How to Scale PPC Campaigns: 7 Tried-and-True Tactics

Ready to scale your PPC campaigns to get more clicks and conversions? Learn how to scale paid search campaigns with tactics like targeting new keywords, remarketing to engaged users, and more.

Ever shelled out marketing dollars on a PPC campaign that didn’t bring results? We feel your pain. It’s a common fear among marketers jumping into PPC for the first time.

Once you crack the code and roll out savvy strategies, your PPC campaigns (also called paid search) will fire on all cylinders and deliver impressive results.

PPC not growing could mean you’re experiencing the dreaded paid search plateau.

How can you expand your PPC campaign reach, drive more conversions, and take your existing campaigns to the next level?

We’ve got you covered with expert PPC tips from HawkSEM Growth & Strategy VP Steven Dang. He brings a decade of experience leading marketing teams to grow client revenues. Keep reading as we explore when it’s time to scale and actionable steps to kick your PPC campaigns into high gear.

(Image: Adobe)

How to scale PPC campaigns

Each brand will approach scaling PPC campaigns uniquely because their goals and strategies vary widely. So, when should you scale an ad campaign?

“We typically scale PPC campaigns when we perceive that we are reading a state of diminishing returns or plateauing when it comes to existing PPC campaigns,” says Dang. “Another reason could be the desire to expand into additional keywords, product or service categories, or geographies.”

Dang also points out scaling can mean both adding new campaigns or improving existing ones:

“We can, for example, scale out existing PPC campaigns with an additional budget, more aggressive bids, or even additional ad types or different targeting parameters. An expansion of ad schedule would also qualify as a scaling effort if it is currently limited in that manner.”

7 expert tips to scale your PPC campaigns

To hit the ground running on the right track, take some time to identify your specific conversion goals. Then follow these expert tips to set your campaign in motion.

1. Increase your budget

We know, Google Ads and PPC campaigns can use up your budget pretty quickly. After all, the budget cap on your existing campaigns is what keeps the finance department off your back, right?

But boosting your earnings often requires increasing your investment, too. That’s why step one is fine-tuning your daily budget or uncapping it all together.

Imagine the untapped potential of an extra 5,000 leads currently unaware of your existence, all because your daily budget is limiting their ad access.

To truly scale your PPC efforts, you need to identify the revenue you’re leaving on the table due to budget limitations.

Thankfully, Google Ads provides a metric to assess this situation: lost impression share (IS- budget). This metric reveals the percentage of instances your ad wasn’t displayed to people using a search query with relevant keywords due to your budget constraints.

For example, your ads might appear to certain audiences in the morning but can’t extend into the evening because your budget doesn’t allocate for more bidding.

Let’s say you’re an ecommerce business that sells stone jewelry, with an amethyst promotion running right now.

Your ads rank for the “affordable amethyst jewelry” keyword, but your lost IS- budget is 30%. That means you’re missing out on people typing in search terms with that keyword 30% of the time. Yikes.

Google also offers the IS rank metric that shows you lost visibility based on poor ad rank. In this case, an increased budget could help you outperform competitors in the SERPs.

Hello, untapped potential!

So now that you have more coin to work with, where should you spend it?

2. Make bid adjustments for more competitive keywords

Balancing your keyword strategy is like walking a tightrope. You don’t want to waste money on irrelevant keywords, but you can’t scale without expanding your keywords to capture more audiences.

Finding that sweet spot is the key to success, and Dang says you’ll find it if you balance quality over quantity:

“Oftentimes, when we decide to scale up, adding additional keywords is important, but we always need to ensure that every single additional keyword that we roll out adds value and can justify its own existence. Simply expanding for the sake of it ultimately becomes a liability or a crutch.”

Don’t forget to reinforce this with an updated negative keyword list to avoid unnecessary ad spend. This helps you use your budget efficiently and effectively, targeting only the most relevant, valuable audience for your campaigns.

How should you determine which new keywords to add so that you’re not expanding for the sake of expanding?

Think about what informed your original keyword choices. You likely conducted A/B testing to find the best keywords — striking the right balance between competitive bidding and results.

Let’s say one or two keywords didn’t make the cut, not because they couldn’t bring ROI, but because competitors drove bidding costs too high.

It’s time to revisit and A/B test those keywords once more.

If they still show promise, such as your returns being higher than cost-per-click (CPC), consider boosting your budget to rank for them.

The payoff? Your target audience will be exposed to your ad more often than your competitors,’ driving more traffic and engagement.

