Like SEO or SEM, Google Ads can be optimized and improved. We’ve asked eight experts to share their tips for improving Google Ads performance.
Integrate SEO & SEM
SEO and SEM are sometimes looked at as mutually exclusive marketing methods. The truth is, they’re much better when they work together.
If you’re looking to improve PPC performance, take a look at organic search results. Chances are, there are insights to be gained about organic click through rates (CTRs) and PPC ad copy, as well as organic conversions and PPC quality scores.
For example, if a PPC ad for a particular keyword is generating a high CTR, then that could signify an opportunity to update the meta description of a blog post targeting the same keyword. The crossover of the efforts is immense. Take the necessary steps to integrate PPC and SEO.
Lawyer keywords can reach cost per click levels of $150-$200 per click. To avoid paying those high amounts, advertisers need to be hyperspecific with the locations they target. Get granular with Maps in Google Ads. Select the exact areas nearest to your service areas to see an increase in conversions and to help your ad budget go farther.
Negative keywords enable advertisers to exclude specific search terms from advertising campaigns to focus on only the search terms that matter to your business. By monitoring campaign activity and adding in negative keywords, campaigns can achieve better targeting with an increase in your return on investment.
For example, there are 125 Cruise America rental centers in the United States, Canada, and Alaska from which you can depart. But, Hawaii is not one of those locations. By adding “Hawaii” as a negative keyword, we can make sure our ads stay relevant to the locations we service.
If I had to summarize a strategy for Google Ads, it would be to focus on the attributed revenue and CAC (customer acquisition cost) rather than CTRs (click-through rates), CPCs (cost per clicks), CPAs (cost per acquisition) and other funnel metrics.
The point of pay-per-click, simply put, is to invest dollars and receive a return on investment. Many marketers get caught up in optimizing top of funnel metrics, but if good CTRs don’t actually attribute to revenue, then is that metric really worth it?
Few people use the “recommendations tab” in Google Ads, where you can get recommendations for optimization of your campaign. In there, you will also observe the “optimization score,” which is powered by a machine-learning algorithm to produce a score about how good your campaign is optimized for performance. Select and act on the recommendations that you find to be relevant.
The best tip I can give is to research what your competitors are doing and use that as a basis for your strategy. There is absolutely no reason to reinvent the wheel when it comes to PPC. Plenty of tools like Ahrefs or iSpionage let you see the copy, image, and landing pages of competing ads. Even better is when you find an ad that has been running for a while as it almost always means it is delivering results.
The best way to improve a Google Ads performance is by optimizing the Click-Through-Rate (or CTR). I suggest putting promotion extensions that highlight deals, exclusive offers, and discounts on your site. Customers are likely to click on ads if they know your business is doing a promotion.
Highlighting any discount, sales, or exclusive offers on your ads help entice customers to learn more about your ad, increasing their likelihood to click on it. The increased CTR rate for visitors in your promotion page translates to higher revenue.
In order to ensure our mobile site loads quickly, we compress our images. This ensures that all our images are optimized for site speed while still retaining image quality. We also took steps to minify all our liquid code while trimming down the total number of scripts being called.
Removing unnecessary assets on some pages while reducing image assets on others helped reduce site load time as well. Also, we started to use AMP on our blog pages which reduced page speed load time under one second.
As a result, we’ve seen a 20% lift in traffic to our blog. Bringing more traffic to our blog increases the likelihood of making a sale as customers continue to navigate through the site.
Through our partnership with WebFX, we also offer access to implementation and consulting services for sales and marketing technology. WebFX’s revenue marketing platform, MarketingCloudFX, helps you optimize campaigns, personalize content, and automate processes, boosting leads, sales, and revenue.
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