Paid search efforts are only as effective as you make them. Use the optimization tips here to improve your PPC results.

When you begin optimizing your PPC efforts, you have a lot to think about. Here are some important factors you should optimize to improve the results of your campaigns.

When advertising in several channels or if you have multiple campaigns, it is essential to figure out what channel is working best for your main KPI – key performance indicator. You also need to determine what is playing a supportive role.

For example, paid search always provides higher conversions than YouTube; however, this does not mean that YouTube is not playing a role in the conversion that your paid search ad receives credit for.

You need to know what campaigns and channels are performing the best, then allocate your marketing budget based on this information.

Another aspect of optimizing your PPC efforts is your budget and search impression share. This is a crucial factor when bidding on any branded terms.

Review your impression share for any area where you are working to defend your brand’s keywords, along with any other terms that are regularly converting for you. If you have fallen behind on share because you have a limited budget, now you should reexamine how your budget is allocated.

You can make bid adjustments on several levels.

Traditionally, manual bid management is done on the keyword level. However, there are several aspects of paid search campaigns where you should make bid adjustments past that point. Adjusting your bids based on the day of the week or hour of the day is one option.

Another is to think about excluding specific times of the day or days of the week based on your performance to make sure you maximize the results achieved. A best practice to follow is to go to Account Settings/Ad Schedule, and then add your selected schedule there.

Even if you have ads running 24 hours per day, you have an easy-to-understand visual, you can look at for performance, rather than having to pull a report each time.

A factor that is often overlooked, yet essential, is the performance by location.

Some locations perform differently than others. If you continually review and adjust to reach your number one goal, you make your campaigns much more efficient.

If you are running campaigns around the nation, you must consider how much budget larger cities require versus how well they will convert. You can find these reports that highlight performance by going to Campaign to Locations to User location report.