Is your Google Ads performing as good as it used to? Or perhaps you never got you the results you aimed for…

If you are just setting up your campaign and forgetting about it, you are wasting money. Take the time to review your campaign performance and always perform tests. Here are some tips that will help you improve your campaign performance.

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  1. Ad Extensions

You might have noticed that some of your competitors have additional parts to their ad. Those parts are called ad extensions. The most common ones are your Sitelinks (links to specific parts of your website), Location and Call ad extensions.  You can also implement Call Out ad extensions as a way to make your offers stand out.

Why should you use extensions? They are free and can hugely increase your CTR! The whole idea is to dominate as much of the real estate on the top of Google with relevant information.

  1. Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are one of the main tools for improving your campaigns. Before you start any campaign, go through all potential negative keywords and decide which ones work for your campaign. It’s best to start with the Keyword Planner Tool to identify all the keywords that are not relevant. Do not forget to constantly review your negative keyword list to save spending on useless clicks and to increase the campaign’s conversion rate.

  1. Geographical Targeting

The wider your geographical targeting is, the more competitors you are up against. Make sure to run your campaigns for specific locations to get the most out of your campaign. You can adjust the bid in the campaign settings for some locations. Click on “locations” and set up your bid variation percentages for each location you are targeting.

If a business services customers nationwide, it’s best to create separate campaigns for each of the geographic areas. You will find that in some areas you will be paying a lot less for the clicks.

You can also exclude locations that you don’t service or are not interested in getting inquiries from. If radius targeting is being used, make sure it targets an accurate range surrounding your location.

  1. Analyse Conversion Rates

To get this done, make sure you first setup your conversion tracking. There are a number of conversions that you could potentially be tracking. The most common ones are form submissions, sales and phone calls.

For most businesses there are profitable and non-profitable hours in the day. Maybe you are not converting at all at 7am, but get half of your daily conversions at 1pm. You can use the Ads and Keywords segmented reports by pulling a report for your indicated time period, then clicking on the report button and adding a segment for Day. You can even go as far as segmenting for Time. Adjust bid scheduling accordingly, or determine if there are days that can be taken out of the schedule.

  1. Use The Right Keyword Match

If most of your keywords are broad, there are some keywords that could be attracting most of the impressions. Broad keywords can also have higher priority over phrase and exact matches. Perhaps using a broad match modifier might be a better way to go as opposed to using broad or phrase matches.

Be sure to monitor what you are showing up for in order to optimise your account accordingly. Click on keywords, then details to retrieve the search query report that shows exactly what keywords are working so you can exclude or include them.

  1. Device Optimisation

Make sure that you regularly run your “segmentation by device” report and look at every ad group. By performing this analysis periodically, you can keep your campaigns running more efficiently across all devices.

Most campaigns will have a pattern that you will be able to spot. In terms of device optimisation, it’s best to analyse the client environment to see what device they are most likely to use. Sometimes it’s best to analyse device and schedule at the same time.

  1. Display Network Placements Analysis

Like a keyword report, a placement report helps you identify the placements or sites where your ads were displayed. Of course, not all of these placements will be relevant to the product you sell or the service you offer. Eliminate sites that produce low or no profit. Sometimes you have to say no to the mediocre so you can say yes to the great! By pausing less profitable placements, you will have more budget available for the most profitable placements.

Don’t forget to have Google Analytics installed on your website. It’s a great way to get additional insights into your website performance. When setting this up, make sure that your Google Ads account is linked to your Analytics account.