15 Powerful Ways On How To Optimise Your Google Ads Campaigns 2020

Have you been looking at ways to optimize your Google Ads campaigns? By optimizing your Google Ads campaigns, you can help to increase your ROI and lower your costs and ultimately, generate more leads and more enquiries.

I’m going to discuss 15 different ways to optimize your Google Ads campaigns to help you generate more leads, more enquiries, and ultimately, more customers and sales.

To find out check out my video below or keep reading for the full blog.

I do want you to take into account that these 15 points are just a high level overview of what you must do in order to optimize your Google Ads campaigns. There is a lot more that goes into it, but this would be a fantastic start.

Number 1:

Allow your data to build up.

I see a lot of companies that create a Google Ads account and they start optimising it straight away, but they haven’t gotten enough data. If you haven’t gotten enough data, you will not be able to make good decisions. Once an account is created, do some very basic optimisation, but let your account run. Let some conversions come in before you start delving in to optimising your account.

Number 2:

Make sure you use a reasonable date range.

Now again, what happens typically if you optimise your Google Ads campaign and you’ve only got a week’s worth of data. You’re not taking into account seasonality or other external factors which could be influencing your Google Ads account. Use a reasonable data set, either one month, two months or three months and look at the general trends. Sometimes, you can get a bad week or sometimes you could get an exceptionally good week, you don’t know. The best way is to have a reasonable date range. Then use that data in order to make your decisions and at the same time when looking at date ranges, compare the period to the previous period. So if you’re looking at a 2020 January, February, March, look at how 2019 January, February, March performed and then make your decisions.

Number 3:

Look at your device level optimisation.

At a settings level, look at your devices. You’ve got mobile, computers and tablets. How are those each device performing? If you want to get even better, look at campaign level or even ad group level because you’re getting really granular. If you find that most of your conversions are coming from mobile, then increase your mobile bid. if you feel that from computer or tablets, you’re getting a lot of traffic but the traffic is not converting, then put a negative bid adjustment on it.

Number 4:

Try different bid strategies.

For example, you might be using manual CPC and if you are using manual CPC, great. It might be working for you at the moment, but how would your account perform if you were to change that bid strategy to say, target CPA or maximize conversions? It is really important that you carry on testing different bid strategies, you can even use the inbuilt experiments within Google ads so that you can test one strategy against another.

Number 5:

Look for campaigns that are limited by budget.

Now ‘Limited By Budget’ means exactly that, that Google is trying to push out ads to your potential customers but it can’t do it because you’re limited by budget. You have a few options and some of the most popular options are firstly, increase your budget if that’s something that you can do. Failing that, reduce some of your cost per clicks on individual keywords.

If that’s not an option or as well as others options you might like to consider using ad scheduling so that your ads only appear certain days of the week or certain times of the day when you know that you’re more likely to get conversions. You can also get a bit more advanced so that you can try using different bid strategies. Again, from my previous point, you might say, “Okay, I’ve got this set amount budget so what I’m going to do is I’m going to set my bid strategy to maximize conversions.” If I maximize conversions, Google is going to take your budget and it’s going to try to drive you as many conversions as possible within that budget as long as you have enough data.

Number 6:

Step back and look at your account structure.

Make sure that the hierarchy of your account is optimal and organised as much as possible and make sure it’s a logical type of grouping. Start up from ads and make sure the ads are highly relevant to the keywords that are triggering the ads in the first place. Make sure that your keywords are highly relevant to the ad groups so each ad group must have a very specific theme behind it. Likewise, make sure your ad groups are very specific to the campaign that you’re using. By carrying this account structure across, you’re going to get the maximum benefits because Google is going to be able to better serve highly relevant ads to your customers and ultimately, you’ll be paying less per click.

Number 7:

Negative keywords.

Look at your negative keywords to see what keywords you want to exclude from a certain ad group or a certain campaign. Negative keywords are keywords which if someone types in, you don’t want your ad to appear for that particular keyword. For example, you might use the word ‘free’ and if someone typed in ‘free’ like ‘free training’, you don’t want your ad to appear. So you can tell Google that if the word free appears, don’t show my ad.

You can add negative keywords at ad group level and even at campaign level. If you want to get more advanced, you can add at shared library level. Make sure you keep an eye on your negative keywords on a regular basis and keep adding whatever keywords are not relevant to you. Whilst looking at negative keywords, it’s important that you look at your search terms because your search terms is the place where you’re going to find the actual words that people have been typing in and clicking on in order to visit your website.

Number 8:

Review your match types.

