Getting the most out of every advertising dollar spent is an important part of using Google Ads effectively. After all, we’re all in business to make profit and better the lives of those around us. We asked the Akzis Paid Ads team to share their top professional tips to help you maximize the return on your paid Google Ads.
12 Google Ads Tips From Our Experts
1. Focus only on the advertising goals for business.
Right now, you’re thinking, obviously, of course. How can this be a pro-level tip? Well, too many people find distraction along the way to developing and analyzing their Google Ads campaign. Professionals know how to filter through the shiny objects and glowing buttons and focus only on delivering strong ROI.
Before building the Ads campaign, decide what the marketing objectives are. Deciding what we want before we create our campaign rather than after it’s already built will ensure the targeting, budget, and formats are optimally effective and will help to set realistic goals for what we get out of each of these campaign settings.
2. Be flexible with budgeting and let the data dictate changes.
When you first start out using Google Ads, you’ll sit down and write up your digital ad spend budget. And that’s a great idea! In fact, you should do that. But, many entrepreneurs see that initial budget as ironclad, and it’s not. That’s your starting point – a suggestion. And it must be entirely flexible and fluid. After two weeks of running Google Ads, analyze the best performing ones. Take portions of the ad spend budget from less performing campaigns and boost up the ones that are solid performers. You must reassess, analyze, and reallocate your digital advertising budget based on individualized campaign performance at least every other week.
Now, for Akzis full service clients, we do this regularly based on the data. After all, when it comes to digital ads on any platform, the data is everything. Our opinions are meaningless. Follow the data and let it dictate your next steps.
3. Targeting is essential. Understanding your targeted audience is critical.
Creating effective ads can often demand more time to really consider the people who will see and respond to our ads. Think about their specific needs and the questions they might have and address their questions and needs with the product information, ad text, and other assets.
4. Location targeting is priceless if it applies to you.
Use the advanced location options during and after campaign creation for optimal location targeting and improved campaign performance.
5. You must prevent overexposure to your ads.
Use frequency capping (available for Display and Video campaigns) to limit the number of times the ads appear to the same users. This helps ensure that the customers and potential customers aren’t overexposed to the ad.
6. Target your ad campaigns based on relevance.
Content targeting, such as the use of a keyword, placement, and/or topic targeting, allows us to show ads alongside relevant content that the customers and potential customers are viewing. For greater scale, consider using audience targeting such as demographic targeting, remarketing, custom audiences, and affinity audiences, which target the customer as opposed to the page content.
7. Don't ignore the observation settings.
Take advantage of the observation setting, where applicable. The observation setting won’t affect who can see the ads or where they appear, but it does allow for monitoring of how ads are performing for the selected placements, topics, or audiences while the campaign is running. We can use the data in these reports to optimize the ad performance.
8. Simplify wherever possible.
Try to consolidate campaigns of the same campaign type, when possible, so that we have fewer campaigns to manage and monitor and organize the campaigns for optimal budget allocation.
9. Get strategic with campaign types.
Considering using different campaign types and showing a variety of ad types in various places can help us to meet the business goal(s). Learn about all the different campaign types that are available, so we can choose the one(s) that best line up with the marketing goals.
10. Smart Bid with clear purpose.
Use Smart Bidding when useful and applicable. For Search Campaigns, Smart bids are set in real-time at the search term level, and for other campaign types, dozens of signals are used to set the optimal bid.
11. Track all conversions based on quality as well.
Use conversion tracking and offline conversion tracking to help optimize the quality of the conversions. Offline conversion tracking helps to track conversions when leads make it further down the sales funnel. We can also leverage Google Analytics with Google Ads to advance the insights.
12. ABT - Always Be Testing!
Test, test, and test to learn and then optimize. For example, one can run ads with different text for the same product so that you can see which text and/or images are most effective.
You can also test different types of targeting. Then, based on the outcome of that testing, you’ll optimize the ads to include the highest performing assets.
