Setting up a Google Ads (previously called Adwords) campaign is easy.
But setting up a Google Ads campaign that consistently brings in sales and leads – not so easy.
There are hundreds of buried settings and hidden features that are your money and keeping you from having the most profitable campaigns.
…Which is the reason why so many business owners and startups struggle to make paid traffic profitable.
Properly set up ad account and a right PPC strategy is what makes the difference.
In today’s article, I will break down a few of the most common Google Ads strategies.
Let’s get into it!
Use The Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that will help you discover the key search terms that are related to your business. Use this to do keyword research and find the top keywords to your campaign. Other great tools to find keyword opportunities for both PPC and SEO are:
Import Google Analytics Goals to Optimise your Campaigns for Conversions
By importing your Google Analytics Conversions for Google Ads, you are able to track which campaigns, keywords, search terms are bringing in the conversions. This will help you understand the performance of your campaigns.
Start by linking your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts and import your Google Analytics goals as conversions.
Use Ad Extensions
If this is not your first Google Ads campaign, you have probably noticed that Google gives you a Campaign Optimisation Score (%) that will suggest ways to improve your campaign.
Often, it will prompt you to write Ad Extensions. You should utilise all the extensions that are relevant to your business. These are:
- Sitelink extensions
- Callout extensions
- Structured Snippets
- Call Extensions
- Review Extensions
- Location Extensions
- App Extensions
- Price Extensions
- Affiliate Location Extensions
- Promotion Extensions
Use Audience Layering In Your Search Campaigns
This is a useful strategy if you want to show your search ads only for people within a certain audience. For example, you only want your ads to be shown to people who are interested in specific topics, or have shown interest in your business in the past. This will also work if you want to exclude certain audiences (such as your competitors).
You can include or exclude:
- Affinity audiences: People based on their topics of interests
- In-market audiences: An audience based on their purchasing intent. This is possible by building an audience based on a list of keywords they’ve used in Google Search or websites they have visited
- Remarketing: Users who have already interacted with your business
- Customer Match: Existing customers based on your CRM data
- Similar Audiences: People with similar interests to your website visitors
How to use Audience Layering
Let’s say you have an accounting firm and you want to target the keyword “accounting services”. However, you want to only show your ads to people who are genuinely interested and have already shown interest in accounting services based on the websites and search terms they have used in the past. Create an In-Market Audience and add it to your campaign.
Create 3 Ads per Ad Group
Creating 3 ads per ad group is one of the best practices to optimise your campaign performance.
By doing this, your PPC campaign will show the ad that is most likely to achieve your objective. In other words, if one ad is performing better than the other ones, then that one will continue to serve.
To keep your account and campaigns optimised, you’ll want to create new ads on a monthly basis.
Find Negative Keywords Ideas from Search Terms Report
The last one on the list of Google Ads strategies is using negative keywords. Once you have your Google Ads campaign running, you start seeing the data on what search terms your ads were shown. If you are using broad match keyword types, it’s very important that you look at your search terms report on a regular basis.
This will allow you to optimise your campaign to be more relevant by ensuring that it will only show to people who are genuinely interested in buying from you.
Google Ads Strategies: Conclusion
These are just a few of the best Google Ads strategies that we see when running Google Ads campaigns.
By using these, you can often turn money eating campaigns into winning campaigns, but only when you have a well-defined, multi-faceted strategy.
If you’d like some help with your paid traffic, you might be interested in SKCreative’s Google Ads PPC Management Service where I will run your campaigns for you.
Contact me for a free consultation here.
