If you’re convinced you’ve done everything you can to optimise your Google Ads account – think again!
Here are 5 advanced ways to tweak and refine your paid search campaigns to achieve more conversions whilst keeping your costs as low as possible.
1. Use your data to optimise your ad schedule
Your ads do not need to be live all the time. In fact, showing up 24/7 could be doing your ROI more harm than good.
There will be times and days that typically lead to higher conversion rates for your campaign – and Google allows you to schedule in these ads according to what works best for your business.
Once you have been running your Google Ads campaign for a few weeks, you may notice peaks in traffic and/or sales at certain times of the day, or on certain days of the week. If the data shows you that your landing page is receiving little to no traffic between the hours of 11pm and 7am, you can assume that the majority of your customers are not active online at this time, and you can restrict your ad impressions overnight to save wasting your budget.
Let the data guide you. Really analyse what’s happening with your ads to determine when they should be running. Don’t just base these decisions on clicks alone, either – you need to be looking at the times that clicks are actually converting.
Similarly, if your customers need to call your sales team to place an order, there’s no point in running your ads at times when the phonelines won’t be open. To avoid even more click wastage, make sure your ads only appear when your staff are on hand to handle enquiries.
2. Target in-market audiences
Imagine if you could reach people based on their interests, their browsing habits, their search history, and their recent purchase intent. Just think about how much more effective your campaign would be if you could place yourself right in front of people who, based on their search profile, are much more likely to buy from you.
Well, you can do all this – and much more! – thanks to Google’s new in-market audience feature.
Google collects an awful lot of data about its users, and it has now made it possible for search advertisers to specifically target people who have shown an interest in their products or services in the past – or who otherwise fit the profile of their potential customers – based on how they have behaved on the web to date. In practice, using in-market audiences drives a better ROI by encouraging more qualified traffic to your landing pages, and minimising the risk of your ads being shown to searchers who are nonplussed about what you have to offer.
One thing to note, though: the in-market audience function shouldn’t be used in place of your primary keyword targeting strategy. You should use it to elevate what you’re already doing.
3. Insert dynamic keywords into your ads
The dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) feature in Google Ads lets you create customised ad copy based on the user’s search query. It essentially personalises your messaging for you, without you having to set up and optimise additional campaigns.
It’s powerful AI, because it automatically makes your ads more relevant for each searcher, giving them that your campaign has been entirely tailored to them. From an algorithm perspective, more relevant ads will ultimately lead to a higher Quality Score, which means better position averages and lower click costs – plus, Google tends to be more flexible with its character limitations if a headline contains dynamic keywords, so you could end up with slightly more space in the paid SERPs if you go down the DKI route.
Use the dynamic keywords feature with caution, though. Dynamically generated copy can sometimes lead to your ads being disapproved, especially if the information in the text ends up being inaccurate. Also, using trademarked terms or competitor names in your ad messaging could land you in hot water – so to stay in Google’s good books, leave these out of ad groups with DKI enabled, wherever possible.
4. Set up as many ad extensions as you can
Ad extensions allow you to provide more information about your product or service in your Google Ads listing itself. (They also enable you to take up more space on the page, which increases your ad’s visibility.)
You can add all kinds of extensions to your ads. We would recommend setting up as many as possible, as Google will decide which extensions to use in any given listing based on which snippet(s) it believes will improve your chance of a conversion.
The five most popular ones are:
Location extensions
Location extensions will give users more information about where your business is based (and how far away you are from them; something that’s particularly important for on-the-go mobile searches). They also enable you to add a clickable Call button to your listing.
Callout extensions
These allow you to promote your own offers or USPs. For example, you might want to mention that you’re offering free delivery on all items, or that your business offers 24/7 phoneline support for customers who need help.
Call extensions
Call extensions provide customers with a way of calling you or sending you a text message straightaway.
Sitelink extensions
These link people to specific pages of your website, giving them the ability to reach the information they need without having to click through myriad landing pages.
Price extensions
These give you the opportunity to add an interact price menu to your Google Ads listing, and make it easy for users to find the cost of the precise product or service they’re looking for.
5. Split test your landing pages
You can improve and optimise your campaign settings in an awful lot of ways – but if you’re sending potential customers to an irrelevant, poorly designed or simply ineffective landing page, chances are all your hard work will go to waste!
It’s easy to sabotage your campaign by making simple design and content mistakes. To encourage better conversions, make sure you’re not making a series of landing page blunders that could be hindering your performance.
Better still, start analysing the impact that small improvements are having on the success of your landing pages. Split testing involves creating two versions of a page, using them equally within a campaign, and monitoring the results to see which version generates the most clicks. It’s one of those advanced paid search techniques that’s simple to implement (especially thanks to intuitive tools like Google Optimize yet can provide you with really powerful insights as to the role that the key elements of each page play in getting users to complete your preferred call to action.
How to track your Google Ads ROI
Implementing the tips listed here is only one part of the process. Ideally, you need to be monitoring these tweaks to see if they are leading to a better return on investment.
We recently put together a whole blog dedicated to ways you can track the true ROI from your Google campaigns. Click to discover how to uncover the true value of your paid search efforts using three easy methods.
If you’d rather let the experts manage and optimise your Google Ads account, contact Multi Layer Media today.
We’re offering a FREE Google Ads audit to any business that wants to generate a better return on investment from its paid search strategy.