Google Ads Optimization Tips [Checklist]

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Okay. So thank you for joining in, my name is Uzair and today is the 3rd of July 5 O'clock UK time, wherever you are in the world, I hope you had a productive and a great week and I'm looking forward to the weekend! Thank you, Adam, brilliant...So we've gone through various topics and subjects during this week, today I'm going to cover a topic which is the most requested one, in fact lots of messages and emails are sent to me on a regular basis, and people want to learn about how to optimise their campaigns...It really depends on what they are...

What you are running, whether you're running a search, display, video campaigns, what kind of campaigns you're running, be it a direct call to action or branding campaign, so there will be different goals for different campaigns, but today I'm just going to go through the search campaigns and there's lots of ways you can optimise, but the most important ones we'll get started with.

If you have any questions, then please put them in the comment box on the right-hand side, I'll do my best to answer them for you towards the end of the session, let's start. The first one is the most important in my humble opinion I think because far too many people make too many changes too quickly. You need to let the machine learn what the changes have been made, give it a bit of time, and then you need to wait and see, so if it's a small campaign or a small account, and by that, I mean, let's say you have budget of around $1,000 to $2,000 or so per month, then that would be classified as a small account.

What you don't want to be doing is going into your account every few hours and making changes, and the other thing which I also come across quite often, is people searching for their own ads. I'm going to put in over here in fact, I should have... Don't search for your own ads... Because this will affect if you do want to see whether your ads are running or not, then use the ad and preview tool.

If you keep on going on Google and searching for your own ads, It will affect your CTR and Google may stop showing you the ads because Google thinks that well, it knows that you're not clicking on these ads, so it probably will not show it to you, and then you might get a bit more concerned, and we get quite a few phone calls every now and then, oh I can't see my own ads...

Well, you shouldn't be searching for your own ads! So what you want to do is not to make too many changes, let it run and make some changes every few days, or if you find that, you know, something is not quite right, your conversion rates have dropped significantly, or your CPA has gone up, then you need to start digging into it...

But if it's running smoothly, don't think of it too much. Next one is your account structure. You have got to have a strong account structure, and what I mean by that is, keep your keywords very relevant in each ad group. Don't have a variety of different keywords, so you want to make sure that each of these keywords are relevant and are relevant to your ads, because if you've got different types and kinds of keywords and your ad is different, it won't be congruent, your quality score will be low, and your ads may not show up for the search terms which people may be searching for, or for the search terms which you want them to show for.

The other bit is try and keep at least two extended text ads and one responsive search ad per ad group. Then that will give Google three ads, and they recommend three ads, so you can either have two or three ads per ad group, and then you can start to split test with different messages and call to actions on those ads.

The next one is... What we tend to do is to keep each device on its own, so we have a campaign for the desktop on its own, mobile will be separate, and so will be the tablet, because what you'll find if you put all three of them in one campaign, you'll find, and it is applicable to most accounts, is that the mobile is going to eat up most of the budget.

Now if mobile is not performing very well for your campaign and it's consuming all the budget, then your cost per acquisition will be higher, and the better converting device may not get a look in and may not get the budget to run. So split them out and have their own individual budget, when they're in a different campaign you can set up however you want to split, so if you find that the mobile is the most expensive one, you can either completely switch it off, or give a minimal budget to let it run and to see if you can optimise the campaign and get your cost per acquisition, or the ROAS within your target.

Then we have ad groups... Some of you may know about SKAGs which means single keyword ad group, it used to work really well before because exact match keywords used to be exact match, not anymore, because Google will also show your ads, even though you are bidding and using exact match keyword match type, or other relevant keywords as well...

So exact match is not exact match anymore and SKAGs don't work as well as it used to be, and many marketers and Google Ads gurus, go to the point of saying that SKAGs are now pretty much dead. What you can also do, and this is what we do, is have an ad group structure of a BMM and exact match, and here's what you do, is you have one keyword as your broad match modified, so let's say buy plus laptop, and then you have your exact keywords buy laptop, buy cheap laptop and buy fast laptop, or any other kind of keyword.

Now, when I write my ad for these ad groups, buy laptop will always be in my ads and it will probably, and is going to be in my headline one because that's the first thing I want to show, buy laptop 50% off, or whatever. If I have another 10 keywords in here, which has got the term words, buy laptop, all of these will be relevant to my ads, so it doesn't matter if I've got 5 or 50, as long as all of those keywords have got these two words, buy laptop.

