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Top Google Ads Optimization Tips

Top Google Ads Optimization Tips
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Hello, I believe we are live, just give me a moment, please, I'll make sure everything is working fine and we shall get started. Okay. Everything looks to be good and we're good to go. Hello, and a very warm welcome to you, my name is Uzair and welcome to today's YouTube live stream. Every weekday I log online at five o'clock in the UK and answer any questions you may have about Google Ads or digital marketing and I also go through various subjects and topics and quite often walk-throughs in the Google Ads interface.

So I hope you had a productive and a profitable Monday and had a nice weekend, talking about being profitable, now this is what it's all about, especially when you're running an online campaign in Google Ads or Facebook or wherever you are running your ads. So you can only be profitable if you target obviously the right keywords, have a very nice ad with a great message on it, a landing page which converts, but then what you also want to do is to optimise and this is where a lot of people get too trigger happy on the keyboards because they try to optimise the campaigns too much and too quickly.

I've always said this that you've got to give Google a bit of time so that whatever changes you make it starts to learn and implement those changes in the campaigns, so don't try and do too many things too quickly. I'll talk about some optimisation tips today, obviously, there are so many things you can do to optimise your campaigns, I have done quite a few tips last week, If you go into the playlist, you'll find that, but I'll cover some more today.

So I see a few of you online, Hello, Manoj... So, yeah, welcome and if you have any questions, please put them in the comment box over on the right-hand side of your video and I'll come back to all the questions and comments towards the end of this presentation. Also let me know which part of the world you're from, so it's always good to know where my audiences and potential customers are as well.

Hi Sandy... Welcome, it's your first time here today, so that's good and these sessions are all for you guys, I started these live streams since the lock down started, just after the lockdown started and I've continued to run these during the weekdays, and I've had some great feedback, comments and gratitude from a lot of people saying that it really helps them with the online marketing.

So I'll try my best to offer you great content and hopefully make a difference to your Google Ads and digital marketing. So let's hop into the Google slides first of all, after I've finished the slides, I'll answer any questions which you may have put on the comment box. Okay so these are not in any order and these are just some ongoing optimisation tips, which you need to put into practice and put in your workflow.

So the first one which I'm going to talk about is the display path, which causes a fair amount of confusion as to what you need to put in, it could be www.yourwebsite.com /...Try and put a keyword in there, so you've got to path one and path two, each one of them takes up to 15 characters. Now you don't need to have that same URL on your website or where you are driving the traffic to, so your landing page URL could be your website.com, but on the display path, it should have and ought to have your keywords in that, because it's going to make the ad even more relevant to someone when they search for a specific keyword and they see that keyword in the headline and the description, in the path URL and so on.

So you want to put the keywords in path one and path two. This is just a simple thing which obviously it's for free, It doesn't cost you anything additional, but a lot of people don't use it. Let's talk a little bit about the ads, capitalise each letter, so just like over here, I've got the, A, B and P as capitalised, so if you had this in your ad, you write each and every word with a capital letter, don't capitalise the whole word, because Google is going to disapprove the ad.

First character can be capitalised no problem, It just makes the ad a lot more, I wouldn't say bigger, but it catches the eye a bit more. That is what Google's best practice is, one of them is to capitalise all words in your ad. So you've got to make sure that you've done that and as soon as I look at the ad and if it has got capital letters all the way through, I know that it has been written by someone who knows a thing or two about Google Ads, but when I see that they are not capitalised, then I know I can take on that advertiser without any problems and beat them in the ad rank.

Put in a call to action and what I tend to do is most of the time, either put it in the headline two, or headline three, but if I do have multiple ads in each ad group, I'll sometimes put the call to action in headline two and sometimes in headline two and sometimes in headline three and then see which one is working and which one isn't, because quite often, Google will not show the headline three.

So you want to put that call to action straight up, so the headline one, make sure you have the seed keyword, headline two call to action, you want them to download, buy, book a free consultation or whatever it may be. Then the description you start off with your unique selling proposition or the USP, what's in it for the customer and not about you, so you try and talk about the benefits and the features of how it can help, how your service or product can help someone with their problem and you want to convey that message, that you are the solution to their problem and that's how you are likely to get the click and hopefully the conversion.

