5-Needle Moving Google Ads Optimizations Your Campaigns Should Have

Google Ads transforms businesses by expanding their brand’s awareness, driving more traffic to their website, and increasing their online sales. With strategic targeting and following Google Ads best practices, businesses can reach a wider, more qualified audience while keeping costs down. But, creating a successful Google Ads campaign when you’re first getting started can take a lot of time and effort to set up. With the variety of campaigns you can create and advertiser tools you can use, knowing which features will set your campaigns up for success can be overwhelming. In this blog you’ll learn five Google Ads optimizations that will move the needle for your campaign and your business.

1. Show your audience what they want to see

One of the most important Google Ads tips to remember is ensuring your Google Ads have a high quality score. Google Ads measures your ads and campaigns on three elements: ad relevance, landing page experience, and the expected clickthrough rate. Once you know who you want to target, you want to make sure you show them an ad that is relevant to their previous behavior. For example, if they search for a keyword that is relevant to your business, you’d want to show them an ad that can nurture them through your sales funnel. That way, the ad appears natural to them and as a solution to solving their problems. Besides, misleading your target audience can lead to irrelevant clicks, a poor quality score, and wasted ad dollars.

2. Use negative keywords

Another Google Ads tip to implement is using negative keywords. Negative keywords will help your ad not appear in irrelevant searches or searches you don’t want to spend money on. This allows your targeting and budget to hone in on who is really the right person to see your ad so you can achieve more qualified results. Be careful when choosing your negative words; if your negative keywords overlap with common keywords or you have too many negative keywords, this could lead to your ads not showing altogether.

3. Separate ad groups by keyword type

If you’re running a search campaign, separating your keywords by ad groups will keep audiences and their intents organized. Organizing your ad groups by keyword type helps you build ads that are better targeted and relevant to what your audience is looking for. This will ultimately help you make better data-driven decisions on what keywords to bid higher on or which keywords to pause. By seeing the performance of each ad group and the keywords in it, you can clearly and quickly evaluate where you may need to pivot or scale. 

4. Don’t guess success; track it

Optimizing Google Ads is more than updating the creative of your ads and stuffing them with relevant keywords. Urchin Tracking Modules (UTM) codes are snippets of code added to the url of the landing page of where you want to send your audience. These parameters are a crucial part of your Google Ads campaigns as they help you later identify which ads, ad groups, and campaigns are performing the best. Knowing the performance of these elements will ultimately help you scale the campaigns that are crushing it or tweak the campaigns that aren’t performing.

5. Use remarketing features

After you build your first top-of-funnel (TOFU) campaign, you will have a group of people who aren’t total strangers to your brand but may not be ready to convert. Within Google Ads’ platform, there are a variety of ways you can build remarketing audiences that fit your various business goals and your remarketing audiences' behavior. Capitalize on nurturing these audiences with Google Ads’ remarketing feature to entice these leads to learn more about your solution with a unique offer relevant to them. 

It is clear that Google Ads is a powerful tool for digital marketing. Yes, optimizing a Google Ads campaign can be a daunting task, but with these Google Ads tips in hand, you can tweak or set up your Google Ads for success.