How To Test Google Ads Campaigns Like A Pro (Save Time and Money)

Hello, and a very warm welcome to today's live stream. My name is Uzair, and it is, what's the date today? I've forgotten. 13th, I think. Yeah, 13th of Jan, uh, 2023, at three o'clock in the afternoon in the UK. Every weekday, and every Tuesday and every Friday, I go live on this channel and cover topics such as Google Ads, YouTube ads, anything and everything to do with online digital marketing.

I just want to make sure that everything is working fine, so just bear with me for a second. And yeah, everything seems to be working fine and we can get started. So yeah, as I was saying, we cover topics such as Google Ads, YouTube ads, pretty much anything and everything to do with online digital marketing to help you generate more leads or sales.

So today's topic is about some optimisation tips, advanced optimisation tips for, uh, Google Ads search campaigns. I'll go through them in a minute with you. And if you're watching this live and you want to ask many questions, please ping them, um, in the comment box or the description box around this videos. Excuse me. So wherever you are watching, is being live streamed on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and, where is the last one, LinkedIn. Seems to be forgetting everything today.

Uh, all right, so let me share my screen, and I'll answer the questions in the order I received them, so start pinging them in. Okay, here we go. Where is my, a bit more, so you guys can see this a bit properly. Yeah, that's, that's a bit better. Okay, so let's get going.

So they are not in any particular order. These are just my top tips. Um, there are lots and lots, but I think there's about eight to ten tips which I would like to share with you today. So one of the tips which I really, um, want you to experiment with is to use different match types, not just one or two. So what you do is you can either use broad, phrase or match, all three of them, either put them in the same ad group or one ad group per match type, or you can have as on different campaigns as well, so you know that how much budget you are allocating.

I know when you go at campaign level you've got three times more work, but trust me, you will see the benefits and the results, because the more granular you break the campaign, the more control you have, excuse me, um, all over the, over the campaign. So you can control your budget, you know, um, that's one of the most important thing.

And broad match is going to eat up most of the budget, as it will have the most traffic and the most clicks, but at the cheapest rate. So it may not be the best quality traffic from broad match. However, having said that, if you are very aggressive with your keywords, then you will name that algorithm and control that traffic. So, you know, experiment with different keyword match types and see which is the right or the best balance for your campaigns in terms of reach, relevance, conversions, conversion rate, cost per conversion. Right.

Okay, um, create separate ad groups for brand versus non-branded keywords to improve ad relevance and performance. I should also add this as and/or. Ideally you won't damage separate campaign, because I tend to keep the budget for brand campaigns completely separate. You don't want to be limited by brand traffic, right? If somebody's searching for W, not www, but your brand name, and you want your ad to pop up.

Uh, now there is always a debate, argument, discussion which always goes on, um, with market, between marketeers and with our customers: "Oh, why should I pay for brand? I'm getting my organic ranking as number one anyway. Why should I pay Google?" The reason why you want to pay is because you don't want your competitors to come up at the top, because they can quite easily bid on your brand. Even if your brand is trademarked, they can bid, right?

So don't want to lose that real estate right at the top of Google, because especially on a mobile, where most of the traffic is coming from, you don't want your organic ranking to be held right way down the page, because you have the four ads, then the Google Maps and so on. So this is why I would always recommend that you invest a little bit of budget in your brand. Traffic is the best traffic, the most profitable traffic you're going to get, so you should not be penny pinching for the sake of a few pennies, because those brand clicks are going to be very cheap, unless you're a very big brand and the whole world is bidding on you brand.

For most local businesses, brand traffic is within under a dollar or, you know, single figures, so it's going to be fairly cheap, and you always want to take the top spot of Google for sure. So I would always keep them as separate ad campaign, but if you want to keep it under the same campaign, you can keep its, um, separately in an ad group.

The only problem when you have that in the same campaign is because then you need to sculpt the traffic. So you put your branded keyword as negative keywords on the non-branded ad groups, and then all the non-branded ad group keywords as negative in the branded ad group, which makes things a bit more complicated and confusing. So therefore I say, I think I should just take this off, to be honest with you. Create a separate campaign, is much easier to control and manage for sure. Excuse me, I've got a really sore throat today. I'm gonna get some water. Thank you.

