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In Google Ads, search campaign optimization is not a set-and-forget task. The real work begins after you set up your Google Ads account. It’s the people who commit the time and effort to their accounts that will be successful with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
In this article, we’ll explore the best practices PPC managers should keep in mind if they want to scale Google Ads and want to generate an excellent ROI in Google Ads. In essence, this comes down to three areas:
Let’s get started.
Firstly, check your impression share. More specifically, you need to inspect the Lost Impression Share, as this metric will show you how much you have missed out on due to budget limitations.
Quite often, you reduce the Lost IS (budget) metric by increasing the daily budget in your PPC campaign. For instance, you may have a high-performing ad with a $10 daily budget. By increasing it to $20 per day, you could dramatically improve your impression rate — and also your leads and conversions.
It’s important to consider ROI when deciding whether to increase your budget, as you need to be confident that the extra spend is worth it. Similarly, with ROI in mind, you can identify weaker campaigns or ads, and reduce your spending to save your budget from going to waste.
Ultimately, whichever way you choose to reallocate your budget, the end goal is to scaling Google Ads to generate conversions that have a higher value than your average CPC.
So, if you spend $10 on ad clicks and earn $15 for a conversion, you’ll make a $5 profit, which is an acceptable ROI in this example. If you aren’t earning a positive ROI, then you need to reallocate your budget to address the problem.
Keywords are an integral aspect of search campaign optimization. You must always look for new search terms, and continuously refine your keywords list so that you attract as much quality traffic as possible. PPCexpo provides keyword planner tool to identify best suited new keywords for your campaigns.
After your initial keyword selection, you shouldn’t relax and think that the results will just roll in quickly. PPC advertising success is all about monitoring, analysis, and testing.
Kick your search campaign optimization up a notch by analyzing the performance of your keywords. Doing this gives you the insights you need to decide which keywords are worth keeping and which are worth dumping.
Continue to make minor changes to your keywords bidding strategy until you identify the optimal bid and system for each term on your list.
Just as high-performing keywords can generate a better ROI, low-performing keywords have the potential to hurt your campaign and budget.
When you conduct keyword performance analysis, look for terms that aren’t delivering the traffic, leads, or conversions you expect. It may be best to pause these keywords or remove them entirely.
Negative keywords act as filters for irrelevant traffic, effectively preventing your ad from being shown to unqualified users. You can add irrelevant search terms to your negative keywords list, ensuring you only receive clicks from relevant prospects.
Let’s say you only bid on exact match type keywords. You aren’t happy with your current ROI, so you switch to bid on phrase match and broad match keywords. Before long, you generate a higher impression share, which leads to more leads and conversions.
Exact match type keywords may be closely aligned with user intent, but placing too much focus on these will reduce your scope for keyword discovery. Moreover, it will limit your audience to reach a smaller pool of prospects.
By expanding your scope to experiment with a mixture of phrase match, broad match, and exact match types, you can find a good balance between reach and relevance so that you attract a lot more traffic without spending all your PPC budget on irrelevant clicks and that will eventually scale Google Ads.
The search term report shows you a list of the user search queries that triggered your ads in the past. This report comprises real data from real users, making it a valuable source of information that helps guide your keyword selection and targeting.
More often than not, you’ll discover new keywords that drive traffic, many of which you would never have considered before. Many of these terms will be irrelevant, but there will be some highly-valuable terms you can add to your ad group to boost traffic. Just be careful not to create bloated ad groups that target too many keywords.
This feature allows you to connect with your ideal audience or potential customers with a perfectly customized message at precisely the right time and location.
Google Ad Customizers save advertisers time spent regularly updating ads. At the same time, they dramatically improve advertisement performance and help to capture customers further down the marketing funnel. When used correctly, this feature will likely boost your performance due to increased CTA, relevancy, and quality score.
Some PPC managers opt for a change in tactics when they want to get more conversions. You should know that switching from manual bidding to automated bidding (or vice-versa) will not necessarily yield a higher conversion rate.
PPC advertising is a complex environment with many factors in play. You must think about your competition, your keywords, quality score, and many other aspects. Changing your bidding strategy is not a quick fix!
Learn More: Manual Bidding vs. Automated Bidding: Essential Knowledge
When you’re scaling your ads account, you can learn from your competition. Finding new keywords is good, but don’t dive in headfirst when you find a potential new keyword.
Research your competitors to identify the keywords they currently target. You can do this by using paid tools like Ahrefs or KWFinder, which will help you find valuable keywords that drive a lot of traffic for your competitors. Better yet, you can identify keywords that your competitors aren’t already targeting.
You can also increase the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaign by focusing on your landing pages — the more engaging and relevant they are, the more likely it is that visitors will convert.