What about long-tail keywords?

Since they’re more specific, long-tail keywords help secure traffic from potential customers further down the buyer’s journey, closer to conversion.

The best part? They’re less competitive than short-tail keywords, meaning you won’t blow your budget with them. Dang says long-tail keywords are often missed by the competition.

“Longer-tail keywords are important for scaling PPC campaigns because there is strong underlying intent behind these keywords and a lot of times, competing advertisers may have overlooked them,” he explains.

“Because they are lower in volume by nature, sometimes they are ignored or overlooked by advertisers, even if they can pack a powerful punch if properly harnessed.”

Your audience might have more questions that you can rank for in the SERPs. All you have to do is use a keyword research tool (like Ahrefs) to consistently identify high-intent long-tail keywords.

Moving on, where else should you increase your budget?

3. Invest in remarketing

If you plan to add new campaigns to your scaling PPC strategy, a remarketing campaign is a great place to start.

Remarketing means strategically adding tags or pixels to specific sections of your website to identify and engage with users who’ve already interacted with your brand.

You’ll leverage this data to create new ad campaigns that appeal to those engaged audiences. For example, in remarketing ad campaigns, you might experiment with more persuasive ad copy or introduce exclusive offers in your call to action (CTA) to seal the deal.

Need some inspo? Here’s an idea for ecommerce businesses:

Retarget potential customers abandoning their shopping carts. Don’t worry about the extra ad cost — the ROI, a whopping 900% higher click-through rate (CTR), is 1,000% worth it.

You might even add a few more remarketing tags to different areas of your website. Say you prioritized remarketing lists to people who visited a specific service page.

Perhaps add a tag to another individual service page or to your contact page to remarket to new audiences.

We invested in remarketing across both Google Shopping and the Display Network for our ecommerce client, Swimsuits Direct. Their Google Shopping conversions surged by nearly 20%, while their search engine marketing (SEM) revenue increased by 110%.

To retarget potential customers across even more Google properties, consider using remarketing lists with Performance Max campaigns. This campaign type includes Google search, display, shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and Discover.

Hence, the power of targeted remarketing campaigns in driving higher conversions and revenue for businesses just like yours.

But remarketing isn’t just about crafting compelling ad copy. You’ll need to personalize where your potential customers land, too.

4. Give your landing pages a makeover

Revamped PPC ads need equally slammin’ landing pages to complement their impact. And Dang says the more specific, the better:

“We want to make sure our landing pages are custom-tailored to the product/service categories or keywords we are running traffic through.”

That’s where A/B testing comes into play. We meticulously test various ad and landing page combinations to discover which ones result in more conversions.

Why not spruce up your landing page with some TLC? Enhance its web elements, visuals, and ad copy to make it more persuasive and downright irresistible.

Here are a few ways to take your landing pages to the next level:

• Web speed: Did you know that slow load times drop engagement by nearly 5% per second? Even the most kick-ass web design and expert ad copy will be fruitless if your website can’t load quickly. Invest in the services of a reputable web developer or UX specialist to ensure your landing page load time is as fast as possible. Then, continue making tweaks as you monitor its performance.
• Personalization: If your landing page copy is outdated, give it a refresh by adding a touch of personalization to better reach your target audience. Speak in their language, teasing their pain points and serving up the best solution to said pain points with–you guessed it–your product or service. You can leverage powerful data like demographics, past user behavior, and location insights conveniently available through our proprietary tech, ConversionIQ.
• Dynamic content: Match your landing page headlines with PPC keywords and ad copy automatically. Dynamic landing pages display the keywords that trigger your search ads, adding an extra element of personalization and aligning the ad destination with search intent.

But remember that landing pages don’t look the same across all PPC platforms.

5. Expand to other PPC platforms

Let’s say you’re working with Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads.

As you scale existing search campaigns and create new ones on these platforms, you might tweak Facebook ad placements or explore different automatic and manual bidding strategies on Google Ads.

But what about Amazon Ads or Instagram? Reddit or Quora?

Beyond Google Ads lies a vast PPC world just waiting to connect you with more audiences. And if you’re scaling your marketing strategy, looking to new PPC platforms is a solid path to tread.

So, where do you start?

If you’re a SaaS brand, dive into the world of YouTube Ads and boost your reach with juicy product demo videos. LinkedIn also offers a goldmine of opportunities to target decision-makers in big businesses with equally big tech budgets.

