Google Ads is the world’s largest and most popular PPC advertising platform.
According to The Social Shepherd, when compared to other search engines, Google leads the way with 83.49% of the market share. In the UK alone, Google has a market share of 93.69%.
The tips in this post will help you improve your Google Ads performance.
If you are unsure that Google Ads is the right advertising platform, reading this post will help you identify the best platform for your business.
So let’s dive in:
1) Target the right audience
Google Ads is a powerful tool that allows you to reach almost everyone because of its many marketing channels like search engines, YouTube, Gmail, partner websites and apps, etc.
Therefore, it’s crucial to target the right audience within your campaign.
Make sure your marketing plan targets the potential customers you want to reach.
If you don’t set your targeting correctly, you may waste your marketing budget on irrelevant audiences.
The ways you can target audiences on Google Ads are:
- Using Audience Segments: It includes demographics, in-market segments, affinity audiences, and life events.
- Creating Custom Segments: It includes Customer Match, website visitors, similar audiences, and more.
- Keyword targeting: You can target your target audience based on specific terms they are searching for.
2) Use Negative Keywords
If you use keyword targeting, it’s important to use Negative Keywords.
Negative Keywords help prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches.
For instance, if you sell new expensive clothes, you might want to add “used” or “cheap” as negative keywords so you don’t waste your budget on people not looking for your products.
3) Consider Google Ads Recommendations
Google Ads utilizes an AI system that analyzes your campaign regularly to suggest whether an optimization action is required.
These recommendations can be a good starting point for improving your campaign performance. Before applying, you should review them because sometimes it can harm your campaign instead of helping.
What kind of recommendations you can expect:
- Bidding strategy recommendations like switching to a bid strategy focused on conversions and return on ad spend (If you have active conversion tracking).
- Bid adjustment recommendations based on Google’s insights
- Keywords and targeting recommendations like adding negative keywords, expanding your reach with Search partners, removing non-performing keywords, adding new keywords, and utilizing ad extensions.
- Ads and creative recommendations like testing different ad variations, and improving your ad copy.
- Budget and optimization recommendations like increasing/decreasing your budget, optimizing your landing pages, etc.
4) Focus on ROI (Return on investment)
Advertisers often focus mainly on performance indicators such as clicks, cost per click, impressions, and CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) rather than ROI, which is the true KPI (Key Performance Indicator).
Since what matters most to you as a business owner or advertiser is what your business will gain from the PPC campaign, you should track sales or conversions to understand whether your campaign is profitable.
Find out how to have the lowest cost per result in PPC by reading this post.
5) Optimize your landing pages
Getting relevant people to click on your ads is the first step in the sales funnel.
The second step is to make them perform a desired action on your landing page, like submitting a lead form, purchasing a product, or calling a number.
That’s why you should focus on optimizing your landing pages and try different variations instead of just switching ad variations.
A great tool that can help you optimize your landing pages is Hotjar, which lets you analyze users’ behavior on your website.
To conclude
Google Ads can be a highly profitable advertising platform for your business. However, using it correctly is crucial if you don’t want to waste your time and budget on reaching irrelevant audiences that don’t help your business grow.
Choosing the right digital marketing agency or PPC campaign manager who knows Google Ads well will allow your business to grow and maximize its return on investment.