All right, uh, next one. Utilise day parting to schedule your ads to show during specific hours of the day or days of the week. Again, very few companies do this. So what you can do is you, you want to find out the most profitable or the most expensive time of the day. So you can make these day parting as four hour blocks. Midnight, if, uh, I'm talking about if you're running it 24/7, right, it's a few, think of midnight to 4 a.m., 4 to 8 AM, 8 to midday, midday to four o'clock, four to eight pm and 8 pm to midnight.

Uh, day part the campaigns, and then you'll start to see exactly which slot or what time of the day, uh, your best, um, the campaign's performing the best and are the most profitable, and also you will find where you are getting, uh, the worst performance. In some of the niches and industry like locksmith and plumbers and, um, niches like that, there's a lot of click fraud which is happening. So if you day part, you will know very easily and quickly where your spam clicks are coming from, or clicks which are happening but not converting.

And then you can see into Analytics what sort of data you're getting and so on, so you can very quickly see and assess that the, these are bot clicks or spam clicks, right, invalid clicks I should say. So you can do that as well. Um, then you can make a decision whether you want to either completely block it and not run on those, at that time of the day, or you can even make it a separate campaign for each one of the six slots of the day and see how your budget is, uh, utilised.

And again, the day of the week as well. If Mondays are the, your most profitable, uh, day of the week, then you want to be very aggressively, so you don't miss out on your search impressions here. Any Fridays or Saturdays are your most expensive, then you did, you can potentially take your campaign into a separate campaign, just run on that Friday and allocate a budget so that you don't eat up all your budget. So you can break it down into campaigns as well, but you can then see the hours and the days of the week which are working and which aren't working.

This is not an optimisation tip, but it's a workflow tip. Um, use Google Ads Editor. If you're not using it, it's going to change your life, well, in terms of Google Ads. It's super fast. You can make bulk changes extreme, you know, extremely quickly. You will be able to create campaigns on the fly, which you can't do in the interface. Copy, paste, make bulk changes.

So if you, if you got 10 campaigns and you want to copy them and make a duplicate of those, it literally takes seconds, and then make all the changes in that campaign. Whether, let's say you've got one, ten campaigns running on broad match and you want another 10 campaigns to run on phrase match to test, copy the, those 10, paste those 10, and then all in one go, click couple of buttons and change the whole match type for all the keywords. Whether you got 10 or 10,000, it really doesn't matter. It is super cool. It's like using a Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet for Google Ads. You can work wonderfully well and quickly.

Um, I also wanted to show you that if you want us to manage your campaigns, we've got a great offer, and the URL is on the screen. So please visit this page and you'll see that it's one of the best offers out there from any agency you'll ever get. So go on there, schedule a free discovery call and see how we can potentially work together.

Um, use negative keywords as always. You know, be very aggressive. This is how you're going to make the most from your campaigns and be more profitable. But then there are three ways you can set these negative keywords. As one is the account level. So let's say you sell furniture but you don't rent out furniture, then "renting" could be at account level negative keyword, because you never rent out, you don't have.

So things like, if you don't give anything for free, then put that word "free" as account level, so no matter which campaigns you run or set up, at all times you will not run your ads for the word "free" or for those words which you don't want your ads to run. But if you've got different campaigns, one for, uh, renting, one for selling, one for buying or something like that, then you don't want those keywords to be at account level. You need to be at campaign level.

Or if those three ad groups are for, one for renting, one for buying, one for selling, then you can keep them at, um, the, uh, ad group level. Depends on how you structure the campaign. So the more you organise that negative keyword structure, the better for you, and much more easier for you and your team to, to manage.

Uh, search terms. Always keep an eye on them and see which one is working, which one isn't working. Um, if there are any good keywords or search terms which have got intent or have got relevancy, keep adding them to the ad group which triggered, if the right key, with the right ad group triggered that search term. If it didn't, then you can manually go in and set up the system in that particular ad group.

Search terms depends, and this is another question which a lot of people ask me: how often should I look at the search terms? It really depends on how small or big your account is. If you're spending just a few hundred dollars per month in your account, then you don't need to go into there every day. You can go in there once a week quite comfortably, sort out all the keywords, search terms, and the job is done within 5-10 minutes.

But if you're spending tens of thousands per month, or thousands per day, or tens of thousands per day, then you need to keep a very close eye, and then you need to have automations as well for maximise, maximising your, your workflow. So for bigger accounts you want to do it daily, that's what I'm trying to say.

