It’s official: We’re in the future.
The year is 2020. Two years after flying skateboards and replicants were predicted in Back to the Future and Blade Runner respectively. The real future might not have all the obvious fancy gizmos promised by Hollywood, but there remains plenty of new things that we wouldn’t have thought possible even ten years ago.
But we’re not really here to talk about that. You’re here because you’re probably looking for ways to improve your Google Ads performance. If you’re reading this in January you’re probably looking to make some postive changes to your account to start the new decade off the right way.
Well regardless of whether you’re reading this in the first month of 2020, or the last; the team here at Digital Gearbox have assembled to give you 4 game-changing recommendations that will help get your ads bringing in the leads and sales you previously thought were impossible.
Much like those flying skateboards, eh? We’re still waiting for one.
Segmentation, Segmentation, Segmentation!
Becky Hopkin – Managing Director
We go into too many Google Ads accounts that are set up with campaigns that have just 1 or 2 adgroups within them that contain all the keywords that the business wants to target.
Within those cluttered campaigns the same generic ads are applied to the adgroups that tell the searcher how wonderful their business is and the services or products they provide.
The problem is, the searcher does not care who you are, nor do they really care that you provide an award-winning service, or that you have a friendly and dedicated team ready to help. At the point someone makes a search, they have a very specific requirement, and they are looking for the solution to match that requirement.
You need to segment your keywords into multiple adgroups where you can create ads that are tailored to match keywords in order to match the intent of the searcher, and then convey the information that will be most important to them.
This will vastly help improve your ad relevance to your keywords, which will improve your quality scores assigned by Google. By increasing your quality scores, your average cost per click will reduce and your click-through rates are sure to increase too.
Save Budget Through Smarter Ad Scheduling
Isabella Matthews – PPC Account Executive
Strategic ad scheduling has made a big difference to some of our clients accounts, where budget was consistently limited and they were not willing to invest more.
By analysing each weekday’s overall performance using the Day Report on Google Ads. It highlighted that the weekends were the quietest and due to the company being closed. it made sense to pause the ads for the weekend.
Stopping ads running using Google Ads Ad Scheduling option meant we were then able utilise the budget when it was bringing the most return for our client.
As a result we doubled the number of conversions generated! We have found that utilising Ad Scheduling can be beneficial not only to save budget but also ensure the ads are running when they are most effective to bring the best return possible.
Review Your Search Terms More!
Jonny Hyams – PPC Account Executive
Humans are creative creatures – it doesn’t matter how specific you think your chosen keywords are, people will find ways to trigger your ads with completely unrelated searches.
And it doesn’t matter that your ad copy about (say) “winter tyres” makes it super-clear your website sells winter tyres. Someone somewhere will type into Google “why am i tyred in winter?” and then click on your ad.
And that will cost you money.
The solution is to use negative keywords, which prevent your ads being shown for particular words and phrases.
It’s good practice to sort through all the search terms that have triggered your ads on a regular basis. Doing this allows you to:
Spot those irrelevant phrases that have triggered your ads, so you can add them as negative keywords
Isolate problem-keywords that consistently generate irrelevant clicks
Identify good keywords that you haven’t yet thought to use, so you can better target that traffic
The net result is your Google Ads will be shown to higher quality traffic, boosting overall performance and generating a superior ROI for your business.
Want Automation?
Train The Machine First
Michael Kenny – Strategic Partnerships Manager
“We’re an AI-first company now” were the words used to describe Google by CEO Sundar Pichai. Over the last 5 years Google have invested heavily to bridge the gap between man and machine, their recent BERT language model being a high profile step towards achiving that goal.
In Google Ads AI can be seen in the number of automated strategies now at our disposal. It’s an exciting time for us; very soon we’ll be free from the shackles of endless bid management, finally free to pursue our dream of becoming the creatives we wanted to be the first time we saw Donald Draper work his magic.
But like any complex machine these automated options can’t just be switched on and expected to perform right away. They need time and, crucially, a consistent diet of data to be able to work.
So if you’re thinking of creating a new campaign and want to plump for that sexy “maximise conversions” bidding strategy. Don’t. At least not yet. Go with the not so attractive Manual CPC until you have at least 30 conversions in the campaign. Once you hit that number, unleash the Google AI beast.
But remember, in 2020 AI is still only as good as the humans in charge of it. Be careful, and don’t expect it to solve all your problems immediately.
