4 Tips to Improve Google Ads Performance

4 Tips to Improve Google Ads Performance

With lots of campaign types, bidding strategies and audience and targeting options it can be tricky at first to understand how to get the very most from your Google Ads account whilst ensuring you are taking measures to improve the performance of your ads.

We’ve put together 4 key things you can do today to start improving your Google Ads account performance and reduce wasted spend across your ad campaigns.

If you do need a hand getting started with Google Ads, we’d love to help – just get in touch!

1. Add Negative Keywords

Adding negative keywords to your Google Ads search campaigns is a great way to ensure you are controlling your keyword bids as much as possible. Negative keywords exclude search terms from your campaigns that are not relevant to the products or services on your business’s website, ensuring you are only bidding on the most relevant keywords and putting your ad in front of more interested users and reducing wasted ad spend.

2. Targeting Options

Taking advantage of all the targeting options within Google Ads is an effective way to ensure your ads are only being shown to your desired audience, when they are specifically looking for your products or services. Targeting options help to reduce wasted ad spend and contribute to a more successful overall Google Ads campaign.

The main Google Ads targeting options are:

• Audience targeting
• Content targeting
• Device targeting
• Placement targeting
• Language targeting
• Location targeting

It’s important to ensure you are controlling how your ads are being shown to your audience using these targeting options. For example, if your business provides a service locally you may only wish to reach customers in your city. Using the location targeting options would be an effective way ensure your Google Ads spent is not being wasted on people who are not within your target market audience i.e. not based in the appropriate location.

3. Organised Campaign Structure

Simply pasting a long list of keywords into one big ad group is unlikely to provide you with a great return on your Google Ads campaigns. Instead, you should try to organise your keywords into campaigns and ad groups, grouping a small number of keywords together in each ad group.

Grouping your keywords will allow you to send your customers to the most relevant landing pages on your website and also allow you to ensure the ad copy is super relevant to each keyword and related search term. A well-structured Google Ads account tends to be much easier to analyse, which means it’s simpler to make tweaks to your campaigns further down the line.

4. Ad Extensions

Utilising Google Ads Extensions are a great way for your search ads to stand out from your competitors. Extensions add more useful information to your ads and tend to increase your CTR and overall performance.

Ads with extensions showing also tend to take up more space on the search results page, making them more visible and useful to users and will become increasingly more important as the world of paid search evolves, particularly with the rise of voice search and continued progression of mobile.

Take a look at the example below. The advertisers has made use of the seller rating, price and sitelink extensions. The use of ad extensions in this example makes the search ad appear more prominent in the search results than its competitors.

Bonus tip: Test everything!

What works for one business, might not be as successful for yours. It’s essential you test everything within your Google Ads campaigns to find what works for your business.

From your ads themselves to your bidding strategy and ad extensions, you should constantly be testing variants in an attempt to improve your Google Ads performance. Making lots of incremental changes, running A/B tests and making use of the experiments feature in Google Ads tend to be the most effective ways to run split tests within your Google Ads campaigns.