Tips for improving Google Ads performance
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Google Ads are among the most popular forms of digital advertising and can appear in different sizes and places on Google’s results pages, allowing for flexibility and visibility. They blend seamlessly with organic results, generating higher levels of clicks than traditional banner ads or pop-ups.
Like SEO or SEM, Google Ads can be optimized and improved. We’ve asked eight experts to share their best Google Ads tips for improving your campaign performance. Plus, six best practices to apply to all your Google Ads campaigns for maximum efficiency.
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It always helps to have a professional opinion on how to optimize your PPC marketing. So, we’ve gathered eight tips for making the most of your Google Ads, according to marketing experts.
SEO and SEM are sometimes looked at as mutually exclusive marketing methods. The truth is, they’re much better when they work together.
If you’re looking to improve PPC performance, take a look at organic search results. You’ll likely gain some insights about organic click-through rates (CTRs) and PPC ad copy, as well as organic conversions and PPC quality scores.
For example, if a PPC ad for a particular keyword generates a high CTR, that could indicate an opportunity to update the meta description of a blog post targeting the same keyword. The crossover of the efforts is immense. Take the necessary steps to integrate PPC and SEO.
Brett Farmiloe, Markitors
Lawyer keywords can reach cost-per-click levels of $150-$200 per click. Advertisers must be hyper-specific with their target locations to avoid paying those high amounts. Get granular with Maps in Google Ads. Select the exact areas nearest to your service areas to see an increase in conversions and to help your ad budget go further.
Court Will, Will & Will
Negative keywords enable advertisers to exclude specific search terms from advertising campaigns, allowing you to focus on only the search terms that matter to your business. By monitoring campaign activity and adding in negative keywords, campaigns can achieve better targeting with an increase in your return on investment.
For example, there are 125 Cruise America rental centers in the United States, Canada, and Alaska from which you can depart. But Hawaii is not one of those locations. By adding “Hawaii” as a negative keyword, we can make sure our ads stay relevant to the locations we service.
Randall Smalley, Cruise America
If I had to summarize a strategy for Google Ads, it would be to focus on the attributed revenue and CAC (customer acquisition cost) rather than CTRs (click-through rates), CPCs (cost per clicks), CPAs (cost per acquisition) and other funnel metrics.
The point of pay-per-click, simply put, is to invest dollars and receive a return on investment. Many marketers get caught up in optimizing top-of-funnel metrics, but if good CTRs don’t actually contribute to revenue, then is that metric really worth it?
Janelle Amos, Head of Demand Gen
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Few people use the “recommendations tab” in Google Ads, where you can get recommendations for optimizing your campaign. There, you will also observe the “optimization score,” which is powered by a machine-learning algorithm to produce a score about how well your campaign is optimized for performance. Select and act on the recommendations that you find to be relevant.
Rameez Ghayas Usmani, PureVPN
The best tip I can give is to research what your competitors are doing and use that as a basis for your strategy. There is absolutely no reason to reinvent the wheel when it comes to PPC. Plenty of tools like Ahrefs or iSpionage let you see the copy, image, and landing pages of competing ads. Even better is when you find an ad that has been running for a while, as it almost always means it is delivering results.
Quincy Smith, ESL Authority
The best way to improve a Google Ads performance is by optimizing the Click-Through-Rate (or CTR). I suggest putting promotion extensions that highlight deals, exclusive offers, and discounts on your site. Customers are likely to click on ads if they know your business is doing a promotion.
Highlighting any discounts, sales, or exclusive offers in your ads helps entice customers to learn more about your ad, increasing their likelihood of clicking on it. The increased CTR rate for visitors to your promotion page translates to higher revenue.
Yaniv Masjedi, Nextiva
In order to ensure our mobile site loads quickly, we compress our images. This ensures that all our images are optimized for site speed while still retaining image quality. We also took steps to minify all our liquid code while trimming down the total number of scripts being called.
Removing unnecessary assets on some pages while reducing image assets on others helped reduce site load time as well. We also started to use AMP on our blog pages, which reduced page speed load time to under one second.
As a result, we’ve seen a 20% lift in traffic to our blog. Bringing more traffic to our blog increases the likelihood of making a sale as customers continue to navigate through the site.
Brian Lim, INTO THE AM
In addition to the expert-given Google Ads tips, here are a couple of additional best practices for crafting an effective Google Ads campaign.
Having concrete SMART goals for your campaign is the first step to mastering Google Ads. Any digital marketing campaign you plan needs an aspirational but doable goal, and a Google Ads campaign is no different.
Think about what you want to achieve with your campaign. Do you want to earn more leads, increase your click-through rate, or improve your conversions?
Once you have a general idea of what you want to gain from using Google Ads, turn that goal into a number – something that can be measured. This will be the measuring stick and compass for guiding your PPC efforts.
With a small window of opportunity to make an impression, your headline needs to be clickworthy. Focus on using sound copywriting techniques to appeal to the reader’s desires, emotions, and curiosity through your headline.
A good metric to measure your headline writing is the 4U formula, as follows:
If your headline hits at least one of these points, it’s miles ahead of those that don’t. If you hit three or four, you’re almost guaranteed a growth in click-through rate.
First of all, make sure that the promise in your Google Ad corresponds to what the reader lands on when they click on it. Not properly connecting your ad with your landing page will increase your bounce rate since readers will feel like they’ve been duped.
Make sure your landing page is up to date and that changes you make to your ads are also reflected on the page.
It’s also important to satisfy your readers’ eyes with a beautiful, modern landing page design. Numerous free and paid tools allow you to design it yourself, or you could employ the services of a good web designer or design agency.
The initial click-through doesn’t always mean a conversion, but it does indicate interest. That’s where a strategic retargeting campaign can help keep you at the top of the minds of people who’ve clicked away because they need time to consider your offer.
Retargeting is a great way to ensure that no lead slips through the cracks while maximizing the return on your PPC ad spend.
In your Google Ads dashboard, you can add extensions to your ad that show readers more information about your business, such as your location, products, contact information, and current promotions.
Using these extensions strategically can optimize your conversion rate by giving readers the information they need to convert without having to look for it on the landing page.
For example, if a person is looking for garden equipment rentals and needs to rent as soon as possible, having your phone extension allows them to connect with you from their phone immediately. Promotions and guarantees, such as ‘Same-day rentals,’ can also assure them that you’re the business they can turn to.
Embrace experimentation when it comes to your ads. Test different visuals, headlines, CTAs, and more to find the sweet spot that leads to the highest conversions and helps you reach your goals faster.
You can do this through A/B testing, also known as split testing. This method allows you to run different versions of your ad concurrently and gather data on what may be working for your ads, allowing you to pivot and adjust your strategy as needed.
Even with so many online ad options available, Google Ads is still an excellent option for generating cold traffic. If managed correctly, a well-targeted Google Ad campaign can deliver significant ROI on your initial investment.
The pricing for Google Ads depends on various factors, such as your industry, keyword targeting, competition, and ad network. That said, Google Ads costs generally range from $100 to $10,000 per month, and most businesses will pay $0.11 to $0.50 per click.
Generally, it takes about 3 months for a Google Ad campaign to mature and 4 to 12 months to develop into a profitable campaign. This number can vary, with some businesses seeing quicker results than others. Patience is the key to seeing results.
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