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Creating Google ad campaigns is a process that’s easy to learn, but hard to master. Millions of businesses and marketers use Google Ads every year, but many are left disappointed with the results. The positive reputation of the platform drives businesses to create an ad and where they expect to immediately become a global force. However, it requires more than just the creation of an ad to succeed.
Many people feel this initial disappointment which causes them to leave Google Ads entirely. They convince themselves that Good Ads is a waste of time and click away rather than working hard to make the experience a success. In this guide, you’re going to learn how to optimize all the different aspects of Google Ads. By the end, your account and campaigns will have the necessary foundation to perform.
The first simple way to optimize Google Ads is to learn how to structure your account. When the structure is lacking, this can reduce your Quality Score, increase costs, and affect conversion rates. For example, you can experience a lack of clicks or an increase in irrelevant clicks. Either way, the budget is wasted, and you don’t get conversions.
To effectively reach prospective customers, your account should look as follows:
Depending on your goals, you might have two different campaigns within your Google account. While one is a display campaign, the other is a search campaign. From here, the campaigns break down into ad groups. Each campaign might have two ad groups which allows you to consider different products. For example, the first ad group sells candles and the other sells towels. Moving further down, each ad group has ads alongside their relevant keywords (we could even put ads and keywords on the same level).
Why not draw up the structure of your Google Ads account now? Laying out your Google account in this way will make things MUCH easier as you start to expand and build more ad campaigns and ad groups.
Users on Google Ads actually have a lot of control over when and how they bid on the important keywords. Unfortunately, not many businesses pay attention to these settings, so they don’t get the most from their budgets. If you want to improve budget utilization this year, it’s important to optimize the highly granular bidding settings.
While some handle bidding manually, others are moving towards automated systems. For example, one option is to use Google Ads scripts. As small sections of code, they read your ad settings and make changes when necessary. You can also take advantage of conditioning triggers, where the bidding is adjusted during certain parts of the day and for different devices.
Playing around with bidding provides a way to ensure good performance on campaigns. If you provide an emergency service to the community, it makes sense to increase bidding on keywords that have a sense of urgency. For example, let’s say that you help homeowners to clear water from their homes after a flood or extreme weather. By placing an emphasis on ‘flood removal near me’ as a keyword, you’re likely to get conversions because these people need your service.
When discussing the process of optimizing bidding, we can’t ignore the many fantastic ad automation tools currently available. After linking to your Google account, these tools will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to continually improve your ads (this includes bidding, targeting, creatives, and more!).
We all want to reduce Google Ads costs, right? Well, one way to achieve this is through the ad settings in your account. Here are some examples:
Firstly, advertising on Google is an experience of fine margins. There’s a fine line between mistakes and strong performance. An example of targeting parameters is geolocation settings which means- where do you want your ad to display?
Too often, we see people misinterpret the meaning of the setting. Rather than the location of your ad, this setting addresses the literal position of your audience while viewing your ad. Where are they in the world? If you have a small business in New York, you probably don’t want to advertise to people in Las Vegas. Control this setting by clicking on Settings, Location and Languages, and Locations.
As well as location, we can also control the day and time our ad is active. Hopefully, you’re now starting to see why investigating these targeting parameters is so important. Using these settings, you’re now zeroing in on location as well as date/time. This is called ‘dayparting’, you’ll find it in the Dimensions tab of the campaign. You’ll see how your ad performs each day by reviewing the clicks, cost per click, impressions, click-through rate, and cost.
If you give the campaign time for patterns to develop, you might notice that two days outperform the others significantly. You’ll want to prioritize serving ads on the most successful days. You don’t have to ignore all other days, but there’s a benefit to ramping up the effort on stronger days.
Negative keywords are simply the opposite of normal keywords (words and phrases you wish to avoid with an ad). As a simple example, you might decide to avoid serving ads for searches with ‘free’ in them. Think about your keywords and then searches that might include these terms without having any relevance to your industry. Once you have a list, add them to the negative keywords for the campaign.
Businesses are still sending prospective customers to poor landing pages. Why spend hours developing the perfect ad and then waste it all with a lacking landing page? Nail the practice of aligning the landing pages with ad text to get results that will positively impact your business.
If we start with the landing page, it absolutely needs to continue the experience from the ad. Try developing a unique landing page for each ad over time. It might take some investment, but this will optimize your Google ads because the viewer gets an experience tailored to them.
We recommend using similar creatives, fonts, language, and tone. Please, never promise something in an ad and then fail to deliver on the landing page. Imagine yourself as a recipient of the ad, you only click through to learn more. If the landing page goes off on a different tangent, your original interest is forgotten, and you’ll click away within seconds - the same is true for your audience.
How do you write ad text that will compel people to click through? It’s the holy grail of advertising and a question that leaves people looking at a blank Word document for days on end. Here are some of our top tips for writing effective ad text:
If you can do these three things listed above, your prospects will understand why you’re the best option in the industry and will know what to do next (and what to expect). In our experience, the top CTA terms include Get, Shop, Buy, Learn, and Try. Less successful phrases are Click, Discover, and Sign Up.
It’s critical to understand the difference between feature-driven ads and benefit-driven ads. One explains the features of your product, and the other explains why your product will help the audience. Generally speaking, benefit-driven ads perform better because the audience learns how you help their pain points. After struggling with a problem for so long, your company is the light at the end of the tunnel for them.
Finally, we also recommend engaging your audience with ‘we’ and us’. Try to position yourself as another sufferer of the problem you’re trying to eradicate. With the right active language, the prospect sees that you understand their problem and have the right solution.
Simple, right? Create a good structure, concentrate on bidding, carefully choose your settings, and spend some time on ad text and landing pages. Get this right and you’ll optimize your Google Ads with very little effort!
