By: Reva Minkoff, President of Digital4Startups Inc
Have you ever felt like your PPC campaigns are spending money without a clear direction? Online advertising can feel overwhelming, with countless options for bidding, targeting, and tracking. If you’re a business owner or marketer running campaigns on platforms like Google or Meta, it's easy to get lost in the noise and complexity.
But what if you could simplify your approach and bring clarity to your ad spend?
By focusing on a few foundational questions, you can cut through the confusion and set your campaigns up for success. In this post, you'll learn seven straightforward questions that will help you evaluate and optimize your campaigns for better results, whether you’re a beginner or an advanced marketer.
The first step to a successful PPC campaign is knowing your destination. You need to get extremely specific about your objectives and goals.
It’s not enough to say, "I want more website traffic" or "I just want conversions." Think about what an ideal conversion looks like for your business:
If you're a travel site, is it a completed reservation?
If you're a B2B company, is it a white paper download or a lead form submission?
The closer you get your campaign to what you're actually trying to achieve, the better it will perform. Specificity is power in PPC.
Once your goal is crystal clear, you can choose the bidding option that aligns with it. The number of options—Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, Maximize Conversion Value, Target ROAS, and more—can be dizzying, but tying it back to your goal simplifies the choice.
If getting as many leads as possible is your aim, but only if they stay under a certain cost, then using Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) is your best bet. This setting focuses your efforts on acquiring conversions within your budget.
If you don't have conversion tracking set up, you might be limited to maximizing clicks or manual bidding, but your goal should be to implement tracking quickly so you can leverage smarter, goal-oriented options.
This is a key distinction that can confuse many marketers: how you bid is often different from how you are charged. Providers are increasingly offering various ways to pay, and it’s critical you know what you’re getting.
Are you paying per click or per impression? Some platforms may even offer options like pay-per-visitor, pay-per-event RSVP, or pay-per-follower.
Choosing a payment model that gets you closer to your ultimate goal can be highly efficient. For example, if your goal is to grow your social media presence, paying per follower or RSVP might be a much more valuable use of ad spend than paying for a click that doesn't lead to that desired action.
Wasting money on traffic you can't serve is one of the quickest ways to tank your ROI. You need to make sure your ads only show when and where your business can actually fulfill the customer's intent.
Timing Example:
If you own a restaurant that closes at 11 p.m., stop showing your pizza ads from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. If people are searching for late-night food, they will click your ad, find you closed, and you will have paid for a frustrated, non-converting visitor.
Location Example:
Think of the guitar teacher who only taught in one county but was advertising across an entire large state. He was paying for clicks from people seven hours away! By simply limiting the ads to the geographical area he served, his KPIs increased dramatically. Always ensure your ads are truly reaching people you mean to serve.
With so many ways to target—demographics, interests, custom audiences, etc.—you need a smart approach. One of the most effective strategies is using in-market audiences.
In-market audiences are people who a platform has identified as actively researching and looking to purchase the type of product or service you sell. If you’re doing e-commerce or generating leads, targeting people who are already actively in the market for your offering makes them much warmer and far more likely to convert than just targeting based on broad characteristics like age and gender.
Your landing page is one of the most critical parts of the online experience. If your ad promises a "sunny, spacious apartment" but the landing page shows a dimly lit, cluttered space, users will be confused and disappointed. You’ll be wasting money and frustrating potential customers.
The promise you make in the ad—whether it's an appealing image, a specific price, or a strong value proposition—must be immediately and clearly fulfilled on the destination page. A disconnect between the ad and the landing page will increase bounce rates and lower your conversions every time.
The most important question of all is: Are you testing?
You should never run just one ad at a time. If you only run a single ad copy, a single image, or a single landing page variation, you are missing out on the opportunity to learn what resonates best with your audience and to make your program better.
Use the testing tools available on your ad platforms, or look into tools for website landing page tests. Always be testing. It's the only way to continuously optimize your strategy, lower your cost per acquisition, and ensure your PPC campaigns remain successful long-term.
PPC can be complicated, but by focusing on these seven simple questions, you can approach your ad campaigns with clarity, precision, and a much higher likelihood of hitting your business goals.
Reva Minkoff is the founder and president of Digital4Startups Inc, a full service marketing agency.
You can find her on LinkedIn