7 Tips to improve the performance of Google Ads

As Google says, you certainly don’t have to spend a lot on ads to get the results you’re looking for in your pay-per-click campaigns. 

Even with a small daily budget, there’s plenty you can do to ensure your money isn’t being wasted — and that the right people are clicking on your ads.

Here’s our top 7 tips for reaching your target audience and optimizing your Google ad spend for AdWords success.

1: Optimize Your Website First

A bad website experience will get you a low-quality score on Google Ads. Ensure you’re excelling in these three technical areas:

  • Speed of the website
  • Ease of navigation
  • Responsiveness on all devices

2: Understand the Quality Score

Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.

Your quality score will be affected by:

  • Click-through rate
  • Relevance of a keyword to its ad group
  • Performance of landing page
  • Relevance of your ad text to searchers

Google will use these above factors to rate your ads on a 1-10 scale. 10 is best. 1 is a disaster.

3: Landing Pages for Your Ads.

Landing pages play a big role in converting clicks into customers. When someone clicks on your ad, they expect to land on a page that's relevant to what they searched in search engine. If they don't instantly find what they are looking for, they're more likely to bounce off your website.

Google specifically recommends that you create custom landing pages for your ads. A landing page provides a seamless experience to the user. We should:

  • Put Call to Actions above the fold
  • Remove menus
  • Have only one offer on the page

Keep your landing pages simple and effective by giving the user only one thing to do: the action you actually want them to take.

4: Use higher-converting ad copy

People click on ads that suggest they’re going to be relevant to them. At all times, think about the customer pain you’re addressing, how you’re relating to their search, and how you’re responding to them.

  • Keep the end goal of your user in mind when writing your ad copy.
  • Include numbers and statistics in your headlines
  • Use keywords in the ad copy
  • Add unique, keyword-rich Display URLs
  • Use multiple ad variations in your ad groups

5: Review the targeted ad groups

Re-evaluate your ad groups. Find a list of keywords in those groups that have low quality scores compared to the others. It could be these keywords perform better in a different ad group.

Use ad groups to organize your ads by common themes, such as the types of products or services you want to promote. It is useful to base your ad groups on the sections or categories that appear on your website.

6: Choose Long Tail or Mid-Range Keywords and Broad Match Modifiers

It is always difficult to rank on keywords that are short. These keywords will cost too much per click.

By targeting long-tail keywords instead of short keywords, you’re more likely to bring in visitors who are interested in your site, product, or service because it is easier to rank with a lower budget and you’ll get a more targeted audience.

Mid-range and long tail keywords have shown to be the most effective in both generating traffic and being relevant for the website.

Broad match modifiers help control when your ad can appear for closely related keywords. It can help your keywords achieve a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) with a more targeted audience, which in turn can help your website get more conversions.

7: Remove Negative Keywords and Pause non-performing ads

Negative keywords let you exclude search terms from your campaigns and help you focus on only the keywords that matter to your prospects.

It is important to choose and remove irrelevant keywords in order to get highly targeted campaign results.

When selecting negative keywords for search campaigns, look for search terms that are similar to your keywords, but might serve customers searching for a different product or service.

Focus on the top-performing ads and pause the non-performing ones.

Interested in how you can get the most of out of your PPC campaigns — while bolstering the overall strength of your sales and marketing programs? Get in touch with us and we can help build up every aspect of your marketing needs. Start here.