For ecommerce brands, Amazon Ads are an absolute must. Without them, your Amazon product pages might get lost in the sea of options.

And your competitors will snag potential customers before you do.

Another way to stay on top of competitors?

6. Monitor your performance

Your Quality Score, return on ad spend (ROAS), and click-through rate are through the roof. After all, these impressive metrics gave you the juice to scale in the first place.

But as you expand, performance monitoring is more critical than ever. We’ve seen clients pump infinite money into their PPC campaigns with hopes of scaling, only to encounter a crash-landing. The culprit? Poor PPC management and monitoring.

To ensure your scaling efforts yield a strong ROI, you’ll have to track performance for every scaled (improved) PPC campaign.

(Image: Unsplash)

Here are key metrics to keep close tabs on:

• Conversion rate: Are you tracking app installations, online purchases, newsletter signups, or phone calls from ad extensions? Whatever conversions you aim to scale, be sure to track them in Google Analytics. P.S. HawkSEM’s digital marketing experts are beasts when it comes to conversion rate optimization, so we’re here to help if GA feels too intimidating.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR): You’re pumping out more ads, but are people clicking on them? CTR tells you how often they are — and the proportion should increase as you scale your PPC campaigns.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): Scaling often means spending more, but it’s only justified if you’re seeing a return. ROAS measures how much money you get back with every dollar spent on advertising.
• Quality Score: If you notice a dip in Quality Score, it’s likely an ad relevance issue. Review your ad and landing page copy, making tweaks until your Quality Score improves. According to Sprout Social, a score between 8 to 10 is optimal.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA): This is also considered cost per lead (CPL) or cost per sale (CPS). Notice more web traffic but higher CPAs? This might mean your ads are driving more audiences to your site, but your landing page just isn’t sealing the deal. If this is the case, you’ll want to audit your landing page to see where you can improve. Is the copy landing? Perhaps the design is cumbersome?

Check out our full guide on important PPC KPIs. And if things get too hectic?

7. Outsource PPC management to the pros

Even a stellar marketing team is accustomed to handling PPC campaigns for your brand pre-growth. Scaling campaigns for the new phase of your biz requires specialized expertise and strategies.

Without the right strategy, you risk wasted ad spend, misfired ad groups, and undesirable results. Bottom line? You don’t want to limit your success, and scaling PPC campaigns is a team effort, even for the pros.

“Putting up new campaigns from an initial starting position vs scaling an account up are two quite different exercises and disciplines,” says Dang. “Scaling up is often a more difficult exercise since you might not be starting out by reaching for the lowest hanging fruit.”

That’s why we recommend partnering with a qualified PPC agency with demonstrated results and success in your industry.

No campaign is siloed, meaning we work collaboratively with our team of PPC experts while harnessing key data from ConversionIQ to ensure we’ve got a solid framework. And this is what has consistently worked every time to help our clients scale PPC and unleash massive ROI.

For example, our client Mommy’s Bliss struggled as their baby-product brand grew. They had a status quo when it came to marketing, but it failed to keep up with the company’s rapid expansion.

As a result, they faced difficulties managing their campaigns and didn’t know which metrics to focus on during their website migration.

We helped them increase keyword rankings, soaring by nearly 80%.

On top of that, you might not have access to cutting-edge performance monitoring tech to assess and capitalize on progress across multiple campaigns and PPC platforms.

That’s precisely why our experienced SEO and PPC experts rely on insights from ConversionIQ. It helps us detect otherwise elusive anomalies and growth signals, empowering our scaling strategies.

While the platform leverages AI and automation, we don’t simply set it and forget it. Our clients benefit from the perfect blend of predictive tech plus the human touch of a dedicated PPC expert.

The takeaway

Scaling your PPC campaigns is a delicate balance between introducing new ad campaigns and optimizing existing ones. Unfortunately, today’s brands struggle to find that equilibrium and end up squandering their marketing budget on inefficient scaling strategies.

That’s why so many of our clients turn to us when it’s time to scale. They don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to diligently monitor A/B tests, conduct effective bid adjustments, or create entirely new landing pages and remarketing ads.

Our expertise extends to SaaS, ecommerce, and various niche businesses in generating conversion success with their PPC campaigns.

Picture your current campaigns achieving a 4.5X ROI. That’s our average client’s reality after partnering with us. Want to tap into that pool of success? We’ve got you covered.

Let’s scale your PPC campaigns.

This article has been updated and was originally published in September 2023.