If you do offer something for free, free consultation, free visit, free delivery and things like that, put the word free in there, because that's the best, I would say clickable word or the best word for any ad, is the word free because it will straight away attract your audience with the word free, everybody likes a freebie! This is where I also have a fair amount of debate, arguments, discussions with other customers, colleagues, and other guys who are running Google Ads that, Oh, should you, or should you not put price on the ad?

Because what a lot of people say, well, let them come to my website, have a read through of my landing page and what we want to offer and then we talk about pricing, which is fair enough. You don't want to be selling on price, for sure, however, if somebody cannot afford you, then what's the point of them clicking on your ad and coming through the website and then bouncing off, which eventually you will have to talk price, nobody wants to talk about the pricing, but you will have to sooner or later talk about the pricing with the client, so my humble opinion is, put it up, 'from', it doesn't need to be an exact price, you might have different plans, different offers, and lots of different variables in your offer, which will dictate the price, so you could put up a price, which says from, so that way you don't waste the click.

Ad extensions is such an easy, win it's such a low hanging fruit where you want to make your ad as big as possible on Google, so the real estate on Google at the top, you know, if you've got a bigger ad, you're going to pretty much take up a lot of the space compared to your competitors and just by having the simple extensions, like call extension, call-out extensions, again you are giving call-out extensions like anything, which you want to shout out... so even if you have these free delivery or open seven days a week in the ad, put it back again, it doesn't mean that, Oh, you put it up in the ad you can't use it again, but use it in a different wording or different way.

But put that message back again, you are reinforcing that message in the call-out extension. Location extension I would highly, highly recommend that you set up your Google My Business page if you haven't and link it to your Google Ads account. Then Google will show you ads, especially the smart campaigns you can run using the location extension, because Google will show the ads to people who are near your location and you don't need to keep on tweaking or changing these extensions, once they are set up, it's pretty much running all the time.

You can change it, so things like call-out or structured snippets or sitelinks and see which one is performing and which one isn't, and then you can optimise it by changing it afterward, setup structure snippets, sitelinks, price extension, again you can say, you know, there's lots of ways you can showcase your price on the ad, which is a really great way to pre-qualify your audience and if you're running any promotions, so you might be running a promo for Christmas, Valentine's, New Year, Mother's Day, Father's Day, or summer promotion, or whatever offer you are running, you can put up as an extension as well.

Now let's talk a little bit about the landing page, best practices. I had an email from someone over the weekend and the email said, Oh, I had 60 clicks over the weekend and zero conversions, can you give me some tips? Well, these 60 clicks, first of all, are not a lot of clicks, so I'm not sure what your expectations are, but with regards to conversions, you will not get conversions right off the bat, sometimes you do.

But if you don't have any data and you don't know what's working and what's not working, then it's pretty difficult to get conversions, It does take a bit of time to get the campaigns going, but it may not be the problem at Google Ads, It could be the problem at your landing page and this is where a lot of people will not accept their problem.

They only talk about, Oh, Google Ads is a scam, Facebook is just, you know, taking our money and ripping us off. It's not that, you've got to make sure that your landing page is up to date and it is converting so that you've got all the important messages on the page so it converts, so first of all without having to say about the page speed, Google is going to really hammer you with ICPCs, if you don't have a fast page speed, so it's in your interest to invest a little bit upfront, to get a faster page speed and then you start running your campaign.

I hear this all the time, I'll get this campaign started when I make money, then I'll invest in the landing page or the website, it never works that way. If you do have any navigation bar at the top or on your landing page or website, then make it simple and crystal clear so that the visitor does not get confused as to where to click and what these clicks, or the buttons are all about.

You want to have a headline which conveys that message straight up, and you want that message to be understood within three seconds or less, as soon as they read that headline, it needs to be precise, clear, and attention grabbing headline, so straight up they can see that they have come to that right page, what they saw on the ad has got the same message on the landing page.

Then you want to use what we call a hero image or a video, photography is very important so use, you know, high quality professional images, don't copy it from Google, these are all copyrighted images, buy them, there are lots of stock libraries and you can buy these images and videos for a few dollars, it's worth your while investing in high quality assets, because if you copy it and start using it the internet is a very small place nowadays, and somebody will sue you for breach of copyrights.

