5 Tips To Optimize Google Ads

 

 

Google Ads research campaign is a thrilling process because there are mixed emotions that come to mind while launching a new paid search campaign.

PPC campaigns give you a lot more control than traditional advertising (you can read about it more on our Pay-Per-Click Page).

In a nutshell, it allows you to get in front of your audiences and pay only when someone is interested in your ads.

Which is very powerful, because that means impression building is free!

It has rightfully become a popular tactic to deploy as part of a holistic marketing strategy not only to drive traffic to your website but also to boost sales.

The plain truth is that you will only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

So, it’s not strange to know why many marketers love PPC.

It can provide almost immediate results and that the fee you pay is based on the outcomes you get.

So, a lot of control, love, and free impressions – what could go wrong?

Well, a lot, if you do not configure campaigns correctly, do your research upfront and are careful about putting your ads in front of your target audience.

People starting without the proper background, education, and dedication have spent countless hours setting up campaigns.

They waste valuable resources and still feel frustrated to get new business from the campaigns.

So indeed, a lot can go wrong if you are not careful.

Fear not, our simple five key tips will even help a novice set up and primary ad campaigns in their journey on a Google Ads campaign stardom!

Google Ads Goals (Free Tip)

 

Image Source: Monster Insight

What you need to know is that there are many different platforms with this service.

Some of the most popular ones incorporate Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter, and Bing. However, and up until today, the most famous one is Google Ads.

It is safe to say that Google Ads is Google’s number one source of revenue!

And everyone uses Google – so you really can get a lot of exposure for your brand if you use Google Ads to kick-start your PPC campaigns!

One advantage of using Google Ads is that Google will display your ad on other Google partner sites (if that is how you want to configure it).

Every business is different.

Even businesses in the same industries, in the same markets, may have different budgets, brand values, operate at different scales.

They might also require different goals that need to be met to achieve their unique objectives.

Setting goals are critical for any campaign.  What are your goals?

Are you looking to increase awareness?  Increase lead?  Form sign-up, maybe?

How about online sales?

All of these are valid goals – but this step must be determined before setting up any campaigns on Google Ads.

The better these are defined, the more you will be able to track against these goals, tweak and adjust to get more optimal performance.

Getting into the weeds and playing the anticipated scenarios out is not a bad idea.

Let’s play a scenario out for a realtor looking to set up goals – what questions would they need answering to better plan his or her goals:

• Do you want leads for your real estate business?
• How many impressions from this campaign?
• What is a lead for you as a realtor?  People picking up the phone or signing up for your e-book that you have designed in exchange for an email sign up, which you will nurture with other great value offerings?
• What is your budget?
• Who is your ideal customer?
• What markets?
• What type of property?

What keywords do you think your prospective client will look for on google?

Answering these above questions in detail will allow you to set up and configure your campaign correctly and help in getting your ads in front of your audiences.

In Google, you can get in front of a searchers query by placing your ads on search engine results pages. (SERP).

This is a crucial point to note here.

You are advertising here.

So, you set a budget, bid in an auction, and get placed for the duration and depending on how relevant your ad is on the search results page.

This is not SEO (you can get a better idea on SEO on our SEO Page)- which is also another powerful digital marketing strategy that allows you to get website visits, impressions, and leads.

But it is done by providing relevant content that places your site organically on search engine results pages.

So without further ado, let’s get into those five awesome tips:

 

Image Source: Viral-Solutions

#1: Keyword Research & Selection:

As mentioned, one of the problems many marketers tend to face while using Google Ads is that they spend a small fortune and don’t get the results they had expected.

However, this is not Google’s fault (yes, we love Google at Web Worx Labs – there I said it).

The question which comes to mind is how to choose the best keywords research tool?

Well, this is not a big deal as you can use Google’s Keyword Planner, one of the best (and free) tools.

It is apparent that you already have an idea about the keywords that you want to target.

However, using this tool can provide additional keywords or even replaces the ones you had in mind.

Why?

Because right beside each keyword, you are also able to see the search volume data and trends, average monthly searches, competition, and bids, which can help you get a better idea.

Any marketing professional worth their salt will tell you that Keyword Research is one of the most critical steps in starting the campaign right.

Do not take shortcuts here!

