Pay Per Click advertising is proven to generate excellent results as part of a full digital marketing strategy, but the key to this success is ongoing optimisation. You can’t hope to deliver a perfect ad to your perfect audience first time, let it run, and never have to look at it again. It doesn’t work like that.
Instead, Google Ads require an approach of continual review and improvement. You must be willing to invest time to adjust and optimise your campaigns, ultimately reducing costs while also improving conversions. As you will see below, this can be done in a controlled manner using this 4-step approach of analysis, prioritisation, action, and control.
Creating a Controlled Approach to Google Ads Optimisation
Optimisation needs structure. You have to be organised and tackle your Ad campaigns in a controlled manner. We do this by following a simple four-step process that starts with analysis and ends with control. By doing this, our optimisations run smoothly, and our time is used effectively.
1. Analyse Data
The first step is analysis. As your campaigns gather more data over time, your Google Ads console has a wealth of analytic data for your campaigns, so it helps to start here. There are a number of third-party tools that can take all of this data and provide actionable insights too, allowing you to utilise the power of AI and machine learning to speed up your optimisation process. You must use this wealth of data and metrics to gain a clear understanding of your PPC advertising performance.
Making sure you are reviewing the right data is imperative, any actions you take from this analysis process will impact the future of your campaigns so you must be sure to understand the data and the implications of any adjustments you are about to make.
When making a judgement on the performance of your campaigns, yes you must consider which split test groups are performing better and which are underperforming, but more importantly, you need to add additional context to your data:
- How do your metrics compare to your industry averages?
- Are your ads meeting your own goals and benchmarks?
- What Target ROAS do you need to ensure each campaign is profitable?
It’s great if you have a low cost per conversion or a high conversion rate, but asking yourself if those metrics are the best they have ever been in your account and how far are you away from your industry benchmarks can give you real insight into the data you are analysing. Without this clear contextual analysis, you cannot hope to optimise your Google Ads campaigns effectively.
2. Prioritise
With your analytics sorted, and clear overview of your Google Ads performance, you now need to prioritise where you place your optimisation efforts. Sure, you could simply try and optimise everything, that generally isn’t the best approach. If your campaign stops generating leads and you have made multiple optimisation activities at the same time, how will you know which action has caused the sudden change? It is much better to prioritise and steadily optimise your Google Ads account over time.
We recommend starting with the 80/20 rule.
Otherwise known as the Pareto Principle, this works under the assumption that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. Or in PPC terms, 20% of your ads will result in 80% of your conversions.
This doesn’t mean that you should completely ignore the 80%. It can simply be used as a means of prioritisation and weighting. Devote more time to your Google Ads that show the most promise and are yielding the best results.
3. Action
With your data organised, and a clear priority assigned for your ads, now’s the time to create an action plan and implement your optimisation strategies. This can include things like testing new bid strategies, improving keyword targeting using keyword research, or testing new ad copy relevant to search intent. It could also be working on new landing pages to help boost your conversion rates.
Your optimisation activities should stem from where in the account you are having issues:
- Your ads aren’t showing in the search results, or they’re not in a prominent position.
- Your ads are showing in the search results, but you aren’t getting enough clicks.
- Your ads are showing, and you are getting a good click through rate, but no one is converting.
So, consider your data, review which of the three issues listed above you want to improve and look at where in the account you can make the biggest difference (using the 80/20 rule).
4. Control
You can’t simply implement optimisation strategies and call it quits. Instead, there must be a control afterwards – a review period.
It’s important to monitor the progress and after each optimisation you should be analysing the results and the impact of your updates. Were the optimisation activities effective? Did they progress the metrics you set out to improve? What worked well and what didn’t go as expected?
By doing this you can strive for continual improvement. Once the control phase is complete, you essentially start again and go back to the analysis phase. With this clear, 4-stage process organised in a structured manner with set timeframes you can continually improve your Google Ads campaigns.
Specific Google Ads Optimisation Techniques
With a targeted approach to Google Ads optimisation, you now need a list of actionable techniques. This is something we can help with too as PPC specialists so if you need help, please contact us to arrange a consultation. Until then, I have listed some optimisation techniques below to provide you with a solid foundation.