Have a strong call to action, just like on your ad, have the same strong call to action on your landing page, so your button should say, buy now or download now or get started or whatever it may be, make sure that it is very clear and it hasn't got a lot of text around it, but stands out quite nicely.

Social proof is very important, you need to have that and that could make or break that transaction or that conversion, because if you've got a lot of social proof and you are displaying and people are singing your praises and they are liking what you offer, then you will hopefully get some more people to buy your product or service.

The other thing which you also want to be doing over a period of time is once you've started your campaigns, is to keep on testing with different headlines, offers and call to actions, so by all means optimise and test your Google Ads campaigns, but then you also keep a close eye on the landing page, best practices and landing page optimisation, because both of them work hand in hand.

The simple thing is you've got to give what they want, so what they searched, what you promised them on the ad and what you are showing on that landing page is what it is all about and if you've got all these three, the search queries, the ad and the landing page all tightly set up, then hopefully you're going to get good results from your campaigns.

Adjusting your bids at device level is also something which I don't see in a lot of campaigns, so you can set them up, as obviously you've got three devices, computer, mobile, and tablet and if your tablet ones are way over the cost per acquisition, then you can bid down, or if your mobile is performing very well, you can bid up and so on.

What you can also do is when we go onto our budget, which I'll talk about in a second, let me cover the ad schedule, is you will have some of the days which will be more profitable than the others and some of the time of the day, when you can see all these in your Ad schedule, then you can bid up or down, plus, minus the bid adjustments accordingly, but what you want to do is, you've got your main target CPA and if some of the days are way over, bid them down...

If Tuesdays are expensive, okay, minus 30% or minus 20% on the bid adjustment, if Mondays are way below your target CPA, and it is being profitable and you're getting a good amount of conversion, then bid up, so you don't want to be losing out on search traffic on those profitable days and the time of the day and if you are just running call campaigns and your offices are shut after 5PM, then don't run campaigns or the call campaigns after 5PM, because people will still click on your ads and nobody will be at the other end to pick up the phone.

This is something which you should be doing and everyone should be doing, is to apply these audiences, all your audiences to your campaigns as observation mode, it will not harm, it will not restrict, it will not reduce your traffic, it will just, as the word says observation, we are just observing, seeing which audiences are performing and which ones aren't, so then you can gather the data and then you can bid up or down on the audience's level as well.

Locations as well, you can plus, minus your bid adjustments on location, so if you find that, you know, Chicago is more profitable than New York, then you bid up on Chicago, bid down on New York and again, this is something where a lot of people miss a trick by not bidding and optimising your bids on locations. Negative keywords we've talked about quite a bit and I always talk about it because negative keywords are your best friend in Google Ads, so what you want to, the simplest way to do that is to create an account level negative keyword list and apply that to all campaigns and if you create new campaigns, all you do is you go to your negative keyword list, apply to that one and all the keywords, which are in that list will be applied to the new one, so you don't have to keep going through each one of them one at a time.

Budget optimisation is, you allocate more budget to better performing or more profitable campaigns and less to the others, if you've got four or five campaigns running, so don't put up the same budget on all the campaigns, split them out, I also split out campaigns by devices, if I find that the mobile, which it will eat up all your budget all the time, no matter what you sell or what you do, or where you are, you will find the mobile traffic is going to be way, you know, pretty much more than double than the other computer and the tablet, so you can separate the mobile out, allocate it's own budget so that the computer and the tablet can get a look in and then see what's happening, you can also set up a campaign for just to run on computers, mobile and tablet, allocate each budget to each one of these campaigns and see what's happening and if you find that tablet is not working, switch it off, put that budget into the more profitable campaign.

These were some of the tips which I would go through and do when we are optimising our campaigns. Let's go to the comment box, it's pretty busy today and I'll try and cover each one of them for you. Okay, Hello Manoj "I too want to learn Google Ads and bin PPC." Well you are in the right place for Google Ads, you can binge watch the over 4/500 videos on my channel over here and in this playlist we've got over, God knows how many 30, 40 hours’ worth of, I would like to think high quality content.

