You did the research, got the keywords, wrote compelling ads and created a kick-ass Google Ads campaign. What’s the next step? With it’s powerful machine learning, Ads is already pretty good at automatically optimising campaigns and creating recommendations for you to action; but there’s always more you can do. Take a look at some of our quick Google Ads Optimisation tips for improving campaign effectiveness.
*Note: These are GENERAL tips. Evaluations and optimisations that you perform will have to be tweaked according to the specific goals of your campaign.
*Another note: It’s good to review campaigns for optimisation after they’ve been running for some time (about 6 months or longer) so that enough historical data has been collected in order to make informed assumptions and decisions.
Step 1: Evaluation
1. A good place to start is by looking at some Reports to see how the ads have been performing.
Some useful reports worth looking at include:
- Search terms
- User locations
- Geographic
- Landing page experience
- Paid & organic
- Attribution
Feel free to browse the other types of Reports available, as the relevance of each one will be based on your campaign goals.
2. Look at your conversion tracking to see:
- Which ad(s) are working best
- Who your most interested demographic is
- Which time of day/week your ads are getting the most clicks/conversions
3. Look at traffic, CTR and conversions across devices in order to gain insight on which devices your audience is using to search.
4. Look at the Click Through Rate (CTR) to see if the ads are actually interesting enough for people to click on.
Step 2: Optimisation
Base your optimisation on the feedback gained from your evaluation. That said, here are some optimisations that can apply to most campaigns:
- Adjust bids according to device type. For example, if you find that 80% of your users are searching from their mobile device, make a positive bid adjustment for mobile devices.
- Add negative keywords if necessary to prevent your ads from being shown on an irrelevant search.
- Remove low-performing keywords.
- Adjust bids for the most valuable keywords.
- If CTR is low, create and test some new ads with different copy to see if they are more compelling to click on.
- Depending on your insights, you can schedule ads to show at the most lucrative/effective times of day.
- Target ads better towards your most interested demographic by creating Audiences.
- Check out the ‘Opportunities’ page and ‘Keyword insertion’ suggestions that the Google Ads machine learning will recommend after the campaign has been running for some time.
If you’re looking to delve deeper into Google Ads optimisation, you can check out Google Ads’ Help Centre or their Academy for Ads; both resources have a wealth of information on the topic.
If you’re new to Google Ads and want to learn the basics, check out this ultra neat 1-hour course on creating effective Google Ads campaigns by our very own Chris De Bruyne that will get you up and running in no time.
That said, don’t forget that Seventh Season provides professional Google Ads marketing services and takes care of your online marketing admin while you focus on running your business. Contact us to get started.
