Optimising Google Search Ads
The landing page must match your ad
The quality of the landing page is a major factor in converting browsers into buyers. When someone clicks on an ad, they expect to be taken to a relevant page. If the page is not relevant, they are unlikely to convert.
Use Ad rotation
To find the best-performing ad, create multiple ad variations. If you create more than one ad in an ad group, over time Google Ads will automatically serve the better-performing ones by default. For best results, create two to four different ads, each with varying headlines or description text.
You should frequently create new ads for each campaign, experimenting with different headlines and assets. These will compete with your old ads in the ad rotation, with the best performing served more often.
Ad scheduling
Your Google Ads campaigns are set to always show by default. This means your ads are eligible to appear 24 hours a day. By looking at your ad performance by time and day, you may find that certain times do not convert, and these times can be excluded.
Use Ad extensions
Ad Extensions show information about your business that will show on your Google ads to increase customer engagement and boost engagement. Google has reported that including Extensions can increase CTR by up to 20%.
- Sitelink Extensions. These direct customers to specific pages on your site. They allow advertisers to highlight the products or services they offer using an additional header of up to 25 characters and 2 lines of description of up to 35 characters each.
- Callout Extensions offer an extra 25 characters, which can be used to highlight your business’s unique selling points (USPs). However, unlike Sitelinks, they cannot be clicked on.
- Call Extensions remove the need for customers to type in your number. This may be especially beneficial for mobile users who are more likely to have an immediate need to enquire and who would otherwise have to endure the inconvenience of leaving the SERP to place a call.
- Location Extensions allow you to highlight the physical address of your business. They can also feature your phone number, operating hours and a map marker to help customers determine their distance from your business. Great for location-based businesses.
Use Smart bidding
Smart Bidding is an automated bid strategy that use machine learning to optimise bidding for conversions or conversion value in every auction. Smart bidding saves time and, from experience, generates good results. Target CPA, target ROAS, Maximise conversions and Maximise conversion value are all Smart Bidding strategies.
Refine and expand your keyword list
When you have been running a campaign for a while, and it has collected some data, review your keywords on those keywords and refine them. Look for keywords with a high number of clicks but few conversions or a high cost per conversion and either reduce the bids or remove them entirely.
You should also frequently use the Google keyword planner tool and look at search results to add new keywords.
Negative keywords and match types
By adding negative keywords to your campaigns and ad groups you can improve relevancy and ensure you do not pay for clicks with the wrong intent. By looking at the search data, you may find that your ads are showing for completely irrelevant keywords.
Removing search terms you do not want to show for and adding negative keywords is something you should be doing regularly. Broad match keywords serve ads for a wide range of keywords, so to cut down on irrelevant searches, use phrase match instead.
Bid adjustments
A bid adjustment is a percentage increase or decrease in the base amount you bid, allowing you to show your ads more or less based on customer behaviour.
For example, a click from a user on a phone might be worth more to your than a desktop user as judged by a lower cost per conversion. Adjust your bids based on device could results in more sale an a higher return on investment.
Bid adjustments are available for:
- Locations
- Ad schedule
- Devices
- Audiences
- Placements
For example more to increase your bids just to customers on mobile devices, you could use bid adjustment of 20% to increase your bid by 20% for mobile searches resulting in a total bid amount of £1.20 on base bid of £1.
Location
Some locations will perform better than others. You can adjust how you are spending location by location in three ways:
- Place a bid adjustment on locations. In the Locations tab, you can place a bid adjustment percentage on each location. Place positive adjustments on best-performing locations and negative bid adjustments on poor performers.
- Remove poor-performing locations. The easiest way to optimise your locations is to eliminate the ones wasting your money and keep the locations doing well.
- Separate locations by campaign. Place your best-performing locations into separate campaigns and allocate more budget to these campaigns.
Add or remove search partners.
Google campaigns will include search partners by default. After your campaigns have been running for a while, review the performance of search partners and decide if they are delivering value.
