How your PPC biases could be hindering campaign performance

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective tools in your digital marketing arsenal, but have you ever considered how unconscious biases could negatively impact campaign performance?

Understanding and addressing these biases is essential to optimise your campaigns and achieve better results. After all, with the money, time and effort spent creating these campaigns, you want them to do as well as they can, without any negative influences.

In this article, we’re going to break down just what unconscious bias is from a PPC perspective and give you the tools you need to prevent it from impacting your campaigns:

• What are PPC biases and why do they matter?
• Common PPC biases that could be hurting your campaign
• Impact of biases on keyword and audience targeting
• Strategies to identify and overcome PPC biases
• Leveraging data to drive objective PPC campaign decisions

What PPC biases are and why they matter

In brief, PPC biases are assumptions that influence decision-making in PPC campaigns. They creep into our decisions as a part of daily life, through no fault of our own. It’s a totally natural part of decision-making, which means it can become a part of our PPC decisions by default.

Biases can stem from past experiences, personal preferences, or misinterpretation of data. It can be something as simple as assuming that one PPC campaign is going to do well because it is similar to another PPC campaign that previously brought in great results.

They can lead to suboptimal decisions, causing inefficient use of budget, poor targeting, and reduced ROI. While it’s often not too serious, you can save yourself the trouble of making mistakes and wasting your budget simply by recognising these biases.

Common PPC biases that could be hurting your campaign

The first step in this process is understanding what biases look like. Here are a few of the most common biases present in PPC campaigns.

Confirmation Bias
This is the tendency to favour information that confirms pre-existing beliefs.
A confirmation bias can lead to overlooking data that suggests underperforming keywords or strategies.

For example, if you assumed that a campaign was going to perform well with one specific keyword because it had previously done well in a different campaign, you could overlook keywords that would actually bring in better results.

Anchoring Bias
This is an over-reliance on the first piece of information encountered (e.g., your very first CPC estimates). In this example, it could be the case that you assume that a lower CPC will do well in a new campaign because that is the first estimate that your calculations came to. But in fact, a higher CPC would bring in better results over time with specific keywords.

Save yourself some budget, and consider where anchoring bias might be affecting your campaign performance.

Recency Bias
As the name suggests, this involves placing undue focus on your most recent data, neglecting the broader historical performance. Recency bias can cause you to unduly prioritise short-term trends and disrupt long-term strategies. It results in marketers “thinking small”, rather than seeing the bigger picture.

Sunk Cost Fallacy
Similar to the last two biases, this is based on the time spent working with one preferred system or decision. The sunk cost fallacy involves continuing with a failing strategy simply because you’ve been working on it for a long time.

Bandwagon Effect
The bandwagon effect is also a bias, where you follow popular trends or competitors’ strategies without sufficient analysis. We’re all for experimentation and analysis of competitor strategies, but blindly following a strategy without the right analysis and investigation can lead to generic and ineffective marketing.

Impact of biases on keyword and audience targeting

Keyword Targeting
These biases can skew your keyword selection, leading to inefficient spending on underperforming or irrelevant keywords.

When analysing existing data from your campaigns so far, bias can also result in the misinterpretation of search intent, or even how you perceive the results that you find. This can of course lead to making decisions that don’t quite reflect the reality of the data that you’ve found, leading to suboptimal campaign performance.

Audience Targeting
Biases can cause misalignment in audience segmentation, leading to irrelevant ad placements. If you overgeneralise your audience and demographic characteristics due to bias, you could be missing out on niche, high-converting segments.

Strategies to identify and overcome PPC biases

A/B Testing
A/B testing is a key tool in overcoming bias. By regularly running A/B tests, you can challenge your assumptions and gain clear insights into what actually works. Instead of relying on your gut feeling or past successes, test variations of your campaigns to see which one performs best. 

For instance, you might think a certain ad copy will resonate with your audience, but an A/B test could reveal that a different approach drives more engagement. Trust the data from these tests to guide your decisions, rather than preconceived notions.

Data Analysis
Relying solely on short-term data can easily mislead you. It’s important to rigorously analyse your campaign data to uncover patterns and trends that might contradict your initial assumptions. Looking at long-term performance metrics can provide a clearer picture of what’s truly working.

Diverse Perspectives
When it comes to decision-making, different perspectives are invaluable. Involving team members from various backgrounds or roles can help you avoid individual biases that may impact your campaigns. 

Encourage an environment where team members feel comfortable questioning decisions and assumptions. Sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes is all you need to uncover opportunities that were previously missed.

Regular Audits
Conducting regular audits of your PPC campaigns is essential for identifying any biases that might be skewing performance. These audits allow you to reassess your strategies based on actual data rather than assumptions. 

By resetting your campaigns through an objective lens, you can ensure that your decisions are driven by performance, not past perceptions.

Leveraging data to drive objective PPC campaign decisions

Automated Bidding Strategies
Automated bidding tools are a great way to minimise the impact of human bias in your PPC campaigns. These tools use real-time data and machine learning to adjust bids based on performance, removing subjective decision-making from the equation. 

By relying on automation, you can ensure your bids are optimised for the best possible outcomes, without the risk of preconceived ideas interfering with your strategy.

Performance Metrics
When assessing your campaigns, it’s vital to focus on data-driven performance metrics like ROI (Return on Investment) and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). Prioritising these objective measures will prevent you from falling into the trap of favouring what you ‘think’ is working. 

Keep an eye on your key performance indicators (KPIs), and continuously adjust your campaigns based on what the data is telling you, not just what you hope to see.

Cross-Channel Analysis
It’s easy to develop platform-specific biases if you don’t take a step back and look at the bigger picture. By analysing performance across multiple channels, you can get a more comprehensive understanding of how your campaigns are truly performing. 

This approach will help you identify any platform-specific biases or strategies that may be skewing results, ensuring you make well-rounded decisions.

Conclusion

Unchecked biases can quietly undermine the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. To prevent this, it’s important to recognise and address these biases head-on. By focusing on data-driven strategies, regularly testing, and making use of automated tools, you can counter the influence of human bias and optimise your campaigns for long-term success.

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