Google Ads optimization: 10 actionable ideas to get the most for your budget

As well as what to look out for with Google ads

Are you tired of spending hundreds of dollars on online advertising without results? Many small businesses fall into the trap of poorly planned Google Ads campaigns and sacrifice a large part of their marketing budget without getting anything.

If you recognize yourself in the above lines, drink a cold water and calm down. There is a solution, and it's not to forget about Google Ads as a source of traffic and conversions. The key word here is "optimization." Or how to get the best results for the budget you have.

Today we will share with you a few tricks based on our real professional experience. These are how we get our ads in front of the right audiences, show them exactly what they're looking for, and ultimately reap the rewards of our labor in the form of conversions and satisfying metrics.

When optimizing your Google Ads, you should pay attention to three elements:

• Campaign structure and type - whether you use Search, Display, Smart or other types of advertising and how you organise the different ad groups matters.
• Keywords - which ones you add and which ones you remove is also essential.
• Advertising text and design - what consumers see is your communication with them, so be persuasive and try to anticipate their needs.

And now we're going to go into a little more detail and share with you our 10 tried and tested ideas for optimizing Google Ads.

1. Allocate the budget correctly

In order to allocate your budget properly in the first place, you need to know what your goals are with your advertising strategy and which type of campaigns are the best choice for your business - whether Search, Display, Video or other.

Once you've established the basics, remember a few subtleties from us:

• If you are running Search and Display campaigns, don't split the budget equally, but ideally choose an 80/20 ratio in favour of search campaigns.
• For best results with a Display campaign, use retargeting of an existing audience in the form of a product catalog.
• Don't fragment your budget between many campaigns at once, but allocate it wisely. For example, the campaign with the highest return on investment (ROAS) should logically get the most funding.

2. Try Performance Max campaign

Performance Max is a new type of Google Ads campaign that uses artificial intelligence to automate the display of adaptive ads across the major networks of Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and more.

These campaigns aim to reach as much of your audience as possible across channels with optimised advertising content and "smart" budget spend.

Performance Mach campaigns save time and money and are extremely valuable for businesses with clear goals but limited resources.

3. Organize campaigns and ad groups correctly

Getting the campaign right is critical to spending the budget appropriately and getting good results.

Pay attention to the individual campaigns and ad groups within them, building them according to the product categories on your website and their appeal to your audience.

For example, if you have product categories that are very popular, it's a good practice to put them in separate campaigns. The same goes for categories that are not so sought after and therefore the advertising aims to boost interest in them.

The other product categories can be grouped into a common campaign.

An additional trick to make sure your budget is spent wisely is to use bids in ad groups. By using them, you can balance your traffic and redirect it from the more popular categories to the others so that they also get an equal chance of exposure.

4. Pay regular attention to keywords

A few best practices to follow here are:

• Use long-tail keywords - despite the lower search volume, they are more specific and have less competition. Focus on keywords that express some intent, ideally one to buy. You can get ideas for relevant long-tail keywords from the search terms report.
• Check the search terms report weekly - it will tell you what searches your ads are coming up for and what keywords to include or exclude from your campaigns.
• Review keywords and their performance regularly - when you see that a keyword isn't selling or the cost per click and conversion is too high, you can make the decision to stop it. However, it's important to test each keyword long enough to be sure of the results you can expect from it. It's best to let it collect at least 150-200 clicks before deciding what its fate should be.
• Use negative keywords - add and remove from this list according to what is relevant to your business style and audience. For example, if you're selling sofas for £15,000, it hardly makes sense for your ads to come up on a search for 'second hand sofa olx'. That's not your audience and there's no point spending your money on expensive clicks that won't result in conversions.

5. Ensure that landing page content, ad text and user searches match

Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer - you're looking for a serum for skin imperfections, you see an ad for the same thing, you click on it, and you're taken to a product category page for skin imperfection serums from different brands. You browse, you choose, you order satisfied that smooth skin was just a few clicks away.

Now imagine you're looking for a Korean face mask. An ad comes up for a website that offers face masks, you click through, but it turns out that this isn't your place - there's nothing Korean there, and you close the page disappointed. That click has cost the advertising business:

• Money;
• decrease in the engagement rate of the page;
• visitor satisfaction;
• a drop in the Quality Score of the ad, which is taken into account by the algorithm and affects the cost per click.

To keep both users and the algorithm happy, it's important to make sure that the ad text, keywords, and landing page content match what users are searching for.

6. Follow Google's recommendations, but with one thing in mind

Google pretends to be your friend all the time, wanting you to get the best results with your ads. This is somewhat true because in order to continue using the platform, it's important to be happy with it.

Remember one thing though, all the optimization recommendations Google gives you are tied to increasing your advertising budget. An interesting experiment you can do is to raise the amount for a specific campaign by a very small amount, for example by 10 pennies. You'll notice that the optimization rate goes up, and this gives a positive signal to the algorithm and leads to better results.

7. Test reasonably

Play with the titles, the descriptions, the design, the extensions and see what works best for your business.

The same applies to the budget - you can decrease and increase it according to your needs and possibilities, but in order not to shock the algorithm, change it by no more than 15-20% per day at the campaign level.

Again, it is important to leave each campaign active for a sufficient amount of time (at least a month) before you decide to stop it. The reason has to do with our friend the algorithm, which is slow to learn, but then pays for its patience.

Remember that good things in life happen slowly. And if you're looking for a quick change, it's best to launch a new campaign to test your ideas.

8. Measure the right metrics

Cost-per-click definitely doesn't show the whole picture of how your ads are performing. When you are looking for reliable information on which to base your decision on which element of your campaigns to optimize, pay attention also to:

• Click-through rate (CTR) - percentage of clicks based on impressions/displays of the ad;
• Cost per conversion (CPC);
• Conversion rate - percentage of converted users based on all visitors;
• Quality score - is calculated at the keyword level and shows how useful and relevant the ad and landing page are to the user; a comparison is made with other advertising businesses in the same industry;
• Return on ad spend (ROAS);
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) - the cost of acquiring new customers.

9. Pay attention to advertising extensions

Extensions are links below your Search Network ad that you can use to highlight information such as phone number, address, important links, popular products, and more.

10. Seek professional help

If Google Ads territory still feels like dark India, we at ADvantage Digital Agency would love to be your guide.

Creating campaigns in Google Ads and optimizing them is like a dance with the algorithm. It takes time to get to know each other, but then you can enjoy a fruitful relationship.