If you’re looking for tips on how to master your Google Adwords game, you’ve come to the right place! Read through my strategies below and then watch my quick-tip videos on how to implement the strategies. You’ll have to forgive the audio quality—I’m new to voice recording!
Enjoy!
Connect Analytics
Unsurprisingly, Google Analytics and Google Ads work extremely well together. If you’re tracking goals on your website such as purchases, contact form conversions, or video watches, connecting the two will allow Google to show you how many people went from one of your specific ads all the way through to completing a goal.
This can help you make tough decisions like whether or not a poor-performing keyword is worth keeping just because it has a high number of impressions.
Google Analytics provides the absolute best data to let you know if your ad campaigns are reaching the results you envisioned for them. They can even estimate financial success if your goals are associated with a dollar value.
To learn how to connect Google Analytics to your Google Ads, click here
NOTE: As I was writing this article, I spoke to Google on the phone and it looks like sometimes Google Ads doesn’t count the conversion data being pulled in from Google Analytics. In this case, I had to set up a specific Google tag for each of my conversion events on the individual target landing pages.
To learn how to add Google Ads conversions tags to your wordpress pages, click here
Switch to Exact Match or Phrase Match
The days of paying to serve ads to any and everyone are on the decline, which is likely why you decided to invest in Google Ads.
Broad match keywords leave room for serving ads where they aren’t relevant—a wasted investment.
Imagine you’re a clothing retailer and your product is called “Pizza Graphic Jeans”. If you’re running “Pizza Graphic Jeans” in broad match, you’re paying to show your ads to anyone who Googles “pizza”. Chances are, these hungry viewers aren’t going to interact with your ad.
Exact Match will only serve your ad to those who type in “Pizza Graphic Jeans” while Phrase Match will serve your ad to anyone who searches anything that includes “Pizza Graphic Jeans”, such as “Pizza Graphic Jeans New York”
To learn how to toggle between Broad Match, Exact Match, and Phrase Match, click here
Use Call to Actions
Any marketing professional can attest to the power of a call to action. You want your ads to appeal to a certain sense of urgency in your target audience—to give them something to do.
The difference between “We’re The #1 Dentist” and “We’re the #1 Dentist | Book Your Appointment Today” can be the deciding factor between an impression and a click.
To learn how to set up Call to Actions on your Google Ads, click here
Set Up Dynamic Ads
Google’s new dynamic ads take your logos, images, headlines, etc. and organize them in different ways, giving favor to the ones that perform the best.
The largest benefit of dynamic ads is their ability to analyze what the user is searching, show the most relevant string of headers and descriptions, and then direct them to the most relevant landing page you’re using.
The ads will draw landing page options from the other ads you’re running, or you can create options from categories or page feeds you’ve created.
To learn how to set up Dynamic Ads on your Google Ads, click here
Add Some Ad Extensions
The more information your ad can provide to a potential customer, the more likely they are to click it. Utilize any extra information that’s relevant to your business from the following list:
- Location
- Affiliate locations
- Callout extensions
- Call extensions
- Message extensions
- Sitelink extensions
- Callout extensions
- Structured snippet extensions
- Price extensions
- App extensions
Most businesses running ads for their website have a phone number, multiple relevant pages, and compelling calls to action, but some of the less common extensions are extremely powerful, as well.
If your business has an app, direct some traffic there. If your website has products with concrete prices, show them off! Give your customers everything they need to make the right choice—your business.
To learn how to set up Extensions on your Google Ads, click here
Consider your Relevance
Google Ads gives each of your keywords a quality score between 1 and 10. This score is based on the following criteria:
Expected clickthrough rate: Google makes predictions based on how your keywords have done before. As a result, this criteria can take the longest to change.
Ad text relevance: This criteria considers your keywords in relation to other keywords and the ad itself. Factors that lower this score include keywords that are too broad, or an ad that covers too many topics.
Landing page relevance: As always, Google’s definitions can be very vague. Landing page relevance looks at the entire landing page experience. The algorithm is looking for keywords, original content, ease of navigation, and how long people are staying on your page. If your visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for within seconds, Google will know.
