How to Optimize Google Ads Campaigns – Ads & Landing Pages

 

We have already seen that being up to date with digital trends is essential if we want to succeed and achieve the goals that we set for our eCommerce business. Optimizing and getting the most out of our Google Ads campaigns is going to be one of these fundamental tasks that we have to perform to achieve success.

• Try here our Google Ads Audit.

This could be complemented with a good SEO strategy and consistent activity on social media channels, which can help to achieve the common goal of increasing our digital reach and thus increase our sales.

Here are a series of tips that we at Clever Ads believe are essential to improve Google Ads campaigns:

Campaign segmentation

Something essential before starting to create our Google Ads campaigns is deciding whom these campaigns are going to be directed to, that is to say, we must carry out segmentation. This way, it will be easier for us to develop and measure the ads that make up our campaigns.

We can establish different segmentation criteria, such as demographics, location, language, and more. Location is quite fundamental because before we set up campaigns with different location targets, we must be aware of the type of business we have and where it will be most in demand. Oftentimes, trying to advertise in a lot of locations can be counterproductive. 

There are also other criteria, like affinity audiences, in-market, remarketing, and similar audiences. With affinity, we will expand the audience to which our campaigns are directed. In-market lets us show ads to users who have searched for products and services similar to those we offer. Often confused with in-market, remarketing is when our ads will be targeted to users who have already interacted with our previous ads. Finally, similar audiences are where our ads will be directed to users with interests related to those of the users who make up our remarketing list.

Our advice is to segment your campaigns as much as you can, this way the chances of the ads reaching quality users is much higher.

Ad extensions

Ad extensions are a very valuable element in our campaigns. They provide useful information for our client and improve the image and quality of the ads. On top of that, they have no additional cost. 

There are many ad extensions, but we consider these to be the fundamental ones:

Location extension

Indicate the address where your business is located and attract customers to your storefront. This is very useful if you have a physical store and want to increase sales at your establishment.  

Call extension

This extension allows you to include a phone number to encourage customers to contact you via a phone call. 

Callout extension

Encourage customers to take action and purchase from your business by adding phrases like ‘free delivery’ or ’24/7 customer support.’

Sitelink extensions

If you want to lead customers to a specific webpage, such as a page on your eCommerce site, you can do so with sitelink extensions. 

Structured snippet extensions

Show customers valuable information by selecting a series of predefined and listed headings (category of our products or services).

Keyword research

Finding the right keywords can be a complicated task, but it is something we must work on since it will refer to the term we want to position in search engines to bring more traffic to our website. To do this, we must conduct keyword research, so we can be as visible as possible on the Internet.

To make this task easier and more bearable, we can rely on tools like the Keyword Planner, which will provide us with a series of keywords to improve our online positioning and make our life a little easier.

Concordance and negative keywords

Once we are clear about the keywords that we will use for our campaigns, we can start working on the matches. These matches will be associated with each keyword and will determine to what extent a keyword has to match the user’s search term. There are a few different match types you can choose for your keywords:

Broad match

The default match type, where our ads will appear in searches that include synonym and related searches. This match will allow us to show an ad in a wider variety of searches, but we must take into account that there is a possibility that it will show our ad to users who are looking for other products.

Exact match

This match will allow us to have more control over who will see our ads since it will only show them when the search includes the keyword or close variations of it.

Phrase match

A phrase match is a middle ground between broad and exact match. Ads will appear on searches that include the concept related to our keyword.

We also have the opportunity to include negative keywords, which will prevent our ads to be displayed when the user enters keywords that have nothing to do with our product, this can be very useful because it will avoid receiving low-quality traffic, and save us costs that will not bring much benefit.

Call to action

One thing we can be clear about at this point is that the text of our ads is going to be a key factor in determining the quality of our ads. The higher the quality of our ads, the more we can maximize our PPC account goals and optimize CTAs. 

Call to action will be used to encourage our customers to perform a specific action, while allowing us to easily attract the attention of users, persuading them, and giving us the possibility to increase our CTR.

Some examples of call-outs that we can use are: ‘Limited offers’, ‘Last day of discounts’ or ‘Register now.’ This can vary greatly from business to business, so we recommend trying different calls to action until you find the one that works best for your ads.

Something closely related to this and quite important is the ad rank, which is a value that will determine whether our ad will be shown and in what position it will appear. Some of the variables used to calculate this value are the number of bids, the quality of the ad, the percentage of expected clicks, and its relevance.

Display ads’ placements

Although search campaigns are the most frequent, we cannot forget our display campaigns either. Something very important is to decide in which locations our ads will be shown.

Google Ads will automatically decide in which websites they will be shown, and unfortunately it is not always right, as there are times when it shows our ads in locations that are not related to our products. What we can do to try to avoid this is to do some research to see which websites will be the most beneficial to show our ads and try to position them there.

On the other hand, Google Ads also allows us to exclude locations, allowing us to prevent our ads from being shown in locations that may be of little interest to us.

Organization and customization of your columns

Being clear and orderly will also help us to improve the performance of our campaigns. To do this, we can reorganize the columns that appear on our dashboard, adding new columns that will help us to perform a more exhaustive analysis of the performance of our campaigns. 

We can also order them from left to right according to the priority we want to give to each metric.

Finally, we are going to leave you some of the metrics that we consider that can be very useful in your Google Ads dashboard:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR 
• Cost
• Avg. CPC
• Conversions
• Conversion rate

Keeping organized will help us to better follow the performance of our campaigns.

In conclusion

I hope these tips have been useful and will help you to make Google Ads a valuable tool to achieve all of your business goals. Finally, I recommend that you look into the free Google Ads certifications, which will allow you to increase your knowledge about the different types of campaigns.

If you have any other useful tips, don’t hesitate to share them with us, we’d love to hear them!