Ads have their advantages — turn them on and they start working, but driving qualified traffic isn’t as easy since you also have to worry about optimizing your ads and keeping them in top form. Learn how to increase conversions and optimize Google ads campaign for your business, then keep sites tuned up with specialized tips.
Every marketer’s aim is to make sales and gain visibility. And Ads are one of the best ways to make this happen quickly. Google Ads, once known as Google AdWords, is a platform from google which gets you a chance to advertise your products on the two biggest search engines platforms in the world—Google and YouTube—at a comparatively friendly budget.
A google campaign is a set of ads that are targeted at the same audience, share the same budget, and share other settings. One google ads campaign can include a number of products. And properly optimizing google ads campaigns ensure that you gain the necessary visibility; here are 13 ways to optimize your Google ads campaign:
1. Use Smart Bidding
The physical world has changed a lot over the years. The world of tech has not been left out of this change. Most companies these days have become quite interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning. You should, too, if you do not want to be left out—your competitors are using them!
Smart bidding, offered by Google, generally involves the use of machines and artificial intelligence to improve your bidding strategies.
Relax. I am not saying you should enter a computer and ask it to teach you its language. That is not only impossible. It is also quite sad to imagine.
You don’t need to do any of that. As a user of Google Ads, Google has already done that for you. All you need to do is input your ad goals. Once you have done that, Smart Bidding begins its work. It starts to optimize your Google ads campaign using machine learning and AI.
2. Desktop and Mobile Ads
For your ads to give you the conversions you need, you want to be in your audience’s faces, remember? This is going to happen when you are on devices that are always in their faces.
People are always with their phones. Enter a bus, and you will find that almost everyone has their phone in hand. This puts mobile ads at a high spot and makes them very important to your ad campaigns.
People are also almost always with their laptops and desktops. And, for the records, most conversions happen on desktops rather than phones.
When targeting ads, to know what devices to specifically target, you have some work to do. Analyze your web pages and posts with any analytic tool you choose.
Try to find out what devices users use the most when they visit your site. Is the margin between mobile and desktop visits wide? If it is, then optimize your ads for the device that gathers the most traffic.
If you want, still, you can optimize ads for both desktop and mobile devices. Just observe how it goes and make improvements where necessary.
3. Discovery Ads
Google Discovery ads were introduced only recently in 2019, making them relatively new and not widely understood. But when understood and used properly, they are one of the best ways to improve and optimize Google ads campaigns.
Google Discovery Ads just offers users a platform to deliver personalized adverts. Advertisers target ads at audiences that are seeking that particular product or service.
As the name suggests, “Discovery” means the ads will be targeted at users who want to ‘discover.’ The ads will only be ads that want to be discovered. They can be any kind of ads, even graphic ads—this means they aren’t necessarily confined to the discovery feed.
Discovery ads are very much like walking up to a kid who is searching for his pen and saying: “Hey, did you drop this? Here’s a pen.” The results will be remarkable, and you can very well reach as many as 1 billion people!
4. Negative Keywords
Adding negative keywords to a campaign is healthy for your ads and doesn’t necessarily diminish their function. In fact, they can even make the ads perform much better. I’ll tell you how.
Imagine going by every thinkable name in the world—that is, every name in the world is yours to answer to.
A man walks into your office and asks who Eric is. Everyone points at you. Another man walks in minutes after and asks who Tunde is. Everyone turns to look at you also. On and on it goes because you go by every thinkable name.
What do you think is going to happen? Well, you will soon be worn out and expended—tired from all that standing and sitting.
In this situation, you can only do one thing—and that is changing your name. That is, canceling out all other names and going by one or two names.
This is exactly what happens when you add negative keywords to your ad campaigns. By doing so, you are canceling out unimportant words that could bring customers, many of which are not your target audience, to your ads.
You are saying to Google: “I don’t want to appear here.”
This works to keep your money from being spent without getting you the results you need. Fewer clicks from people who would not convert mean you are paying for less, and this is such a good thing.
Lookup a list of negative keywords you can include, and include them in your ads. Some negative words I suggest are; big brand names that offer the same product as you, free, no cost, about, etc.
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5. Natural Language Search
Google keeps coming up with new and amazing methods to make the world of tech amazing and easy to navigate. Recently, google included natural language search as a part of its methods.
Many more people now use voice searches on google. Google, via natural language search, has a way of identifying these searches and interpreting them as user intent.
Even though traffic from voice searches is comparatively low, conversions are considerably higher. Optimize your ads for natural language.
Even when you may use keywords, you don’t have to repeat them over and over. Natural language is usually enough, anyway.
