Benard Kiplangat What if you could learn the advanced hacks that can significantly improve your Google Ads performance? What if you could get the most effective and impactful pay-per-click marketing tactics to help your business grow?
That would be awesome. Right? Right.
Today, we will cut the clutter and dive right into the ten tips that will help you to improve your Google Ads performance. That way, you will equip yourself with advanced marketing hacks that can revolutionize your pay-per-click strategy today!
So, here we go. Let’s discuss these top PPC hacks and make a lasting impact on your PPC campaigns.
Top 10 Google Ads hacks to supercharge your campaign’s performance
There are many advanced Google Ads tips, and all can be relevant to your business differently. To effectively drive a profitable Google Ads campaign, try to implement the following hacks into your campaigns:
Optimize your Google Ads Quality Score
It may not be obvious, but the perks of a higher Quality Score are numerous. Your QS in Google Ads affects your click-through rates and ad ranking. For example, advertisers with a high-quality score will enjoy lower CPC and higher-ranking positions for their ads.
So, how can you optimize your quality score for better performance?
One way to improve your quality score is to analyze your quality score components to find areas of improvement. Understand the three Quality Score components to help you learn which areas of your ads need improvement.
These components include your expected click-through rates, ad relevance, and landing page experience. If you keep improving each of these, you will soon see an increase in your quality score.
And because all these components measure how you give users what they are looking for, it is much easier to optimize. Thus, the more you can deliver what they want, the better your quality score. So, check these areas to see if you should update your ad text, keyword selection, or content on your landing page.
Focus on the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Google Ads will help you achieve your goals faster and lets you see your results immediately. However, some metrics you will use to measure your results may show inaccurate progress toward your advertisement goals.
Therefore, it is important to understand if your Google Ads campaigns are effective. And if you don’t take action in time, you will spend a lot on the wrong objectives.
On a higher level, you invest in your PPC to achieve certain desired goals for your business. These goals could be increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, or gaining more users. Either way, if you have specific goals in mind, you need to focus on that — and only that.
Another fundamental strategy to improve your Google Ads performance is to focus on the right KPIs to measure your progress toward your goals. For example, over-optimizing your CTRs when your conversions are too low is illogical.
That is, even if you pay less for the costs per click and get many clicks but gain no users or customers, then your strategy is probably flawed. So, focus on the key metrics that will portray that you have a better investment toward your goals.
Read more: Top 10 Most Important KPIs for Digital Marketers
Make your ads more relevant for your target audience
Relevant ads often appeal to the right audience. Targeting the right people at the right time ensures that your content is relevant. And to ensure your targeting is appropriate, it is crucial to take time and effort to understand your target audience.
Effective Google Ads campaigns demand more time to consider those who will probably respond to your ads. Aim to understand your customer’s possible concerns and questions and the keywords they use to describe their problems. That way, it will be easier for you to reflect the solutions to their needs through your ads, product information, or other assets.
You should ensure that the keywords your target audience use match your content. Your ads should address their specific needs and concern for you to find success with your Google Ads campaigns.
Another way to make your ads more relevant is to use content targeting more effectively. Targeting is the basics of creating a successful PPC campaign, and marketers often overlook how they use targeting, especially content targeting.
Using content keywords, placement, topic, or display expansion for search allows you to show ads alongside relevant content that your potential users view. While audience targeting, like demographic targeting, custom audience, and remarketing, can be more effective, optimizing your ads based on page content might also be ideal.
Increase mobile site speed score
Why should you care about mobile speed scores for your PPC campaigns? You are probably asking yourself how it’s even possible that the speed of your mobile site can be a factor in optimizing your ad performance. However, the data shows that users abandon a site 53% of the time they visit a mobile site that takes over three seconds to load.
Today, getting exceptional results on your Google Ads campaigns requires more than just the right keywords or the right bids. You should ensure that you engineer frictionless user experiences, especially on mobile devices. And that is because even the best ads sent to a slower landing page will probably deliver poor conversions.
Nowadays, over half of all web traffic happens on mobile. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize your mobile sites for maximum conversions. Optimizing your landing pages ensures that you are creating superfast mobile sites that deliver delightful mobile experiences to your users.
