Don’t know where to start with Google Ads? Here are some simple tips for you to make sure you’re getting the most out of your Google Ads Campaigns.

In today’s Denton’s Dos and Don’ts, our Head of PPC and Marketing Manager, Phil Mitchell discusses some quick wins and things to check with your Google Ads Campaigns.

Video Transcription:

Hi Everybody it’s Phil Mitchell from Dentons Digital here. I’m the marketing manager and I head up the pay per click department. I’m here today to give you a few tips on how to optimise your pay per click campaigns.

1. Negative Keywords

The first thing that you need to look into is negative keywords.

If you go to your keywords tab in your google analytics account and click search term report, it will show you all the actual search terms that have triggered your ads.

In here you can see any terms that are relevant for your business. Any terms that aren’t relevant for your business, you will want to add to a negative list.

You can either have a master list in negative library, where you create a list that applies to all campaigns. Or you can have campaign specific lists, so you can have a negative list for each of your campaigns.

A good rule of thumb also, is when you’ve started a campaign, to initially start with a negative list. Certain words, you know from the gate, aren’t going to be relevant for your business, such as free, cheap, and stuff like that.

Add these [to your negative keywords list] initially, and that will mean your terms are much more relevant to your business, and there will be a much higher probability of them converting into a sale or a lead.

One other tip on that: the opposite of negative terms is to create terms called broad match modified. Broad match modified is a phrase that has a plus sign in front of every word in the phrase, and that means that every word in the phrase has to match the term. It’s a good way of getting around issues.

For instance, we’ve had issues here where we do marketing for a plumber in bath who would come up [in search results] just to do with bath, like bath tennis. So, if we have the broad match modified, they would have to match plumber and bath. It’s a good tip to apply to your campaigns to get more leads and sales for your budgets.

2. Bid on your Brand

The next tip is to bid on your brand.

Some agencies and pay per click professionals will say this isn’t a good idea because you may have SEO rankings already for your brand.

But I feel like it’s definitely a good idea, especially if you have competitors bidding on your brand, because they’re going to be taking position 1 for your brand. If they’re in the same industry as you, they may actually be taking advantage of your hard work to build your brand exposure.

And also, with the way the listings work, where you get 50% of clicks to the top ad, 30% of clicks the next one, 20%, 10% [and so on], you’ll get two hits on the same term. So you’ll actually get your paid search traffic and your organic traffic. Instead of taking just 50% or only 30% or 10%, you’ll be taking 50% plus the 20% so you get 70% [of clicks]. So, it increases the amount of volume you get for your brand searches.

3. A/B Testing

Always be A/B testing.

You want to A/B test your ads to see which ones get the most clicks but also, which is more important, which ones are driving more conversions, so which ones are actually driving traffic, that are buying your products and services. They’re the sort of adds you want to go for.

Clicks are important for google, in terms of they help your quality score, so your rankings and your click costs are cheaper if you have a higher quality score, but in terms of business conversions are the main thing you want to be looking at. So clicks are secondary, conversions are primary when you’re doing A/B testing.

Also A/B testing your landing pages is very important to see if you can improve conversion rates. The way we manage campaigns here, is we take the revenue from your clicks and your keywords, apply that to keywords in the feedback loop so we can decide the actual accurate amounts to bid to be profitable for your business.

If you can change the conversion rate slightly it can mean you could bid a little bit more, which means you could get a higher position. This means more traffic and more sales at the end of that process.

So it’s always important to keep on testing, trying to increase that conversion rate, any small increases in conversion rate can have massive increases in terms of exposure. for example i had a site where we had a logo. Trimming off 10 pixels of the logo brought the call to action slightly higher and increased conversion rate 2%. This isn’t a massive increase, but it meant that we were able to bid on terms that had high volume competitively. We were able to appear for terms that had 10000 volume of searches per month because our conversion rate increased by 2%. So don’t think just a 2% increase is not a massive deal, it can have big repercussions.

4. Ad Extensions

The fourth thing I wanted to talk about was ad extensions.

You get a ton of ad extensions with google, some are good, some are not. You want to go for call extensions if you’re in a service or even if you’re an ecommerce site (but mainly service) you want call extensions, definitely and site link extensions to relevant areas.

Google does a thing called dynamic site links. You don’t necessarily want dynamic site links because they’re searching for a specific term and you want to give them links related to that term. You don’t want to allow google to decide that for you, you want to decide which ones are going to be more relevant and drive sales. So, using ad extensions is very important.

5. Mobile

And the 5th and final thing I’m going to discuss quickly is mobile.

So, always look at your mobile audience. Google, a few years ago, brought in a device adjustment for bids, so you can limit your amount of exposure on tablet or mobile. You can decrease or increase your bids for mobile and tablet and desktop. You want to see how your site is performing on these platforms. Some businesses work really well on mobile because they’re call-led, meaning most of their leads or sales come through calls. Some don’t work as well if they’re ecommerce led.

There are a lot of things to track as well, a bonus tip so to speak, is google signals. What you can do is use google signals which tracks mobile traffic to desktop traffic. Studies have shown that people will browse ecommerce sites on their mobile but won’t actually purchase the item until they get home to a desktop, maybe because they feel safer. They’ve found that’s how it works. So you want to kind of link those two together, because if you’re driving pay per click traffic to mobile, and it doesn’t look like it’s converting, it may actually be driving customers but they are buying on desktop. So using something  like google signals to link that data together is very important.

I hope these tips have helped your campaigns. If they have let us know. We can also, if you feel like it’s too much for you to do, we can manage this for you, just get in contact, and we will be happy to talk through your campaigns and any of your other digital needs, and see if there is any way we can help you with that.

Enjoy the rest of your day, and I’ll see you next time.