How successful are your Google Ads in driving clicks and conversions? With strong competition, creating successful campaigns can be difficult. Fortunately, we’ve got 10 secret Google Ads tips, features, and strategies to boost the performance of your search engine marketing campaigns.
1) Setting up conversion tracking
Conversion tracking refers to monitoring conversions and consumer actions. This is important for discovering whether your ad campaign is successfully driving users to conduct a certain action on your site.
Without properly setting up conversion tracking, it can be difficult to effectively judge your performance and success. It’s also impossible to tell which of your ads are driving the most conversions. Without this information, you can lose money on your bidding.
The data that conversion tracking provides helps you to make appropriate changes to your keywords, budget, and bidding to optimise your campaigns. As a result, you can save money on your Google Ads spend, increase conversions and boost your ROI.
To properly set up conversion tracking on your Google Ads account, you need to:
- Define your conversion
- Install the tracking tag
- Choose an attribution model
Setting up conversion tracking will either require adding the Google tag code to your website or getting your webmaster to set up the conversion tracking for you. Find out how to properly set up conversion tracking in your ads account using this guide from Google.
2) Creating a clear structure
If you intend to create multiple campaigns and ad groups, you need a structure that makes organising and managing campaigns as simple as possible. When planning your campaigns, it’s a good idea to use the navigational structure of your website. For example, the main headings would be used for campaigns. Then, use the subcategories of the website to create the ad group structure.
It’s important not to convolute your Google Ads account by advertising every single product or service. This can result in low click rates and potentially high expenses. Consider what are the best sellers or have the highest margin to begin with.
One more point to remember when planning your campaign and ad group structures is to send a user to the specific area on the site that they clicked for. This will help in boosting your quality score and conversions.
3) Extensions
Extensions are another of our Google Ads tips that can help boost the performance of your ads. These appear with your ad on the search results page and are a great way to boost the performance of your ads and gain the attention of potential customers.
Using extensions provides more space and content for your ads. This means they appear larger on the search page and is an effective method of making them stand out for more visual impact. It also provides users with more options to help their search.
Using extensions in your ads is also a great way to boost the quality score of your ads and improve your click-through rate. Site link extensions help your ads to stand out as these increase your ad size the most. You can include a minimum of 8 site link extensions, but the root URL must be the same.
Other extensions you can include:
- Location
- Call
- Sitelink
- Callout
- Price
- App
- Lead form
- Promotion
4) Use negative keywords
If you’re using Google Ads, you may already be familiar with the different types of keywords. Broad match, phrase match, and exact match are all keyword types you should be making use of in your ad groups. However, another keyword type you should also use is negative keywords.
Unlike the other three keyword types, negative keywords are used to exclude search terms, words or phrases that you don’t want your ads to appear for. It’s an ideal way to reduce your spending by eliminating search terms and clicks that don’t deliver a return on investment.
Negative keywords are typically displayed with a negative sign before them, such as “-blueberry”. This means any searches that contain the word “Blueberry” will not cause your ad to show. However, other relevant searches, such as cake, pancake, fruit or flavour, may still appear if relevant.
If your Google Ads account is relatively new, you should be making extensive use of negative keywords alongside broad match keywords. These negative keywords can also either be a broad match or an exact match. It’s good practice to have a 1 to 1 match between positive and negative keywords.
5) Widen your keyword search with Microsoft ads
Carrying out extensive keyword research is something that every successful Google Ads account requires if you want to appear for the search terms your customers are using. However, something that can widen your keyword search is by using Microsoft ads.
In particular, the search terms report in Microsoft ads can provide you with much more data and insights than Google Ads.
As such, you can use their platform to find relevant keywords, either positive or negative, and add those to your Google Ads ad groups. This will help increase the success of your pay-per-click efforts on Google.
6) Bid adjustments
Another of our Google Ads tips that help boost performance is making bid adjustments depending on the success of your ads. Increasing bids for the devices, locations, or times when your ads are performing better improve your success and click-throughs.
Some considerations to make:
- Increase bids for the device(s) that convert well.
- Set higher bids for the areas where you have better performance or more valued customers.
- Ad scheduling can help you increase bids for higher-converting times of the day.
- Audience lists can allow you to bid higher for searchers who have an interest in your products or searches based on their previous search history.
These small changes can make a significant impact on the success of your campaign’s success and efficiency. It also makes sure that you are spending your budget where it’s likely to be more effective.
7) Landing page consistency
The landing page that you send searchers to after clicking your ad is crucial. This is highlighted by the fact that your ad quality score is impacted by your landing page experience. The greater your quality score, the better your ad performance at a lower cost.
The first and most important element of your landing page experience is that there is some consistency between your ad and the landing page. The landing page needs to be consistent with the searcher’s intent by ensuring it helps achieve their goals. This is done by ensuring your landing page mirrors the CTA in your ad text.
Your landing page should also have one clear goal or CTA. This is the action you want a user to take when on the page. To drive the action, your landing page should have a:
- Clear, relevant headline
- Supporting copy that is relevant to the searcher’s needs and intent
- A main headline image
- Optimised page speeds
- A clear and concise form with minimal fields
By ensuring the above, you can help to improve the user experience on your landing page. In return, you should see the quality score of your ads increase.
8) Understand search intent
A big factor that drives your ads and how effective they are at getting clicks is understanding users’ search intent. Every search performed on Google has a reason behind it. This is what is referred to as search intent. There are four different search intents:
- Informational – to find a specific answer
- Commercial – seeking more detailed information about a solution
- Transactional – complete an action, such as purchase
- Navigational – seeking information from a specific place
When it comes to selecting keywords based on search intent for your ads, it’s best to ignore informational keywords. These are typically broad keywords that yield a lower CTR and wasted budget. Instead, you should focus on those that will drive results.
Knowing how you can interpret the potential intent of different keywords in your Google Ads account is vital for ensuring success. This allows you to:
- Target the right keywords that align with high-intent user searches
- Provide high-quality content that delivers on a user search needs
- Yield higher quality scores, click-through rates, and conversions
- Identify and target high-value conversion keywords
- Create a strong negative keyword list
9) Increase your quality score
Quality score plays a vital role in determining whether your ad displays for certain keywords and how much you pay for a click. The higher the quality score, the less you will pay to achieve a higher placement.
Quality score is based on three major factors. We’ve already covered the landing page experience, but the other two major factors are ad relevance and expected CTR. By optimising your ads for a stronger quality score, you are setting yourself up for more success.
Some of the ways you can improve your quality score include:
- Including relevant keywords in your ad copy
- Ad copy and landing page align
- Optimise landing page performance
- Mobile-friendly pages
- Write compelling and genuine copy
10) Google My Business Integration
The last of our Google Ads tips is integrating your Google My Business profile. Connecting your Google Business Profile with your Google Ads account can improve your local search visibility, helping potential customers discover your physical locations and increasing offline conversions.
To integrate Google My Business with your ads account, you need to:
- Ensure the email addresses on both accounts match
- Navigate to the assets area of your Google Ads account
- Create a location extension
- Select a Business Profile Manager account
These Google Ads tips, features, and strategies will help you make the most of your spending and boost performance. As many of these are easy to implement, you can begin to see the impact within just a few days. Always remember that the end goal of your Google Ads effort is to provide value to users’ search queries by ensuring ad relevance and copy align with keywords.