Some ways to increase your mobile site speed include:
- Compressing and optimizing images
- Minifying all your liquid code
- Removing unnecessary assets
- Trying Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on your web pages.
That way, you build smooth, fast, and engaging mobile user experiences for your landing pages.
You can check out tools like The Speed Scorecard and The Impact Calculator. They will help you measure mobile site measures up with the other’s sites and estimate potential revenue you’re probably losing.
Optimize your Google Ads campaigns with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is essential for successful Google Ads campaigns. If you’ve not yet set it up already, here’s the process you need to follow to link your Google Ads with Google Analytics:
- On your Google Ads dashboard, go to Settings, then Account Settings.
- Next, ensure that you check the checkbox under Auto-tagging. Google Ads will then apply a query parameter to the end of all your campaign’s URLs to allow tracking on Google Analytics.
- Go to Google Analytics and navigate to Google Ads Linking. To find it, click Admin, then Property.
- Under Google Ads Linking, click New Link Group and select your Google Ads account.
- If successful, your data will start populating into Google Analytics under Acquisition, then Google Ads.
Once you’ve linked your Google Ads account to Google Analytics, it is not time to check for actionable insights that will help you to optimize your Google Ads campaigns. You can compare campaigns against your expectations and use the insights to drive data-driven decisions.
Moreover, check your reports for specific KPIs that measure your campaign’s performance, like ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), to ensure that you are running profitable campaigns.
Also, analyzing search terms in Google Analytics will help you determine more growth opportunities. To check the terms the visitors who clicked your ads used, use Search Query as the secondary dimension to reveal the data.
If you discover that your users are using irrelevant queries to find your ads, you need to update your negative keywords. Also, if some terms are more profitable, consider increasing their bids and reducing those that are not.
Implement a solid bidding strategy that aligns with your goals
Determining the right bid type and creating a solid strategy for adjusting your Google Ads bids is another way to improve your Ads performance. Google Ads offers several bidding strategies that can make or break your campaign’s success.
Depending on your goals, one bidding strategy can fit certain types of campaigns and advertising goals. For example, if you want more clicks, conversions, impressions, or views, you will undoubtedly choose a different bid strategy for each of these goals.
You can significantly cut costs and increase results if you focus on the right bidding strategies. However, if you pick the wrong strategy for your campaigns, you may end up wasting your budget on results with minimal value for your business.
The five basic types of bidding strategies
While you may have unique goals for your campaigns, there are five basic types of bidding strategies on Google Ads that you should consider based on the following five advertising goals:
- Conversions: this is where you want users to take a specific action on your site. You will be using conversion tracking to help you measure how ad clicks translated into desired customer action with a Smart Bidding strategy.
- Clicks: if you need to increase your website traffic with Google Ads, you should focus on the Cost Per Click (CPC) bidding strategy.
- Brand awareness: if you need to take your messaging in front of more customers, focus on impressions. Therefore, it is ideal for you to use Cost Per Thousand viewable Impressions (vCPM) as a bidding strategy to optimize your campaigns for brand awareness.
- Views: for video ads, it is reasonable to focus on increasing views or interactions for your ads. Therefore, you can use the Cost per View (CPV) or Cost per Thousand CPM bidding strategy.
- Brand or product consideration: if your goal is to increase a product’s or brand’s consideration with video ads, consider Cost per View bidding strategy.
Every time you launch a campaign on Google Ads, Google will ask you to choose the best bidding strategy to help you achieve your goals. And while it can be reasonable to pick an automated system over a manual to take much of the heavy lifting and guesswork, not all best campaigns work that way.
You can use automated bidding systems to help you run your ads more efficiently, giving you more time to create compelling ads for your campaigns.
Either way, no strategy is perfect and can be one-size-fits-all. Measure and test new ideas regularly to find more opportunities to improve your Google Ads performance.
Write a clear, genuine, and compelling ad copy
Crafting a genuine and competitive ad copy seems to be a cliché. However, everyone knows that because it works! Users readily respond to engaging ads, offers benefits, and speak to their needs. But how do you do that? How do you write a highly compelling ad copy?