Those will all be super relevant to my one, or two ads, or three ads, and this is why this structure works quite well, and then all we do is we put all of these exact match keywords as exact match negatives in the BMM, so we are sculpting the traffic to my exact match, that's what I want my exact match search query to be triggered in this ad group and not in this one; so there is a little bit of work and an ongoing optimisation, every time we add a new exact match keyword, we need to remember to put in that word as an exact match negative.

So this is how you can set up your ad groups, try it and see how it works for you. Then we move on to the keywords, you focus on the profitable keywords and got to bid very aggressively, don't want to be losing out on search impression share at all. If that keyword or keywords are running at your target CPA, then you want to make sure that you never run out of budget for that as well, what you can also do, is if you find that you've got lots of keywords in a campaign, which quite often there are, you can peel and stick them in a separate campaign called winners, so all the winning keywords, whichever are the winners, you can put them in a separate ad group and let it run from there, so you know that you want to put the maximum amount of budget for that campaign.

You also need to be very ruthless and very strict with regards to pausing unprofitable and expensive keywords, even though sometimes you may feel that this is a really good keyword, and if I stop it, I'm going to lose out on the clicks and the traffic. Well, if it's not converting or it's very expensive and you can't afford to run at a loss, unless the client wants conversions, and some companies will buy the leads or the customers at a loss, because they have the funnel, they have the sales pipeline, and they are not looking at making a profit at the front end, but at the backend, that's different, but for most campaigns customers don't want to be unprofitable at the front end so in that case, you must stop all these unprofitable or expensive keywords.

Negative keywords, keep adding them, go into your search term query report once a week, at least, and find keywords from there. If you have set up the campaign the right way, you will find that you won't get that many irrelevant search terms in there, but if you find that there are some terms which are wasting budget and getting new clicks for those terms, then you add them to it.

The easiest way to do that is have an account level negative list, and then you've got to apply that negative list to all your campaigns, which are live. Even if you pause them, it really doesn't matter, but any new campaigns which you set up, you get into a workflow, then you've got to apply these negative lists or any shared negative list to those campaigns.

I've written over here account level, It could be campaign or campaign level, but most companies or advertisers, which we run, especially the small ones, those negative keywords would be applicable throughout the account. We covered extensions this week, make your ads a lot bigger, this is one of the Google Ads best practices, you've got to run extensions and use as many as you possibly can, sometimes you can't use let's say site links because you are driving traffic to a sub domain where you set up a bespoke standalone landing page, in that case then, you've got to use all the other ones like the call-outs and structure snippets, location is a must as well, and for that to be used, you must link your Google My Business account to your Google Ads account, and the promotion, so try and use as many extensions as possible.

Then we move on to the landing page, you've got to have the right messaging on that page, make it super simple for the visitor on your website to get that message within a matter of a few seconds, as soon as they land that page, the big bold headline has got to be same or similar to what you promised on that ad, which they clicked...

Have a great offer, If your offer is not enticing enough, they may not get hooked on it, a lot of advertisers I see are running ads without any offer, but what's the hook? You've got to have a hook, for somebody to see your offer, and say this looks really good, I'm going to sign up or buy that offer, so have a great offer, strong call to action buttons or links.

Don't have any links, if you're driving traffic to a landing page, then you got to make sure that you don't have any links going here, there, and everywhere, because once they escape from that landing page they might forget why did they come to you in the first place? You've got to kind of like cage them in and keep their sole focus on just one strong and simple call to action, don't have too many offers either, sometimes I see, you know, call to action could be call now, and then there's something else as well going on, on that page, and it just creates a lot of confusion for the visitor.

Explain the features and the benefits of your product or services, why they should sign up from you, and if you've got reviews on Facebook, Google or Trustpilot and places like that, put them up on there to give them the social proof. So these were some of the main important tips for optimising your search campaigns, I mean there's loads, and i'll cover some in the future sessions as well, but now is the time for me to have a look at the questions and comments, if you haven't put anything yet, then please do so, and I'll go through with them.