You don’t need to tailor a landing page to every single keyword, but if you have ten keywords for “dog grooming” and ten keywords for “dog food,” you should have two separate landing pages that focus on each product.
By segmenting your keywords into related groups, you can target a smaller but more focused group of people. Once you have their attention, use your landing page to drive them to action.
What’s the ultimate goal? A phone call, visit, newsletter sign-up, or Facebook page like? Tailor everything on your landing page to accomplish that goal.
You can reach more people with ad extensions that help your ads stand out from the pack in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
Some examples of ad extensions include:
Generally speaking, ad extensions help your ads earn a higher CTR, which typically leads to more traffic, leads, and conversions.
How to Scale Google Ads? Search campaign optimization is an ongoing process, so PPC managers should expect to optimize more with every new ad they create. As you optimize more, you should aim to increase some core metrics. One of the best to target is to know what is a good CTR.
On the surface, a CTR increase from 1% to 2% may not seem like a big accomplishment. However, if you can double your CTR without a notable increase in your CPC rate, then that’s excellent news for your bottom line.
Your ads must be relevant to users in order to generate conversions. Having a high CTR means little if it doesn’t translate to conversions. You should provide relevant information on your landing page that correlates with your ad. Doing this will improve your chances of getting conversions.
Quality Score is a crucial factor in PPC campaigns. If your score is too low, Google will show your ads to fewer people. Conversely, having a high-quality score is likely to help you reach a bigger audience.
Try A/B testing several versions of your landing pages with variations in headlines, images, and call-to-action (CTA) text. With proper analysis, you can optimize these elements to create an enhanced version of your content — and boost your Quality Score at the same time.
Ideally, your ads will be designed for a specific audience with defined interests. However, there is no guarantee that your ads will display 100% of the time when these users search for the solutions you offer.
Let’s say your ad had 100 opportunities to display, but it gets triggered 80 times. That would mean you have an 80% search impression share.
If you want to increase your search impression share, look to your ad copy, CTAs, and headlines. Think about how you can make your ads more appealing to click. You must know which ad format is good for you campaign goal. When you figure out how to increase your CTR, your Quality Score will benefit, and eventually, so too will your search impression share.
If you can provide services on a larger scale like on state and country-level then don’t stick with to promote your campaign on city levels. Focus on different areas and cities and expand your reach. Also, different timings and scheduling will help to target more audiences.
If you want to reach a bigger market, all that may be needed is a simple change in the language you use in Google Ads.
Your target audience may be fluent in more than one language. So, you should keep that in mind, as you may need to create several variants of your ads to target each separate language.
If you have already created ads and landing pages in English, it makes sense to target English-speaking users. However, selecting additional languages will tell Google Ads to display your ads to more users, which can help you generate more leads, even if English isn’t their first language.
You may have a high-performing campaign that is currently only for desktop users. When you go to scale up, the logical step is to target users on mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones.
Before you launch these new campaigns, take the time to review your ads and landing pages on all devices. You need to be sure that you offer a user-friendly experience across all target devices. Even after the campaign launch proper device performance analysis is important to know which devices to target and on what time.
RLSA is a Google Ads feature that enables you to target your previous site visitors. Through data and automation, you can scale your campaigns by serving ads to people that have already expressed some interest in your site, brand, or products and services.
Remarketing is an effective method of search campaign optimization now, as warm prospects are more likely to convert when they see ads from a site they know. With the RLSA strategy, you can target obscure keywords solely to attract specific prospects that use that search term.
Doing this facilitates high-level targeting, which makes your ads more relevant and engaging for these users. You must have idea of Google Ads Remarketing Best Practices.
Many businesses worry about quiet periods in the year, where consumers aren’t interested in buying anything. However, if you pay attention to seasonal events, you can maximize your returns with smart marketing campaigns.
For example, you could run seasonal ads in the run-up to Christmas, Black Friday, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, or the Summer holiday period.
Depending on your products and services, you can tailor ads and brand messaging to engage more people around these times, attracting more interest in your range with timely discounts and promotions.
Speaking of promotions, you don’t need to wait until there’s a big day on the calendar to run one. Good advertising is all about testing out new ideas, so you can use Google Ads to reach audiences with special offers all the time.
For example, you may offer free shipping on orders over $50, or a discount code or complimentary gift when people sign-up for your newsletter.
Continue to try out promotional offers on a regular basis to see what works for your brand and audience.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to improve your search campaign optimization. These steps are by no means a strict structure, so feel free to pick and choose ideas from the list.
If you do have the time to try them all, you’re sure to see some significant results. You can learn more about search campaign optimization in our blog with 5 Core Areas and 20+ Tricks.
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