Yeah, watch it, but you've got to put into practice as well, it's not just keep on watching nonstop, whatever you learn until you don't practice, you will not get better and you will make mistakes as you go along, so don't be scared of making mistakes and as you make mistakes, you learn from them and don't make it again, that would be my advice.

Hi Ashish, good evening to you as well, so enjoy the process of optimisation, good, thank you. Okay. Hello everyone, California, Nigeria, India, Bahrain. They're pretty much all around the world, we've got people... Ashish Thank you and appreciate it, this is something which I would like to give back, I've been helped by others in the past and I thought it's about time I do something in return, so I appreciate you guys being here and spending time with me, first of all, because if you guys are not here, then I would have probably stopped after a few days.

Okay, Hello Abby. Alright, so we've got a question from Precious Pearls "I'm new to Google Ads and wasted some money, please tell us a way, how can we make money with ads, as I will spend a hundred dollars on ads and get more than 100 in return, in form of ad revenue." It's a very good question and it's one of the most common questions which is always asked, I wasted my money, It's not wasted at all, because if you don't have data, you need to buy data or artificial intelligence or whatever you want to call it from Google, because until you don't have data, how can you look into it and see what worked, what did not work?

Now, if you did not make any money, obviously it did not work, so you need to keep on improving it, so then you can say, okay, what do I need to improve? Let's start from the first bit, you know, impressions - without impressions you will not get the clicks, but let's look at the CTR, let's start improving that CTR, once you start improving that and then you go along, okay, why aren't the conversions happening now?

If my CTR is good, people are clicking on my ad, you look at the keyword list and see they are not broad keywords, definitely do not run broad keywords, if you've only got a limited budget, look at negative keywords, see which one is eating up all your budget and then going forward, you will not... So it's not like a tap, where you open up and you start to get conversion straight off from the word go, you've got to keep running it, running it and then you'll start to find that you are going to get a return on ad spend, sometimes you may have to spend a few hundred dollars, just to learn what is happening and what's not happening, so I would never say this that you have wasted your money, it is that you invested your money to make more money.

"I saw a YouTuber who told that we can earn double from Google Ads, we will spend." Well, if you're just looking at doubling your money, it's not a lot, you want to be looking at a bit more because you're not taking into account your cost of goods, so this is where you want to be looking at least a bit more, it really depends on your business and your profit margins, I will cover that, how to calculate your profits and your minimum return on ad spend or ROAS.

Hi Adam, "Is there a good tool you use to test page speed?" Yes, there is, if you just go to Google and put in Google page speed test, you will get the page insights tool and that's pretty good. Okay. Thank you, Mike, from Bournemouth, a nice part of the world Mike! Ashish, "How to select keywords initially, did we select high volume or low CPC?" Well, the expensive keywords are expensive for a reason because they convert better, so you need to try them out and see what's happened and I have done a fair few videos and sessions on keyword research, where I go through my process of how to organise the keywords in ad groups and I'll be doing one more this week, because every week I've got so many emails requesting more of these keyword research and how to set up these ads, so if you stick around, then you'll know how to do that.

Ashish, you're asking what are the mandatory requirements on a landing page? Well, this is the best practices, which I've just gone through, if you follow these, you'll be pretty much good to go. Hi Sandy Entertainments, "Customer info form is also important, right? So if I'm running food-based ad, if I offer free shipping, how should be the landing page?" Without looking at your landing page I can't comment as to how it should be, sometimes the worst designed landing page converts the best, so until you don't try, I'm not saying your page is bad, but I'm just saying we try to make it pretty and better with really nice graphics and everything, but the more simple the pages, the better it's going to sometimes convert.

Adam, "Do you feel bidding low on keyword misspellings is a good strategy?" Not really because Google will show you ads for misspelled keywords, exact matches, not exact match anymore, but it doesn't really matter really. Ashish, "What should be the minimum bid?" I can't comment what would be the minimum bid for your niche, it could be $2, and it could be $80, depending on your niche.

Abdinoor "Can I use Google campaign for Amazon products, which I'm affiliated to from Kenya?" You can't use affiliate links, but you can drive to your Amazon page, but then you won't be able to track the conversion tracking, so the best way for Amazon I would recommend, is you run Amazon Ads because this is where you can track your conversions, but if you're just optimising for clicks, then you can pretty much use maximise clicks bidding, and get as many clicks on your ads as possible and drive them to Amazon and then you will need to do the calculations of how much profit you're making, by how much you spend on Google and how much were your sales in Amazon.