 

Image Source: Nicepng

Research with Keyword Planner:

Google’s Keyword Planner is an awesome tool to use (one of our favorites), and this intelligence, when setting up a campaign, is included for free to help you ensure you set it upright.

Yes, Keyword Planner is (still) free, and yes, it continues to blow my mind!

Assess competitiveness before including in your campaigns

Searching for the keyword “Dogs are better than Cats” above immediately gives us insight that the keywords “cats and dogs” are searched a lot more.

Considering this keyword over the others may be a good option.

These keywords may be essential for a pet store or a pet accessories store (online or otherwise) looking to increase exposure for your business.

However, keyword competitiveness must be considered as well when choosing the right keyword to target in your ad groups.

If the keyword is searched a lot more, but the starting bids are too high, it may not be worth getting clicks from that keyword.

This is because the clicks may exhaust your daily budget.

So, knowing what the keywords are is essential.

Also, their bids are critical to understanding what keywords to select within your ad group.

Thorough keyword research is necessary to run a successful Google Ads campaign.

Keyword research is the first and most important step to improve Google Ads.

Google Ads assists you in choosing the appropriate keyword for your PPC campaign to get huge sales.

The chief advantage of using PPC campaigns is it allows you to target the keyword of your own choice.

But make sure to select keywords that are promising and enhance your website chance to get a better ad rank position on Google.

Keyword types & Selection

To get the target audience, you need to know what are the Types of the keyword :

1. Broad match is one of the keyword matching options that allows you to choose one or more matching options for your keywords. Broad match helps to appear your ad by controlling how closely the keyword needs to match a person’s search term.
2. Broad match modifier works by adding a “+” sign in front of any or all words in your keywords. This option let you create keywords that are more targeted than broad match.
3. Phrase match allows your ad to show only when someone’s search terms include the exact phrase of your keyword with additional words before or after.
4. The exact match appears your ad to the specific audience who is searching for the target keyword selected by you.

These match types give you the power to control the relevancy of your keyword search and trigger your ad.

You should start by looking at the broad match keywords.

When these are working well for you, you can then move into the exact match keywords that will give you a closer targeting and more relevant clicks.

While you are in this process of choosing keywords, make sure that you do not forget to pay attention to the negative keywords.

After all, they can help you filter out the irrelevant content.

Let’s say that you are selling used cars only.

So, you want to make sure that the word “new” is never a part of your searches. So, just mark it as a negative keyword.

 

Image Source: Impact

#2: Landing Pages:

Landing pages are one of the most neglected aspects when you are creating a PPC campaign.

Truth is most marketers can spend countless hours choosing the best keywords, writing the best ad they can.

However, they don’t even consider looking at the landing page to see if it needs any kind of optimization.

As if this wasn’t enough, many marketers just use the homepage link on the ad.

However, when you want to increase the sales of a product, make sure that you point the link directly to the product’s page, not to the homepage of your website.

Here are a few key items to include in your campaign when designing landing pages

• An easy call to action visible above the fold
• Easy form to fill in
• Social proof or reviews/testimonials
• brief value of what one gets when filling out the form
• A way to track conversions
• A thank you page

While this may seem pretty obvious now!

You just have no idea of the huge number of marketers who continue to make forms without including the above items that cost businesses a small fortune or missed opportunities.

Another thing that should be taken into consideration is when you are looking at the landing page, see if you are targeting the same keywords that you are pointing to your ad.

Keep in mind that this does not mean keyword stuffing at all.

Accumulate the keywords once or twice where they make sense can help you increase your Google Quality Score as well as it can decrease the cost of your ads.

 

Image Source: Extra-Digital

#3: Click-Through Rates:

CTR (Click-Through Rates) shows the number of people who checked your ad by clicking on it.

CTR is considered important for your ad campaign because it has a direct effect on your Quality Score (more on that on tip five below).

Let us suppose that you are creating a PPC campaign to sell a specific product.

So, you will search for the best keywords and keep all these keywords that relate to just one ad group.

When you have quite a few campaigns running at the same time and several ad groups, it will be much easier to determine not only the costs but also the effectiveness of each campaign.

When you have a tight budget, one of the things that you can do is to limit your ads targeting.

