22/07/2023 • Thomas Chappell
How to optimise your PPC ads in Google Ads
PPC Article
TL;DR:
Organising your account structure is crucial, involving campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords. Choose relevant keywords aligned with your offerings and use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant clicks. Craft compelling ad text, highlighting customer benefits, and using seasonal trends. After setting up your campaigns, optimise your bidding strategy for better performance. Manual bidding offers more control, while bid adjustments allow flexibility. Employ A/B testing, regularly update ad copy and extensions and conduct an Ad Quality Review for enhanced campaign performance.
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A Simple Guide To Google Ads Optimisation
As the world’s largest and most widely used online advertising platform, Google Ads has helped millions of advertisers to reach new customers and grow their businesses.
However, for all the ease and accessibility promised by Google advertising, many newcomers to paid search find themselves disappointed by the results of their first campaigns. Why? Because they haven’t properly optimised their Google Ads account.
Google Ads optimisation can be intimidating at first, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, optimising a Google account can be much easier than you might think. All it takes is a little planning and preparation, as well as adhering to some well-established PPC best practices.
In this article, we are going to take a deep dive into ad optimisation and how we make our ads perform the best that they can within your account. We will look into how to set campaigns and ads up optimally then how to control them and tweak them from there.
Building An Effective Account Structure
Of all the various elements you can optimise within Google Ads, the actual structure of your account is arguably the most important.
Poorly structured accounts can lead to a range of problems, from lower Quality Scores – and the higher costs often incurred as a result – to fewer or irrelevant clicks. The key to an optimally structured account is organisation, and by spending a little time properly structuring the elements that make up your Google Ads account, you’ll be in great shape to start reaching prospective customers with your ads.
Most accounts are comprised of four main elements:
- Campaigns
- Ad groups
- Ads
- Keywords
A single Google Ads account can have multiple campaigns active at any one time. There could be a mix of campaign types targeting across the Google network such as search campaigns targeting users using Google search for specific queries or Display campaigns which favour more visual ads like banners across the vast network of sites that span almost the entirety of the web.
Moving further down into a Search account structure, you’ll have Ad Groups which, as their name implies, are groups of ads that have been organised and categorised by semantic relevance. This means that your ad groups’ keywords should be organised by their meaning or theme.
Finally, each Ad Group will have its own keywords, as well as multiple ads that feature the semantically related keywords of that ad group.
Structuring a Google Ads account in this way offers a range of benefits. Not only does this approach make managing your account easier, it also ensures your ads and their related ad groups are as relevant as possible. This, in turn, means that your ads will be shown to the right people, at the right time, in the right place. There are other considerations to be taken into account besides account structure when it comes to the visibility of your ads, such as bidding strategies, keyword match type, and other targeting parameters, but structuring your account logically and semantically should be the first step in any Google ads optimisation workflow.
Choose keywords that reach qualified buyers
Taking a closer look at your keyword list can help you reach your potential customers, reduce your costs, and increase your return on investment.
Align keywords with your product/service offerings:
Make sure the keywords within your campaign are relevant to the service/product you offer. This will help people find your ads quickly as the quality score of your ads will improve, allowing the ad to rank on the first page. You can also add your product/service as a keyword so people searching for it will find your ad.
Understand the research and buying process:
Try to understand what stage of the buying cycle a user might be in. This can then influence what match type you wish to use on your keywords (exact, match, or broad). It can also influence the keyword itself. For customers more likely to convert, they may use terms such as "... to buy" or "... for sale."
Use negative keywords:
Negative keywords let you filter out clicks that are less valuable to you. There are two main tools that you can use to find negative keywords—the Keyword Planner and the search terms report. For example, you might discover that the name of one of your products is also the name of a musical group. In this case, you can add negative keywords such as a concert, ticket, lyric, album, or mp3.
Make your ads appeal to potential buyers
A successful ad is relevant and impactful. It delivers the right message at the right moment, motivating your customer to purchase with a strong call to action.
Set your ad apart from your competition:
Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to see which ads are showing for a particular search. Your ad text should quickly convey how your business stands out, so featuring competitive prices and special promotions can be especially effective.
Highlight the customer benefit:
Give customers more incentive to purchase by conveying how they'll benefit by choosing your business.
Keep it simple and specific:
Focus on 1-2 selling points for a stronger impact. If you try to pack too many selling points into your ad text, your message can get lost.
Use a landing page that drives sales:
Your ad should bring people directly to a page where they can buy the specific product you're advertising. The higher the quality score (the connection between the landing page and ad), the more likely you are to generate sales.
