Step-by-step optimisation

Is your campaign not performing as hoped? The following step-by-step plan will help you analyse and optimise your campaigns.

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Step-by-step optimisation

5 tips before you start

As soon as you start optimising your campaign(s), the following tips are handy to remember.

  1. Improve your relevance
    The position of your advertisement in the search results depends on multiple factors, such as the name of your ad, the category, the brand, the product description, and other product characteristics. Ensure that this information aligns with the keywords you use for your advertisement.

  2. Prevent useless impressions with negative keywords
    Optimise your campaign by refining keywords, even in automatic campaigns. The algorithm searches for the most relevant keywords, but you can also add negative keywords. These are keywords on which you do not want to be found, preventing useless impressions and improving your results.

  3. Split your campaign based on performance
    With ad groups, you can view and analyse results per product and per placement separately. This provides an overview and allows you to activate or deactivate placement types without needing to set up new campaigns.

  4. Use reports
    Measuring is knowing. Use reports to gain insight into the performance of your articles, keywords, and categories. For example, analyse how your campaign performs on different devices. Are your ads successful on mobile? Then increase your bids for that. Or exclude devices where your campaign performs less well.

  5. Watch out for campaigns that often reach the daily limit
    In combination with a good, low ACoS, you can increase the daily limit to ensure that your ad remains visible all day. Calculate your ideal ACoS with our handy ACoS calculator.

Optimise your campaign step-by-step

1. Select your campaign

Take a first look at the campaign’s performance. What stands out immediately? Are there any items that are performing poorly, or exceptionally well? Is the ACoS for a particular placement type higher than your target?

2. Analyse items

Items with a (too) high ACoS may not be successful. This could be related to the content about the item, the price, or the relationship with the payable cost per click (CPC). What can you do about this?

Automatic Campaign:

  • Lower the target ACoS and, consequently, the costs. Note: this will result in fewer impressions and clicks.
  • Exclude underperforming articles so that you have more budget available for the better-performing items.

Manual Campaign:

  • Lower the bid for keywords with a (too) high ACoS. Use the “average winning bid” function to determine your ideal bid.
  • Are you bidding below this average winning bid? Then the chances of winning the auction are low, but you will keep costs better under control.
  • Are you bidding higher than this average winning bid? Then try lowering your bid in small increments to see if you can maintain similar performance at lower costs.

3. Optimise your keywords

Disable keywords that are causing a (too) high ACoS. In a manual campaign, if you notice that a keyword has a high ACoS but is still relevant to your product, first try lowering the bid for a better ACoS. If that doesn’t work, then disable it.

Note: Certain keywords are more expensive to advertise on than others, which can increase the costs of your campaign. Therefore, also pay attention to the impressions and clicks of your automatic keywords.

4. Check your categories

Disable categories that result in a (too) high ACoS or where you do not want to be visible. Running a manual campaign? You can also lower your bids for categories with a high ACoS.

If your goal is to optimise your ACoS and/or increase your return, focus on the best-performing categories.

5. Analyse product pages

Are the results from the product page not as good as hoped?

  • Manual campaign: Consider lowering your bid for this placement and wait a few days before analysing again.
  • Automatic campaign: Consider creating a separate manual campaign for this placement type, the product detail page, to set bids yourself.

Want to give your campaign a boost?

The following tips will help you optimise your campaigns.

Automatic campaign
  • Increase your daily budget and target ACoS for more visibility and conversions
  • Consider a manual campaign for more control over your spending
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Manual campaign
  • Increase your bid for more visibility and conversions
  • Increase your daily limit to remain visible for longer
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