Perfect your Ad Headlines and Copy
Keywords are the foundation of Google Search Ads, but for the best click through rates possible, those keywords must be placed within tight Ad Groups with relevant ad copy. You can have the best keywords in the world, but if your ad copy and assets are poorly optimised, your ads will fail.
There are a range of things to consider when creating your ad copy including:
- Try and use your target keyword in the headline.
- The copy and headline match your landing page content.
- Links are used in the correct context to the pages they point to.
- A clear CTA is included in the ad copy.
- The copy is interesting or causes an emotional reaction.
- The copy also reflects the customer search intent.
Creating multiple variations of ad copy and headlines and doing A/B testing is also a great way to optimise your ads. You can test different versions of your ads and see which ones perform the best.
Use as many of the descriptions and headlines as possible and max out you character limits, this will help your ad copy stand out over the other listings on the page and Google prefers original content so try not to duplicate your content.
Make Sure Bidding Strategies are Optimised
A large part of Google Ads is bidding, and this is directly linked to your budget and CPC. You can create a simple optimisation checklist for your bidding strategies including – setting your big spending limits, setting the right goal for your ads, giving priority to higher-converting ads, and utilisation of automatic bidding.
Your bid strategies should be continually monitored for each campaign in alignment with your marketing budgets so you can keep control of your spending and continue to drive costs down while still maintaining effectiveness.
Target the Right Keywords
Keywords are the building blocks of your PPC search ads, and this is one of the first things you must concentrate on for your Ad optimisation. Once you nail the keywords, everything else falls into place.
A simple starting point is to look at which keywords are giving you the best ROI and which ones are performing poorly. Consider pruning the poor performers, while investing more resources into the high-ROI keywords.
Make sure you analyse your search terms report and use the keyword research tool to find those hidden gem keywords that have low CPCs and enough volume to target that you may have not previously considered.
Keep an eye out for search terms that have been matched to your keywords using Google’s close variants, these search terms may be similar to your target keywords but Google is using it’s AI to include same meaning variations, and searches that it deems has the same intent. Although this is continually improving the more we use AI in Google Ads, there are still some occasions where these close variants are all wrong and it needs to be monitored closely.
With your keywords optimised, you can create ad copy that is tailored to them.
Make Sure Your Ads Reflect Your Target Demographic
Hopefully, as part of your digital marketing you have done extensive research on your customer avatar and your target demographic. This research forms the basis of your marketing campaigns and should be utilised across the board – including in your PPC advertising.
Your ad copy and headlines MUST reflect your target demographic. For example, if you are selling products to the public instead of B2B, you shouldn’t use overly complex language and excessive technical jargon.
Similarly, you may choose to use different language when targeting your ads to different age groups or use popular expression and slang if targeting a specific geographical location.
Make Sure Your Ads Reflect Customer Search Intent
When someone types something on Google they have an intent. This could be to research a product, to find a location, to find a professional service or to make a purchase, for example. Understanding the search intent and matching your Google Ads to that intent is a vital part of your PPC optimisation.
Remember that keywords can have multiple search intents too. For example, someone searching for “New Volvo Electric Cars” could be wanting to buy a new car, or they could simply be wanting to research information on which is the best model for them. This about targeting keywords that have the closest intent to what you are offering, so replacing “New Volvo Electric Cars” with “New Volvo EC40 Offers”.
Concentrate on Ads That Work
A common mistake we see businesses making is pouring money and time into strategies that yield poor results, often trying to stretch budgets too far across multiple campaigns.
For example, let’s say that you have two ad campaigns – one consistently performs well and provides above-average conversion rates. The other is struggling to gain traction due to high keyword competition.
Sure, you could spend time trying to optimise the underperforming ad. But wouldn’t it be much more cost and time effective to improve the already successful campaign? You have finite time and resources for your digital marketing – use them wisely.
Make Your PPC Campaigns Streamlined and Optimised with These Strategies
Optimising your Google Ads campaigns offers many benefits such as reduced CPC and CPA, and increased visibility, traffic, and conversions. Ultimately, this is one area of your digital marketing that will run smoother and yield better results.
With your Google Ads optimised and a controlled optimisation strategy in place, you can now turn to other areas of your marketing such as SEO, social media, and email marketing and look to make improvements.
If you need to any help with you Google Ads, feel free to contact us for a strategy session or to discuss your options.