Run seasonal ads:
Customise your ads to fit the season and the promotion you're running. Take advantage of seasons (summer, winter, "back to school") and specific holidays (Valentine's Day, Halloween, etc.) to promote your product/service. These seasonal trends can be explored through Google Trends.
Use title case:
Capitalising the first letter of every word can help boost clickthrough rates.
Use ad assets to enhance your ad:
Take advantage of ad assets to show extra information about your business.
Optimising Your Campaigns
In this section, we look at how to optimise your campaigns after the set-up period. Depending on your daily spend, you want to let your campaigns run for around a month to allow for the account to gather enough data to give actionable insights that show where optimisation is needed.
Google Ads Bid Optimisation
Google’s bidding options are highly granular and nuanced, allowing you to exercise a great deal of control over how and when you bid on the most valuable keywords for your business. However, since your bidding strategy has a direct impact on how your ad budget is allocated and spent, it’s vital to adjust your bidding settings carefully.
Bidding in Google Ads can be handled manually, but it can also be automated through Google Ads scripts (small snippets of code typically written in JavaScript that perform specific tasks automatically) and conditional triggers or through Automated Bidding strategies which will adjust bids based on bidding signals at ad auctions (e.g. bidding more on keywords targeting mobile traffic or certain kinds of mobile devices, bidding less on keywords during specific times, and dozens of other parameters).
As important as bid management is to any Google Ads optimisation, it’s important to note that utilising the right bidding strategy isn’t just a way to ensure your ad budget is being spent wisely – it’s also important from a performance standpoint.
Adjust your bid manually for closer control
If you're new to Google Ads, using automatic bidding is a simple way to manage your cost-per-click (CPC) bids. As you get more detailed insights on what's working for you, you might want further control of your bids. In this case, you can consider using manual bidding, which allows you to adjust bid amounts for individual ad groups or keywords.
With manual CPC bidding, you can fine-tune your maximum CPC bids. If you find that certain keywords are more profitable to your account, you can bid more strategically on those keywords. Here are a couple of ways to do so:
- Increase your bids to show on the first page: To increase the chances of your ads showing on the first page, make sure your bids are the same as or higher than the first-page bid limit. Bidding competitively in the auction is an important part of getting your ads to show in the most visible spots.
- Use bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids: A bid adjustment represents a percentage change in your bids. You can increase or decrease every bid in your campaign to bid more or less across devices, locations, and across your ad schedule. This is especially helpful when trying to take advantage of a high-performing part of your campaign, such as a specific location. It can even help increase performance in a low-performing part of your campaign, for example, a certain time of day within your ad schedule.
Optimisation Methods for Enhanced Campaign Performance
At 43 Clicks North, we understand the importance of optimising your campaigns to maximise their effectiveness. Here are some of the top optimisation methods you can apply to your Google Ads campaigns:
- A/B Testing: Utilising A/B tests within the "experiments" tab of your Google Ads sidebar allows you to test various elements within your account. Conducting tests on Ad Copy, Campaign Settings, and Keywords can provide valuable insights. For meaningful results, it's recommended to run the tests for a minimum of 30 days. This duration allows for sufficient data collection, enabling you to make informed decisions on whether to implement the test findings into your account.
- Ad Copy & Extension Updates: Regularly updating your ad copy and extensions is crucial for staying relevant in your market. By making monthly changes, you can align your messaging with current trends, seasons, events, and competitor activities. This ensures that your copy always feels fresh and engaging to your target audience.
- Ad Quality Review: Conducting an Ad Quality Review involves navigating to the "ads" tab on your sidebar and customising the columns to include the "ad strength" column. Sorting your ads based on their ad strength allows you to assess their performance. Ideally, you should aim for "Excellent" ad strength, although "Good" is also acceptable. If your ads are rated as average or poor, it's essential to improve them. This can be achieved by refining your ad copy, unpinning ineffective elements, or strategically incorporating keywords. For example, if you're promoting a gaming PC, consider adding {Keyword:Gaming PCs} to ensure that your ad appears when someone searches for that specific keyword.
Conclusion
At 43 Clicks North, we know that Google Ads optimisation is essential for achieving success in online advertising. By following the strategies outlined in this guide, you can set up a well-structured account, reach your target audience with relevant keywords, and create impactful ad text that drives conversions. Remember to optimise your bidding strategy to make the most of your ad budget and experiment with different elements through A/B testing. Continuously update your ad copy and conduct regular Ad Quality Reviews to stay competitive in the market. With these optimisation methods, you'll be on your way to maximising the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaigns and scaling your performance.
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