For example, by targeting your ads to a specific location and only for broad terms, your costs will decrease.

Another way that you have to increase your click-through rates is by knowing your targeted audience.

When you have a pretty clear idea about when the people you are targeting are online, you can set your ads to only display during that specific period.

Since one of your goals with a PPC campaign is to get the best possible Quality Score, also you need to know that getting a high CTR is crucial.

So, what you can do to ensure is to have the best ad running for a specific campaign to perform A/B tests.

Each ad that you create includes four different elements: the headline, the first line, the second line, and the link to your website.

Since you won’t change the link, this leaves you with two possible changes: the headline and the ad text itself.

Google will then rotate the different ads that you have and allows you to discover which ad performed the best: which one had a better click-through rate and lower cost-per-click.

Then, you need to use the ad, which has the best results.

Image Source: Un-bounce

#4: Ad-Copy:

One of the limitations of PPC campaigns is the limited amount of text that you have in the ads.

So, you need to ensure that you are concise, relevant, informative, and persuasive at the same time.

The truth is that it takes a bit of practice to write a good ad-copy.

However, with your clear goal in mind, you can be sure that you will be able to do it in the best way possible.

Besides, you can always check the PPC ads that your competitors are running.

We don’t mean that you should copy them but to improve your ad.

Make sure that your ad stands out.

Some of the things which you can include and that usually tends to grab the visitor’s attention are “free shipping,” “limited offer,” “learn more,” “free download,” and other similar expressions.

Related article: Types of advertising

 

Image Source: Ko-Marketing

Leverage Ad extensions:

Want more ad impressions?

Want to take up more screen space on the search results page for your ads? Want more vacations?

Wait – scratch the last one – but the first three still apply, and Ad Extensions are a great answer to your first three questions!

These extensions add to your ad copy by providing additional text in your standard text ads.

This information gives your target audiences even more reason to choose your business.

More importantly, it gives your ads more real estate on the search results page, allowing you to take up more of the screen – which is always a plus!

Even Google says that it won’t show these extensions on all your ads, it is still a good idea to take advantage of this feature when setting up ad copies.

Your ad quality will have to be high and rank well before Google considers showing these ad extensions and sharing this valuable real estate on their search results pages.

When setting up ad copies, focus on the call to action and great features that will allow your ads to resonate with your target customer.

Here is a great resource from Google itself to help advertisers learn more about ad extensions.

 

Image Source: Grow-Traffic

#5: Quality Score:

All PPC campaigns that you run with Google Ads have a Quality Score provided by Google.

Word-Stream – another Ad agency has an awesome article written by one of the gurus on the subject matter Larry Kim.

You can get more details on it here.

This Quality Score takes into consideration several factors.

These include your historical Google Ads account performance, the keyword relevance, the landing page experience, the ad relevance, page-speed, and click-through rate.

See how we said historical performance.

So it goes without saying – you should not expect Quality Scores to be available the minute after your campaign launches.

It takes time to get the measures for quality scores for Google to reflect in your Google Ads dashboard.

But why Quality Score an important factor that you should consider?

Simply put, the better your score, the higher your ads will be displayed.

Additionally, a high-Quality Score usually means that you end up with a lower cost per click.

When you are looking to improve the Quality Score of any of your ads, here are some suggestions:

• Make sure that your landing page is well optimized and has the keywords you are targeting. Also, you need to ensure that the page can provide a good user experience.
• Try different versions of the ad to see which one has a higher CTR.
• Do profound keyword research to find relevant and new keywords that you can target with your campaign.

Creating a good PPC campaign involves many different aspects.

The truth is if you follow these five key points to optimize Google ads, then be sure that you’ll have the returns you need.

Besides, PPC campaigns are one of the best ways to generate highly-targeted traffic to your website and increase sales.

Closing thoughts

There are a lot of things that you need to do when running an ad campaign with Google Ads.

These tips have been invaluable to us.

So, we decided to share to help you run your campaigns or ask the right questions to people who are running your campaigns.

Do you have things that you think we should include that we missed in our top 5?

Add to the comments section, and we would be happy to consider them.

Any questions or concerns?

Reach out @ info@thewhitehatcompany.com or fill out our online form.

We would be happy to help!