Okay, um, use remarketing to reach users who have previously interacted with your website or app or video. But yeah, so anybody who has been to my website, so like you are viewing my video right now, whether live or as a recorded video, you will get pixeled in. You, I can then, uh, show you some of my ads whenever I want to. Depends obviously on the, um, the number of days of my list.

So always, um, have your, um, remarketing going as well. Is again, like brand campaigns, one of the most profitable campaigns out there, because you don't want to invest in getting people to your website and then letting them go. So you've got to make sure that you are reaching out to them and bringing them back, and this is how you build, keep building up your brand and keep pushing them further down the funnel.

Uh, I think I've copied this twice. Yes, I have. Don't reduce the CPA. Um, now again, most advertisers, agencies, freelancers are going to say something different: "Oh yeah, we are going to reduce your cost, or reduce your cost per acquisition" and so on. Well, you can. It's always good to reduce and cut out the fat or the excess, but there is a certain limit you can go down to. You cannot go further down that CPA, because you will then either screw up your campaign, it won't get any impressions, because you are not giving Google anything to play with.

So you will find that your impressions have stopped. Once that happens, you won't get any clicks. Once that happens, you won't get any conversions. So forget the CPA then. So what do you do? How do you increase your campaign or scale your campaign? Is by conversion rate. So if, let's say, you are getting a CPA of ten dollars, the temptation would go down to eight or seven or as low as possible, and that's what you as a marketer will be, um, uh, told by the customer: "Oh yeah, we want the cheapest lead cost."

So my argument, or my discussion, my reply would be, yes, that is fine, but we cannot go any, any further down this, um, lead cost. Increase, pro, increase your conversion rate. If you are closing them on the phone or offline, see if your conversion rate is 20 right now, take it to 25, 30 percent and you are going to increase your profitability. And this is what I mean by increasing profitability, is increasing your conversion rate without affecting.

And the name of the game is, whoever is willing and/or able to pay the most to acquire a customer will always win. So if you're not aggressive enough, you will lose out to your competitors. Okay, and this is where we follow quite nicely to, is to, you've got to be very aggressive with your bids and budgets. I'm not saying give away your, all your savings or all your cash to Google, but you need to be aggressive. You've got to outbid them and outrank them, otherwise you will find that your competitors are getting all those clicks and you are losing out big time.

You're in it to win it, right? It's like a sport. You don't want to come second. Nobody remembers who the second best. So this game is all about being very aggressive, and a lot of advertisers and in, in-house team members who I train and coach, they are scared of increasing the bids: "Oh, but are the, why should I pay Google 20 dollars per click, or 50, or whatever?"

Well, we need to look back, I'll go back a bit and say, okay, what is your customer lifetime value? How much you are getting from a customer? All of that needs to be looked at, and then you work out how much can you afford to pay for a client. And the more you can afford to pay to acquire a client, you are going to win, because your competitors won't be thinking like that, and they will be saying, "Oh, we..."

So if your competitor is, let's say, bidding at 100 CPA and you are bidding at 200 because you know your numbers. It is really important and critical that you know your numbers. Without that, you are going to lose out and lose all your cash to Google, um, which I don't want you to do because I said, "Oh, be aggressive, you know, bid aggressively and outrank your customers." No, first you need to know your numbers. What is your conversion rate? What is your average order value? What is your customer lifetime value? And the whole lot. There's a lot of things which we can, which we need to know before we have that full picture.

Okay, now I know my numbers, now I know how much I can afford to pay to acquire a customer. And this is why I always say that knowing that you, if you want to play this game, you've got to know the numbers. Even if you don't know, play this game, you still need to know your numbers. If you want to run your business, you need to know your margins, your gross profit, your net profit, all of that, right? A lot of people don't know that, unfortunately, and then they lose out and they wonder why it didn't work out.

Okay, um, so I'm just gonna go look at the time, because, uh, have a call to hop on to. So what I'll do is I'll skip the questions for, um, today, and I'll be back on Tuesday. And if you have any in the meantime, please put it across to us through our website or on YouTube and I'll, uh, answer them for you.

So thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you being here, um, and for all the support which you guys give on our channel and all the various social media channels. So I'll be back on Tuesday. Till then, stay safe and have a great weekend. Bye for now.