Unlocking PPC Campaign Potential: Protecting Ad Budgets from Returning Users

With the rapid rise of digitalisation, marketers are looking to capitalise on a growing online audience. The increasing availability of technology such as smart devices has drawn in waves of users, and marketers are keen to capitalise on a developing market.

Data Reportal found that 5.44 billion people globally were using the internet at the beginning of April 2024. With such a large potential audience up for grabs, marketers are pulling out all the stops to keep users engaged and loyal to their brand.

By utilising tactics such as personalisation and loyalty programs, marketers have succeeded at encouraging users to keep returning to their sites. What they don’t realise however, is that these returning users are unwittingly eating away at advertising budgets. This is preventing digital campaigns from reaching their true potential and negatively impacting ROI. Without a strategy in place to manage returning users, marketers risk losing crucial ad spend.

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The Silent Barrier to Success

Returning users have unknowingly created a new challenge for marketers to overcome. To conveniently return to their favourite site, these users will click on the paid search results leveraged by a company’s pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. While this would seem harmless on the surface, it can be detrimental to advertising budgets long-term.

By using these PPC campaigns to navigate to the site, returning users are driving up customer acquisition costs (CACs). This results in a loss for marketers as ad spend is wasted on increased CACs without any new revenue coming in from new users or conversions. We’ve recently seen a company spend 97% of their branded keyword budget on existing customers, draining their ad budget while delivering zero conversions.

Another problem that can arise from this is inaccurate campaign data. Campaign results can be artificially inflated by returning users using paid search results to return to the site. These skewed metrics can then lead marketing teams to believe a campaign performed much better than it actually did despite no genuine conversions being made. Resources are then mistakenly directed towards similar campaigns in the future, resulting in further losses.

Digitalisation has created an increasingly competitive market as more companies cultivate an online presence. Marketers, therefore, can’t afford to waste ad spend on underperforming campaigns. Wordstream found that up to 29% of PPC budgets go towards just bidding on brand keywords to use in their campaigns. This makes it all the more crucial that marketers manage returning users to prevent unnecessary losses and save profits for future projects.

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Preventing Unnecessary Losses

When launching a new campaign, there are strategies and tools that marketers can utilise to ensure ad budgets are protected without damaging relationships with returning users. These tools are:

• Custom Verification Rules – To control the number of times a user interacts with a paid advertisement, it’s possible to set custom verification rules. Marketers can set a limit, and once a user reaches it, they can no longer interact with or see the ad. This prevents them from driving up CACs and wasting ad spend. These rules can also stop non-genuine sources such as bots powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Bots repeatedly click on ads, increasingly cost-per-click (CPC) rates. The University of Baltimore estimated that on average, around 14% of clicks on PPC campaigns are from non-genuine sources like these. By setting a limit, budgets are protected against both returning users and bots.
• Shadow Campaigns – These are another effective tool operators can leverage to protect ad spend. A shadow campaign is an exact duplicate of an existing campaign. The original campaign can then exclude returning users from seeing it, instead they are diverted to the duplicate. This duplicate is run at a much lower cost to the advertiser, but returning users can still use a paid search ad to navigate to the site. With a shadow campaign in place, returning users aren’t negatively affected, and marketers can save their budgets for new users.

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Maximising Results

Competition is heating up as the online market expands. Marketers are looking to make the most of the opportunity to pull in a larger audience and boost revenue. To maximise ROI and capitalise on a growing online audience, marketers need to ensure their ad spend isn’t going to waste.

Returning users are unintentionally depleting ad spend when interacting with PPC campaigns, but with the right tools at their disposal, marketers can minimise the impact. Custom rules and shadow campaigns can empower marketers to decrease CACs while making sure returning users aren’t neglected. With these in place, marketers can protect their PPC investments and optimise campaigns to their fullest potential.

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