So that's it for today, thank you very much guys, for being here, tomorrow would have been here, but I have some personal matter to attend to, so we will not be online tomorrow, but I will be online on Wednesday. Until then, stay safe and hope you can make it. Thanks for now.

SF Digital Studios offer over 30 hours of free and high-quality training on YouTube. This blog accompanies the video on Google Ads optimisation tips. Here are Uzair Kharawala’s top tips on Google Ads optimization

Display path

When a viewer sees an advert, they will see the associated URL above the text, usually in green. By default, this will show the regular URL. You can, however, add “path text” (up to 15 characters). If you do, Google will add the path text onto the end of the regular URL.

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The advantage of doing this is that it gives the viewer a better idea of where, exactly, they will end up if they click on the ad. For example, if you sell clothes and shoes, then you can use the path text to show the viewer that they will be directed to a special offer on flip flops.

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Ads best practices

Write your header in Title Case (i.e. capitalize the first letter of every word). Be very careful about writing whole words in capital letters as it looks like SHOUTING.

Make sure that you remember to tell the viewer what it is that you actually want them to do. Generally, you want to write this in positive terms e.g. “click here” rather than negative ones “don’t wait”. This is easier for the mind to process and saves space.

Make sure to tell the viewer why exactly they should click on your advert. Again, put this in positive terms.

It’s fine to have a special offer or free promotion. If, however, you are planning to charge, then make sure your visitor knows how much they should expect to pay. This saves everyone’s time and your money.

Ad Extensions

You can use extensions to provide your viewer with extra information. For example, you can:

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  • Call out a special feature
  • Highlight a promotion
  • Give price information
  • Give location information
  • Provide a phone number people can call by tapping their phone screen.
  • Add a structured snippet (e.g. a list of features)
  • Add site links

Landing page best practices

It’s vital that your landing page loads quickly (on any device) and has simple and clear navigation. When your user lands on your site, the first thing they should see is a “short and sweet” attention-grabbing headline. This should ideally be accompanied by a hero image and video. There should definitely be one or the other.

The whole landing page should be about giving the user what they want. If possible, you should back this up with social proof. If you don’t have any direct proof about your product or service, then you could try finding relevant statistics. Your page should have one, strong, clear call to action.

Always keep checking that your landing pages are as effective and well-optimized as possible. Keep testing different headlines, offers, call to action etc.

Bid adjust

You can use bid adjust to vary your bid according to the device (e.g. desktop/laptop, mobile or tablet) and/or schedule. If you want to use bid adjust to manage your ad schedule, you’ll need to keep track of your ads’ performance over time to see if there are certain times/days when they perform better or worse than average.

Audiences

There are two ways of designating your audience. These are “targeting” and “observation”. Targeting means that you only want your ads to be shown to the designated group. Observation means that you want your ads to be shown to everyone but you want to observe a particular audience. This might be so that you can make bid adjustments against it.

As a rule of thumb, you want to start by applying all audiences to your campaigns as “observation. You can finesse this later if you wish.

Negative keyword lists

Negative keyword lists are a useful way of making sure that you don’t waste your PPC budget on searches which you know don’t perform well. For example, say you sell shoes, but don’t stock a particular brand, for whatever reason. There’s probably no point in showing your advert to someone looking for that brand, so you’d add it to your negative keyword list.

Budget optimization

In general, the best way to get the value for your money is to allocate more budget to better performing campaigns and less to others

Uzair Kharawala live streams every week-day at 1600 hrs UK Time / PDT 1000 hrs / EDT 1300 hrs / CST 1100 hrs. This is your chance to learn how to improve your campaigns by asking him any questions you have about Google Ads, YouTube Ads, Video Marketing, Digital Marketing and much more. You can also learn more at the SF Digital Studios blog

Uzair Kharawala

Written by Uzair Kharawala

Partner at SF Digital Studios, a Google Premier Partner agency. Uzair has been helping businesses grow with Google Ads since 2002 and teaches it every week on YouTube.

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