We’ve got various different match types from broad match to broad match modifiers, phrase match, and exact match. When it comes to broad match, that’s where your costs are really going to start increasing and you’re going to introduce a lot of irrelevant search terms being driven to your account which you will be ultimately paying for. Wherever possible, try to sway your account more towards exact match because by using more exact and phrase matches, you’re serving your ads to a more qualified audience. If you want to get a bit more advanced and you can start grouping your account so that it is organized by match types.

Number 9:

New keyword opportunities.

Use the suggested keyword tool in order to find new keywords which you may or not already have within your account. When you go to add a new keyword, Google would give you so some ideas about keywords it can add into your ad group. That’s one way to find new keywords, the other way is to look at your search terms again. Now earlier, we discussed making certain search terms into a negative but by looking at search terms, you may also discover new opportunities, new keywords. These are driving the actual conversions but have been added as a keyword. Now by adding them as a keyword, you can have more control over how much you bid for those keywords.

Number 10:

Use audiences.

By using audiences, you can add another layer. As well one of your keywords, you can add into the layer to laser target your potential customers who are in market for your services. For example, if you’re a financial investment consultant, you can have an audience of people who are in market for investment services and by doing so, you know that your ads are going to work far better because you are targeting those who have at some point in time, shown an active interest within investment services.

Number 11:

Look at your remarketing campaign.

A remarketing campaign is campaign whereby you can re-target people who may have visited your website and not converted. In other words, they may not have filled in an enquiry form or contact us form or they may not have purchased. When they go away from the website, you can then show them an ad incentivising them to come back onto your website again. Now this is especially good for high value items. Some of the most common factors as to why remarketing campaigns don’t work is because either you remarketing is too generic. In other words, your retargeting people who have visited any page of your website. What you might like to do is target specific campaigns at specific purposes. For example, a person who was visiting the mortgage page of your website for example and then the ad will be highly relevant to that audience who may have visited the mortgage page.

In some cases, your bid adjustment is not high enough or low enough or it could be that your date range as to your remarketing is either too long or too short. There could be various factors why your remarketing campaign may not be working, but it’s important to analyze the performance of your remarketing campaign.

Number 12:

Review your ads.

Make sure the ad copy is highly relevant to the keywords that are serving those ads in the first place. Not only that, makes sure the structure of your ads so your headline one, headline two, your descriptions have got appropriate keywords in them and are very highly relevant. Make sure your ads are taking people to the appropriate landing page. What you might like to do is look at the ads which are not performing and pause those ads, get rid of them and keep the high performing ads. What I mean by high-performing is those ads that might be bringing the most conversions or they might be bringing the highest amount of conversion rates or they may be bringing you conversions at a really good cost per acquisition or cost per lead.

Number 13

Test your landing pages.

It’s great sending people to various pages but if you find that you’ve got the right keywords, you’ve got the right ad and you’ve checked everything but the conversion rate isn’t brilliant, check your landing pages. It could be that your landing page has not got the right messaging or the copyright or the call-to-actions on them. In some cases, what you might like to do is conduct an AB test. Have another landing page set up and test the first version, the original version, against a new version that you have. That can massively improve your conversion rate.

In order to test your landing pages there are so many ways you can do this but one of the ways you can do it is by creating an something called an Experiment, which is an in-built tool within Google Ads.

Number 14:

Check your extensions.

We have various extensions from site links to price extensions, to call extensions, structured snippet extensions. Your extensions are the links that appear below your main ad. By reviewing your extensions, what you want to make sure is firstly, you’ve got them, which will give you more exposure, your ads are going to look better, you can get a better click through rate. Then look at individual extensions and see how they’re performing. Which ones are performing in terms of bringing you conversions, which ones are not performing in which case you might like to take that out and put a new extension in which may perform better.

You might also want to take a look at what level your extensions are. Are they at account level, campaign level or at group level? Obviously the more lower down the tree, the more granular they’re going to be. You can set a more highly relevant site links or extensions to that particular audience.

Last but not least,

Number 15:

Review your recommendations.

Google gives recommendations but take it with a pinch of salt. Don’t apply everything because you know your business better than anyone else does, not Google. Google is always going to say, “Add these keywords in” or, “Why don’t you do this? Or do that?” etc.

Just because Google has recommended it, it doesn’t mean to say you do it. Take a look at the recommendations that Google is making and use your own business knowledge to actually decide whether those recommendations are relevant. If you do want to apply them, do you want to apply them through the recommendation tool, by clicking on apply or do you want to manually apply them? Or do you want to dismiss that recommendation that you don’t agree with it. It’s okay to dismiss recommendations.

I also have a PPC guide so if you are creating a brand new account, you might like to download it. It’s a really good guide which will help you to create your Google Ads account in a well-structured manner in the first place. Click on the image below and you’ll be able to download it for absolutely free of charge.