Optimisation is one of those words that gets sprayed around in agency proposals until it means nothing. So let's be concrete. Optimising a PPC campaign means: spending less to get the same result, or spending the same to get a better result. Anything else is just admin pretending to be strategy.
Start With the Search Terms Report
This is where the truth lives. The search terms report shows the actual queries people typed to trigger your ads. You'll find gold. You'll also find spectacular waste. "Free", "DIY", "jobs at", "reviews of" and dozens of variants you'd never have thought to block.
Ad Copy: Test Like You Mean It
Two variants per ad group, minimum. Rotate them, measure them, kill the losers, iterate. Most accounts have ads written once, two years ago, never touched since. That's not running a campaign, that's decorating one.
- Headline variety: Test benefit-led, feature-led, urgency-led and question-led hooks.
- Use every ad extension: Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call extensions, lead forms. They're free real estate.
- Match ad to landing page: Scent matters. Break it and conversion tanks.
Device Performance: Segment Ruthlessly
Mobile and desktop almost always convert at wildly different rates. Tablet is usually a rounding error. Adjust bids by device based on actual conversion value, not vague assumptions. Ten minutes of work, measurable lift.
Day and Hour Performance
Your Tuesday at 2pm performance is not the same as your Saturday at 10pm performance. Pull an hour-of-day, day-of-week report, look at cost per conversion, adjust schedules. If you're paying to run ads at 3am and nobody's converting, stop.
Geographic Performance
Some postcodes convert three times better than others. You're currently bidding the same on all of them. See the problem? Geographic bid adjustments based on conversion data are a 30-minute job that can reshape an entire account's ROI.
Landing Page CRO Is Part of PPC
Throwing more traffic at a leaking landing page is just expensive optimism. Half of PPC success is what happens after the click. Headlines, social proof, form length, call to action clarity. Our web team works with our PPC team constantly, because the two jobs are the same job.
Quality Score: The Hidden Discount
Higher Quality Score equals lower costs. It's driven by expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Improve all three and your costs per click drift downward while your position drifts up. Compound interest, essentially, in reverse. Runs through everything in our paid media retainers.
Want to Know How Much You Are Wasting?
Our free PPC audit typically identifies between 20 and 40 percent reclaimable budget. Sometimes more. Rarely less.
Book Your PPC AuditOptimisation isn't one big move, it's fifty small ones done consistently. The accounts that crush it aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the cleverest strategists. They're the ones where someone actually cares, checks in weekly, and makes small, measurable improvements. Forever. Unglamorous, undefeated.
