Google Ads: 4 Strategies To Optimize Stale Evergreen PPC Campaigns

Google Ads: 4 Strategies To Optimize Stale Evergreen PPC Campaigns

Evergreen Google Ads Search campaigns.

Evergreen PPC Campaigns Defined

Evergreen PPC campaigns are running mainly because they contain core targeted keywords common to your particular business, industry, or product you are selling.

Evergreen PPC campaigns are always running and target keywords central to your brand, whether you’re offering services or products. These campaigns generally have consistent year-round search demand with occasional spikes, though they are primarily driven by factors unrelated to seasonality. They consistently receive a good volume of searches every month.

For instance, consider a rental store offering designer suits year-round and holiday-themed costumes during Christmas. The keywords for rental suits are considered “evergreen,” as they are the store’s main offering and searched for throughout the year.

Stale PPC Campaigns Defined

A stale campaign is a long-running campaign that no longer shows improvement in key performance indicators (KPIs) such as CPA (Click per Action or Cost Per Action), ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), CPL (Cost per Lead), and others relevant to the specific campaign.

Why do campaigns become stale? It may be due to a lack of optimization efforts or a lack of incoming data for decision-making, among other reasons.

These campaigns may result in lower traffic and poor conversion quality, and they may become increasingly costly to drive conversions.

Evergreen PPC campaigns frequently contribute to the largest share of the business’s weekly traffic, generating traffic consistently and making up the foundation of a company’s core PPC marketing strategy, with a large percentage of your clicks and conversions coming from them.

How to Improve Your Evergreen PPC Ad Campaign Performance

• Wake up the Algorithm
• Consider smart bidding
• Enable tracking for Offline Conversions
• Revisit Keywords

Strategy 1: Shock the Algorithm

Algorithms are like people. They get lazy, quit working, or stop trying to improve themselves without someone pushing them to do better.

Shocking the algorithm that controls your evergreen campaign is important for restarting optimization.

Some of the optimizations you can focus on that will get your algorithm back in the gym:

• Add more conversion actions
• Change the bid strategy
• Add new keywords
• Add new ad copy
• Change the device bid adjustment
• Optimize for value

Start by making high-level optimizations to revive your campaign performance:

• Increase the number of conversion actions
• Modify bid strategy
• Expand keyword list
• Revise ad copy or overhaul it entirely
• Modify device bid adjustments
• Focus on optimizing for value

Strategy 2: Consider Smart Bidding Strategies

There was a time when using modified broad match keyword match type and manual CPC bidding was a good strategy, which often outperformed Google’s automated “Smart” Bidding strategies.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a straightforward approach where you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ads. It’s a direct method to drive traffic to your website, unlike organic strategies that gradually attract visitors. Among various PPC tactics, Smart Bidding stands out.

Whether you’re new to PPC or looking to enhance your existing campaigns, understanding Smart Bidding is crucial.

Smart Bidding is an automated bid strategy used within Google Ads that utilizes machine learning to optimize for conversions or conversion value in each auction, a method Google refers to as “auction-time bidding.” This strategy is part of Google Ads’ suite of automated tools designed to improve campaign performance based on the goals you set.

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

Put a smart bidding strategy in place for each evergreen campaign, only if the campaign meets the following criteria:

• Maximizing conversions
• Maximizing conversion value
• tCPA
• tROAS

Make sure to assign a value if using Maximize conversion value.

Your campaigns must meet the requirements for the bid strategy you choose because, while smart bidding strategies may have powerful algorithms, they must have data to use. The more conversion data you provide, the better.

Strategy 3: Implement Offline Conversion Tracking

Implementing offline conversion tracking (OCT) might just be the best way to breathe new life into stake evergreen Google Ad Search campaigns.

Google describes OCT: “Sometimes, an ad doesn’t lead directly to an online sale, but instead starts a customer down a path that ultimately leads to a sale in the offline world, like at your office or over the phone. By importing offline conversions, you can measure what happens in the offline world after your ad results in a click or call to your business.”

Strategy 4: Mine Your Own Data

A tried-and-true method of optimizing any search campaign, including evergreen PPC campaigns, is to mine your first-party data.

Getting an edge for a single campaign or building an entire customer profile as per previous users’ actions and information.

Google Ads not only automatically gathers a plethora of information on every user that has ever interacted with your ads, but there are various places to access this without even leaving the Google Ads platform.

Google Ads side menus provide accessibility to a huge amount of information about how your customers act and what they desire.

List of platform-side menus that contain essential and actionable information about your customer:

• Ad Schedule > Ad Schedule
• Devices
• Ad Performance
• LP Performance
• Audiences > Audience Segments
• Audiences > Demographics

Final Thoughts

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

Take time to apply some tactics and breathe new life into your evergreen Google Ads campaigns.