements.
For years, we’ve advised clients to disable search partners unless they’ve exhausted other options to profitably grow their campaigns.
Search partners simply don’t perform as well as Google’s native search campaigns, in part because advertisers have limited control over which properties their ads run on.
Shortly after the Adalytics report of ads placed on compromised websites, Google (coincidentally!) gave advertisers the option, until March 1st, to opt out of search partners of all kinds of campaigns, including peak performance and app campaigns.
Maybe you’ve seen great results from search partners in the past and want to keep those campaigns. At the very least, evaluate whether search partner campaigns are a good fit and make sure that decision is reflected in your settings.
6. Check network and audience settings on all platforms
Along with Search and Google Video Partners, which serve ads outside of the YouTube platform, Meta and LinkedIn may serve ads on third-party sites outside of the platform.
As with Google’s third-party options, I recommend taking a critical look at these audience expansion options and turning them off by default.
They may not have caused as much PR trouble as Google’s third-party properties, but they’ve struggled to match performance on the platform and offer relatively limited location controls.
They are one of the first things I check on new accounts to see if there are immediate ways to save costs.
Google (Display), Meta and LinkedIn also have audience expansion settings that allow them to reach users outside of your established audiences (this is very important to check for remarketing campaigns).
This is another sneaky way for ad platforms to amplify the post by hitting any user they feel will meet the campaign’s goals.
Google is the only platform that reports the performance of audience expansion (which is not reflected well in Meta and LinkedIn), and the performance is always underwhelming.
Dig deeper: Improve Google Ads performance: 3 simple configuration changes
7. Align budget and creative resources with audience size on Facebook and LinkedIn
All too often, we take on accounts with ambitious goals to capture decent-sized audiences on LinkedIn or Facebook, and a budget that doesn’t get us that kind of reach.
If there is a relatively limited budget, make sure it goes directly to your highest priority audience. If your audience size and budget size are aligned, check if you have enough creative options to keep your ads current for your audience.
Type of bonus: Do a separate check to make sure you’re aligning ad frequency with amount of creative. You need a lot of the latter to avoid churning out users who see a high frequency of your brand’s ads.
8. Exclude audiences on social media that don’t make sense: current customers, current employees, irrelevant audiences, etc.
This is relatively minor in the scheme of things, but if you go too long without auditing your exclusions, you’ll almost certainly find new audiences to add to your negative lists.
Check audiences like current employees, current customers, and other irrelevant groups to keep your budget targeting more viable users.
Focus on these eight areas to boost your PPC results
All that said, I’d be very surprised if this checklist didn’t have some additions and revisions over the next 12 months. Don’t wait until 2025 to re-examine your overall approach and resulting action steps.
If we know one thing, the major platforms will release new features and ways to interact with users, and staying ahead of the game is self-defeating. Here’s to a great year ahead!
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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