Five Essential Tips to Optimise your Google Ads

Google Adwords is an essential platform for online advertisers as they enable businesses to promote their products and services through Google’s search engine. As of April 2020, Google is reported to have a dominant market share of 86.02% which means that most people prefer to use Google as their search engine. Utilising Google Adwords enables your business to take a cut of that market share and you can promote your products to a wider pool of potential customers.

To use Google ads to its full potential and to make the most out of your campaigns, there are a few main areas you can look at to increase performance and optimise your budgets. Learn our top 5 tips for optimising your Google Adwords campaign below.

Manage Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are a list of keywords that you don’t want to appear for when people are searching for your products or services. Identifying potential negative keywords and adding them to the list will enable your ads to appear for only the relevant keywords that you are targeting. This improves the relevancy of your ads and can also reduce wasteful clicks.

For example, if you’re an official footwear retailer and you are promoting your shoe products, you would want to include negative keywords such as ‘shoe manufacturers’ and ‘shoe repairs’ as they are not relevant to your business and products.

If you’re unsure about what keywords you should add to your negative keyword list, you can find more data in the ‘Search Terms’ section which shows you a list of all of the keywords that people search for to find your products. From this list, you can add any keyword you deem to be irrelevant to the negative list. It’s good practice to regularly check on the search terms to see if there are any new irrelevant keywords that people are using to find your products.

Review Ad Scheduling

Ad Scheduling is a powerful feature in Google Adwords which enables you to control when your ads are visible. This feature enables you to see when your ads are most popular and least popular which enables you to make an informed decision about when you should and shouldn’t show your ads to limit ad spend. With this data, you can turn off the ads during the low periods and enable them during the peak periods. This is also a useful feature for businesses that want to automatically turn off their ads during the weekends if no staff are available to answer calls or enquiries.

You may have already enabled ad scheduling from the start of your campaign, but it’s a good idea to review this data to see if any trends have changed.

Adjust Keyword Match Types

If you find that your ads are spending too much or are not spending enough, then one area you could have a look at is the keyword match types. These are the match types that you have defined during the set up of your keywords. By default, Google will assign ‘broad match’ to your keywords, unless you define this otherwise.

These match types enable you to control how specific your keywords are which will affect how people will see your ads. You can adjust your keywords so that they only appear when people are specifically searching for a keyword or phrase which can help reduce ad spend. If you want to reach a broader audience and get more clicks, then you may wish to use a less restrictive match type to enable more people to see your ads.

To help you understand a bit more about each match type, we have provided more information below.

Broad Match

• Broad match means that your ads may show when people search for a phrase, similar phrase, singular form, plural form, synonym, or misspelling of the keyword. This is great for helping businesses to reach a broader audience but can result in higher ad spend.

Modified Broad Match

• This match type is a restricted version of broad match and it enables your ads to appear whenever someone searches for your defined keywords. For example, ‘+men’s shoes’ uses the modified broad match as it includes the plus sign in front of the keyword. This means that your ads will appear whenever someone searches for a phrase that includes keyword ‘men’s shoes’. If you want a bit more control over your keywords, but still want to target a broad audience, this will be a useful match type.

Phrase Match

• Phrase match enables your ads to show when someone searches for your exactly defined keyword, phrase, or close variations of your exact keyword phrase. For example, if you have defined a phrase keyword – “buy men’s shoes”, your ads will show only when someone’s search includes ‘buy men’s shoes’ or close variations of this phrase, such as ‘buy men’s shoes online’ or ‘how to buy men’s shows’.

Exact Match

• This is the most restrictive match type as it only allows your defined keywords or phrases to appear when someone searches for that exact term or a close variation of the exact term. This includes keywords with the same meaning as your defined keywords, regardless of grammar or spelling. For example, when you define an exact match keyword as [men’s shoes], your ad will only appear when someone searches for ‘men’s shoes’ or a close variant of that keyword. An example of a close variant would be ‘male shoes’. This is a useful match type for when you have a specific product range that you want to promote and want to keep separate from other similar ranges.

A/B Split Testing

While you may have already set up a few ad variants, you may find that they are not performing as expected. If you’re finding that your ads variants are not producing as much as other ad variants in your other ad groups, then you should consider testing new ad copy or even revisiting your landing pages. The AB testing feature enables you to randomly split the traffic between two ads and will allow you to assess the performance of each ad.

You can test a variety of things in your ads, such as the headlines, the ad copy, the landing page link, and the keywords that the ad shows. If your current ads are not focused on driving conversions but you want to make more sales, you could trial more conversion-driven ads. For example, you may wish to try a new headline, such as ‘50% Off Men’s Shoes – Buy Leather Shoes – End of Season Sale’.

After setting up your AB testing, you should let it run for at least one week so you can get quantitative data for analysis and review. You may find that your new ad performs better.

Consider Location Targeting

If you run a local retail shop and want to target specific areas within your locality, then location targeting is the feature for you. Keep in mind that if you can accommodate nationwide delivery or even international delivery, then location targeting may not be needed in this case. If you offer delivery to certain areas in the UK, then you may wish to use location targeting to appear for these areas and not just where your business is physically located.

If you’re selling products to Birmingham, you can use location targeting to set your ads to appear within areas of a country, a radius around a location or a group of locations. You will be able to find the right customers and restrict your ad from appearing in areas that you do not want to target. Setting your ads to appear in Birmingham and perhaps a certain radius around this city, this can help to increase your ROI as your ads will be focused on your target audience.

Contact Us For PPC Management Services

If you’re interested in optimising your Google Ad campaigns and would like a PPC expert to take care of your ads for you, then please get in touch with us. We have years of experience in creating and optimising PPC campaigns for a wide range of sectors.

Call us on 0121 439 5450 or you can send us an email here.

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