Okay, hello Rory, "Tricky one with optimisation score, often Google suggests improvements that may not align with the objective of your business, let's all remember, Google loves money." Well, everybody is in it to make money, and that's a very fair comment, some of the optimisation tips, which do pop up on that page, I also don't agree, and if that is the case, I need to look after my client campaigns and or my campaign, so then you've got to decide what's good for you and not just be a lemming and just keep clicking, apply all, apply all, and do the wrong stuff or the wrong things for your campaigns.

Okay, Sandy entertainments. "I have a small suggestion. Please tell that topic one day before, so we will prepare some stuff and we'll get some more..." Okay, I think what you're trying to say is, to advertise one day before what I'm covering on that day. Okay, that's a fair comment, I do send out the email a few hours before each session, so if you have signed up, then you should get it and you'll see what we are going to cover in that day’s session.

Sandy, you're saying "Tags are quite expensive." Exact match would be the most expensive keyword match type. It all depends on what you call expensive, because it's not only about... If you're just looking at the cost per click, then I don't think that is the right way to look at it, because that expensive keywords are expensive for a reason because they convert!

You can get cheap clicks, if that's what you want, then exact match keywords will be expensive, but if you want conversions and the expensive ones do convert, then in my opinion, they are not expensive, they are the golden keywords which I want to go after, and as I said earlier on, I'm going to bid very aggressively, so I don't get outranked, and outbid by my competitors.

Sandy "What is the difference between negative keyword and exact negative keyword and how to apply them?" Yeah, you do the same thing, so you have the minus in front and then you put the square brackets, so the way you have put in the square bracket, and then the minus, the minus sign comes outside, and then you can either use phrase, broad match or exact.

Adam "Is phrase match always needed, or simply focussed on BMM and exact?" I personally don't use phrase match, some people do, and a lot of people do, or they will use all three, but BMM will cover phrase, in fact BMM will cover a broader range of search terms than the phrase itself, the phrase match is, so you're going to limit your campaigns...

Your traffic a little bit compared to the BMM, but the BMM is going to get a lot more, what's the best way to explain this... The phrase might obviously if you... Well I'm sure you know that they need to be in that same order, if somebody has put in... Let's go over here, this will explain... Let's say if somebody put up, instead of buy laptop, somebody put up, buy a new laptop, and if you've got a phrase match as, buy laptop, this will not trigger, so I'm better off having a BMM where any kind of search term will trigger that.

Yeah, buy a new laptop. Okay. Adam "Would a bid adjustment per device within a campaign, achieve the same effect as having an ad group for each device." No, I'm not talking about ad groups for each device, I'm talking about ad group... Campaign for each device, separate campaigns, not ad groups, because I want to allocate different budgets, so if I want to, let's say put £30 per day over here, and I'm saying mobile is eating up a lot of my budget, but it's still giving me good conversions, I might put in something like that, or I can allocate another budget over here, separate them out, you can't do that in the ad group level and you can't bid at the ad group level for the devices.

Rory, "Would you mind showing us how you report results to your clients? This will help us with what to look for when looking at our own campaigns." Yes I will, I think that's a really good idea, I like that, and we use Google data studio, It's fairly straightforward and simple to use, and you can customize to your heart's content, what you want to report, what you don't want to report, so I'm going to put this on my list for next week or so, and we'll go into Google data studio, it's a very cool tool and best of all, obviously like most Google apps it's free, so you don't need to send monthly reports to your client as a PDF, which are static, just like we can change the date range in Google Ads, Google Analytics, and so on, you change the date range, you can compare results and everything in Google data studio, just go to Google...

Let me Google the studio. You go to datastudio.google.com, and then you can create... Although this is not linked, this is just a sample one, so you can see, you can put up your important metrics over here and in there you can see whether your performance is going up or going down, so you have all the metrics, these are what we call the scorecards, you can have charts and graphs and pie charts, and all that, and campaigns, etc.

All sorts of really wonderful things you can do, and then you can just change the date range and adjust your data, It's fairly straightforward and easy to use. Sandy Entertainments "Please try and talk about funnel." Sandy, I have made a note about funnels and how we create a funnel. Brilliant, so I think I've covered everybody and all the comments and questions, so thank you guys for being here, I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and I shall see you same time at five o'clock on Monday afternoon, until then stay safe and well bye for now.