Creating ads that focus on the specific needs of users needs more research and takes time and effort. You need to understand your users more to craft an ad copy that will resonate most with your customers.
Once you learn more about your audience, you can develop campaigns focusing on user benefits. One way to skyrocket your ad’s performance is to include the best-performing keywords in your campaigns. For example, you can write your ads’ headlines and descriptions to reflect those keywords that align with your user’s needs.
Another way to write compelling ad copy is to avoid using generic language in your ads. You will receive decreased engagement rates if your ad copy is generalized and there are no specific calls to action. So, create ads with clear and specific messaging and calls to action.
There are a couple more tips on creating effective ads that we haven’t discussed. So, keep learning, testing, and optimizing your ad’s messaging to ensure that it will always remain relevant to your target audience and improves your ad performance.
Integrate your Google Ads campaigns with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO and PPC tactics are more impactful for your business if they work together than when operating separately. Many marketers often find a disconnection between their PPC campaigns and SEO, seeing both strategies as mutually exclusive.
However, if you need an advanced hack that will boost your Google Ads performance, and draw more insights from your organic search results, CTRs, and conversions. There are a couple of smart ways you can integrate both marketing strategies for an impactful ROI.
Many businesses use different insights from SEO and SEM channels to maximize their conversions and keyword success. One of the popular ways that they use SEO to improve their Google Ads campaigns is through keyword symbiosis.
With keyword symbiosis, you identify the profitable keywords for conversions on both SEO and PPC campaign channels and strive to use what works on one to inform the other.
Another powerful way to use SEO to improve your Google Ads strategy is to use your technical SEO to optimize and support your campaigns. For example, site content, loading time, and user experience are key ranking factors that can also give your users a frictionless experience after they respond to your PPC efforts. Thus, you achieve a better ROI for your investment.
Use Geotargeting when appropriate
Location-based advertising can significantly improve your Google Ads performance and optimizes your conversion quality. Many advertisers often miss advanced location options to create and run campaigns. Thus, making their ad budget go further with unoptimized conversions.
Sometimes, your target keywords may have the highest costs per click and the lowest monthly search volume in your area. So, if you do not become hyper-specific with your target locations, you will reach more users who could be far from your service areas and who may never become your ideal leads because of their location.
So, get granular with your maps, selecting the exact locations in your service areas in your ad campaigns. One way to stay effective with Geomarketing is to identify and leverage local trends from the local news, events, influencers, personalities, etc., that will help you understand how people in the area think about your services.
Another way to increase engagement for your location-based campaigns is to use the languages that users from your target location will understand easily. Also, utilize the local terms and phrases they use so that you speak directly to them in a way that resonates with them.
Moreover, using the exclusion options in Google Ads allows you to hide your ads from specific locations within your target. That way, you will reach only the audience you think is worth your investment. With exclusion, you will avoid marketing to the wrong customers, saving you a lot on costs and time.
Read more: Tips to Use Geotargeting & Multiregional campaigns to Improve your PPC strategy
Track and compare your ads’ performance to drive growth
We’ve talked about using Google Ads with Google Analytics above. However, we want to stress how powerful tracking your ad’s performance is. One of the secrets to successful PPC campaigns is testing, tracking, and comparing your ads to learn and optimize your campaigns for success.
No matter how successful or unsuccessful your past campaigns have been, you can always test new ideas, compare, and get better results. For example, you can run separate ad groups with different ad copy to help you see the groups with flaws and those that are the most effective for your campaigns.
One of the most popular strategies advertisers use to test their ad performance is A/B testing. Many marketers find it effective as it allows them to assess their ad performance directly on specific evaluation metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions.
More importantly, Google Ads makes it easier to try your ad variations to help you test and optimize your creative messaging. That way, you will understand more about your customer’s preferences to help you hone your ad copy for maximum click-through rates and conversions for your ads.
Studying your previous ad campaign performance as you try new ideas will help you find what makes up profitable campaigns. When you compare all the findings from your testing, you will discover more and better ways to improve your Google Ads campaign performance.
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