6. Gallery Ads
Google now offers a chance for you to include images in your ads; it is even giving some preference to visuals over text.
This means no more boring ads (many people consider text ads boring.) No boring ads mean more users will click on them, which is just what you want to increase your conversions.
Remember, Google only charges you when users click on your ads—or scan through your pictures in the case of images. Be sure to use sharp and inviting images. Not ones that can make your readers scoff and type away.
Use images of your brand and product. Optimize these images effectively, and you will get amazing results.
7. Make Great Landing Pages
No matter how great your ad is, it will not get you the desired result if a click on it takes a customer to a poor landing page.
Imagine getting on the fanciest airplane in the world but landing on quicksand, your heart in your mouth. Even though the plane must have been well furnished and the hosts and hostesses made such an amazing team, you most likely will not board that plan again. Why? Because the landing scared you pretty much.
Your ad is the plane in this illustration, and your landing page is the tarmac. You should make your landing page pretty amazing if you want to have many conversions.
A landing page should be responsive and device friendly—if your ads are targeted at mobile devices, then your landing page should be very responsive to mobile devices.
Optimize your landing page for speed. It has to be fast. Remove any material or phrases that give one the impression that your landing page has some spam material.
Since your landing page functions pretty much like a sign on the street, showing your customers what next to do now that they have clicked your ad, include self-explanatory icons on your landing pages.
It is your first impression. Let it strike. You do not have all the time in the world to impress your customers—delay them for too long, and they will change their minds about getting your product.
8. Location-Based Modifiers
You will build a market where you sell umbrellas in a desert. If you try, you will be lucky to sell one umbrella once in four months. And that is if luck really is your friend.
Why? Because location matters much in influencing the demand for a product.
If you have been tracking your Google ads campaign carefully, you should have noticed by now that not all ads do the same way across different locations. Some do better, and some do worse.
Use location-based bid modifiers to target the audience which you believe is most likely to convert. Doing this demands that you have both a great idea of your product and a great idea of locations where your products will most likely be appreciated.
9. Google Language Settings
It is always a great idea to reach your customers in a language they speak comfortably. If you are a German, you will have many reconsiderations purchasing a product advertised to you in Spanish even when the visual ads may be very appealing.
Google knows this, and this is why they have included a means by which you can reach your target customers in their own language. This is great because you can use Google Ads language optimization alongside location optimization to further improve your results.
For example, if you sell a product that is going to be appreciated by Spaniards, you can optimize your ads in a way that makes them shown to customers in Spain. You can also include more than one language if your customers speak many languages.
10. Campaigns Across Other Channels
One of the ways to make your google campaigns yield more results is to host ad campaigns on other platforms and find a way to link the results to your Google ads campaigns to produce one result—make sales. All you want to do with ads is make sales and gain visibility, remember?
For example, if you run a Facebook ad campaign, you should be able to know what gives you the most results. You should try to include these methods as you optimize your Google Ads campaigns.
What Facebook ads do customers click on? Do you think that they’ll be willing to click on the very ads if you brought them to google?
Not just Facebook ads. Email campaigns. Any other ads.
11. Google Search Partners
Google search partners partner with Google to show ads. That is, your ads can appear on other platforms that are not google. As a Google user, this can be a good thing, and it can also be a bad thing. Remember, the purpose of optimizing your Google ads campaign is to make sure your conversions are optimal.
Since changes cannot be made to Google Search partner bids, it becomes truly difficult to target specific audiences. This means you will be charged for every user that clicks on your ad even though they do not purchase your product.
Check out how Google Search partners work for you. If it is doing fine, then you might want to leave it. And if it is not, you should consider disabling the option.
12. Fill Out All Available Ads Content
When creating your ad, Google gives you a series of forms to fill. Make sure you fill in all necessary details about your product and campaign on these forms.
Use necessary keywords and descriptions. Simple and relevant ads phrases are often the best kinds to use if you’re looking to optimize your Google ads. Necessary descriptions will help drive the product or service you offer across. They reveal the motives of your customers and compel them to take action. This will make your target audience respond favorably to your ads.
13. Track and Observe
You don’t just optimize your Google ads campaign and heave a sigh of relief. Okay, maybe you can. But that sigh? It doesn’t end there, trust me. You will always have to keep optimizing. First, because it is almost impossible to be completely satisfied with your sales. Even if you sold a million books today, you would most likely look for means to sell some more stuff.
On and on, the need for growth and improvement goes.
Observe how your ads are doing. If they are not doing as great as you expected, return to them and optimize some more. Keep tweaking and tweaking until you get the ad campaign you are comfortable with.
Remember, the aim is to make sales. Make sales. Spend less.