The following sections will target relevance and how you can improve your strategy.
To learn how to view Google Ads keyword relevance, click here
Set Match Type and Add Negative Keywords
We can’t always foresee how our keywords might go wrong, but consider these three match-type issues:
- Broad Match: You’ve set the keyword “Brands” as broad match. Because broad match shows your ad to any search including your keyword, you’re now serving ads to people searching “perfume brands”.
- Phrase Match: You’ve set the keyword “Pizza New York” as phrase match. This is great because you can target searches for “Great Pizza New York” and “Best Pizza New York”, but you soon realize you’re also showing for “Pizza Graphic Shirts New York”.
- Exact Match: This one won’t have an issue with the unexpected, as it will show if and only if your keyword “Furniture Ontario” is searched. While this is great for avoiding those strange edge cases, you’re also missing out on useful keywords such as “Affordable Furniture Ontario”.
All three of these match cases have their pros and cons, but here’s my advice: In my experience, Broad Match and Exact Match are more trouble than they’re worth. The best bang for your buck is a strategic combination of Phrase Match and Negative Keywords.
Negative Keyword: These are selected keywords that your Google Ad will specifically not show to. In the case of “Pizza Graphic Shirts New York”, adding the negative keyword “Graphic Shirts” will help you keep the benefits of Phrase Match, but help you avoid showing your ads to the wrong audience.
To learn how to see your Search Terms and set up Negative Keywords in Google Ads, click here
Separate Your Ad Groups
As a continuation from the last point, separating your ad groups is one simple way to solve the relevance issues for ad text.
Imagine your business sells wildly different products like tires, toys, clothing, and cosmetics. Can you think of one ad that will appeal to a person looking for any of these individual categories? If someone did click your ad, would it take them to a specific page catered to what they’re looking for? Chances are, you’ll end up creating a generic ad that just echoes your business’ main slogans.
Try creating a different ad for each specific type of product or service you’re looking to target with your ad. Once that’s done, create multiple ads so you can always test them against each other and find out what’s working the best for you.
To learn how to create multiple ads for a single Google Ads campaign, click here
Test Your Landing Page
Speaking of testing, ensure that your different ads are trying out different landing pages. Keep in mind that if someone clicks your real estate ad that says “View Our Available Homes”, they don’t want to land on a page that doesn’t display your available homes. The harder it is for your customers to find exactly what they’re looking for, the higher the chance they leave.
To learn how to specify landing pages in your Google Ads campaign, click here
Keyword your headings
This one is a super powerful tool. When I search for something on Google, like many others, I find it very frustrating when the results are close to what I’m looking for, but not completely aligned.
With keyworded headings, any user that performs a Google search containing one of your keywords will actually be shown exactly what they searched within your ad.
Imagine that you’re in the automotive industry. Your customer enters into the search bar “Eco Friendly Cars”. They’re going to see a bunch of listings and ads for cars of every type, but they look at your ad and the first thing they see is “Eco Friendly Cars”. This tells them that you’ve got exactly what they’re looking for, and they’re much more likely to click through.
There are some things to be careful about, though. I’ve actually seen my competitors using this trick, but what became instantly clear is that they used the name of my company as one of their keywords. Their ad read, “Yastech | [Their name] | Website Solutions”. Whether or not this was intentional, they either tricked some of my clients into clicking their ad, gave me some free brand recognition, or both.
Another trick to consider is how your keywords will fit into your ad. If your keywords follow a specific pattern, where you could integrate them like, “Top [keyword] in Paris”, great! This will look great with “Top Coffee Shop in Paris” and “Top Cafe in Paris”, but it be suspicious when your ad reads “Top Coffee Shop Paris in Paris”. Carefully consider each keyword and how it will fit into your ad.
To learn how to set up Keyworded Headings in Google Ads, click here
If you have any questions about any of these strategies, feel free to reach out to me personally at zack@yastech.ca or give me a call at 306-249-2863!
