Lately I’ve been discussing how global changes to your PPC account can affect your overall performance. In a nutshell, making big changes all at once can have big consequences (good and bad). Today, we’ll explore a strategy that will help maintain your performance and mitigate Quality Score shock to your campaigns when making global ad text overhauls.
In a recent post I discussed how moving keywords can affect your campaigns performance, and today we’re focusing on ad texts. As you know, ad text optimization is a continuous process where you eliminate your under performing ad texts and insert new variations to test against your best ads. However, there are times when you need to make major changes to all of your ads at once. Reasons for this change can be launching a new website or switching out promotional offers. We’ll focus on the later today.
With e-commerce clients, special offers can change frequently. And these changes need to be highlighted within your PPC ad text. Featuring special offers such as “free shipping” or “25% off” or “Buy 1 Get 1 Free” in your ad texts is a great way to increase your click-through rate (CTR) and your conversion rate. But making frequent global changes to your PPC ad texts can wreak havoc on your Quality Score. Why does this happen?
Keep in mind that your ads and keywords have a symbiotic relationship that has accrued a performance history, and when you sever that relationship, it can negatively affect your account. Therefore if you pause or revise all of your ads in a given ad group, your Quality Score can take a hit and so can your performance.
How do you change your ad texts while mitigating these negative results? You can use one or more foundation ad texts. What’s a foundation ad text?
Foundation ad texts are the ads that remain within your ad groups that don’t highlight your specific offer. They are still keyword-focused and benefit-driven, but they don’t highlight your ever-changing offer.
Since special offers can be the juice that improves your overall campaign, you don’t want to have too many foundation ad texts in each ad group, but having one or two ads within each ad group that are a constant presence that don’t get altered for different offers can help stabilize your Quality Score and performance. This is why they are called “foundation ad texts.”
Here is an example:
Let’s say you have a “25% off” offer that is going to end on Thursday, and on that same day you’re going to launch a new “free shipping” offer. Over the course of Monday through Wednesday you can slowly pause your “25% off” ads shifting your focus toward your foundation ad texts. And when Thursday arrives, you can insert your 1-3 new ad texts that highlight your “free shipping” offer. This way your not completely jolting your account by pausing all your ads and inserting new ads all at once.
By doing this, you’ve slowly removed your old ads allowing your foundation ads to maintain your Quality Score, and then inserted your new ads. Sure, with new ads there is going to be a period of adjustment but using this method may help smooth out the bumps in the road when switching our offers.
