Guides
7 Must-Know Best Practices for New Google Advertisers
Google Ads has been around for a long time. It is the most popular digital advertising platform. Google Ads lets advertisers appear on the most popular search engine, as well as on Youtube, Gmail, and hundreds of Google’s partners.
Google Ads is a great place to focus all your paid campaigns. However, it is not as easy as it may look. There are some things you need to be aware of when setting up and optimizing campaigns.
Now that you know a little about Google Ads, let’s learn about the best practices for using them. These tips will help you use the platform more easily and effectively.
1. Take care of negative keywords
Many people think that they are done once they set up their campaign and leave the rest to Google. However, this often leads to running out of money and falling down on the search engine results page.
Now is not the time to add new keywords to your list of phrase matches. It is time to focus on search engine optimization. This means making sure your website looks good to Google and that your content is high quality.
How Google ads’ negative keywords work
Negative keywords can be set to prevent your ad from being shown when someone types them into a search engine. You should focus on using negative keywords, especially in the first few weeks.
If your company sells marketing software, the first thing you should do is add terms like “free” or “development” to your Google ad campaign’s negative keyword list.
This way, you are targeting people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
At the same time, you will be excluding irrelevant search terms, such as “marketing software free”.
Search intent is a tricky thing to pinpoint. Especially when you’re using broad match keywords in your Google ads (as opposed to the exact match). This is exactly why you should always remember to regularly check the search terms that trigger your ad and get rid of those that are irrelevant to what you’re advertising.
2. Keep track of your Quality Score
Google Ads’ Quality Score has been the topic of many discussions among marketers, with some arguing that its role in a campaign’s performance is way overrated. And while that may be true to some extent, it doesn’t change the fact that the Quality Score is one of the best indicators of whether Google “likes” your ads or not.
How Google ads Quality Score works
Quality Score allows you to see how well will your ad rank compared to similar competing advertisements. The score is given on a scale of 1 to 10. Google analyzes several specific factors to estimate this:
- Expected clickthrough rate;
- Ad relevance;
- Landing page experience.
Google Ads can help you measure how your ads are doing. There is a status for each factor that Google looks at. You can see if your ad is “below average” and then find out what the problem is.
If you want to make sure that your keywords and ad groups are a good match, you can create a new ad group.
If you want your Google ads to be more relevant, you should be specific when choosing your search terms. You don’t need to make huge changes; just fixing your landing page loading time can help improve your Quality Score.
If you see a quality score of 4/10 next to one of your keywords, it means that you can improve it by working on all three factors.
Make sure that your ad is relevant to what people are clicking on. Check to make sure that the CTR is what you expect it to be. Make sure that the landing page is consistent with what people are expecting when they click on your ad.
This way, you’ll be able to see what needs to be changed and adjust it for the best results.
Make sure to check Google’s guidelines on the matter and see how you can keep improving the Quality Score with every campaign.
3. Make targeting as detailed as possible
It should be your unconscious standard practice at this point to tailor your ad to your potential clients. Aside from the obvious possibility to target your audience depending on their age, gender or location, Google ads allow you to customize and segment your campaign even further.
Audience targetting
When it comes to your audience, you have the possibility to target users based on some pretty specific factors, such as:
- their interests
- their habits
- their most popular search queries
- their interaction with your website
You can also create custom audience segments by inserting keywords based on your potential customers’ interests, URLs, and apps that they’re likely to use or that are similar to yours. This way, you’re able to target a very narrow audience, yet the one that is highly likely to engage with your product.
Content targetting
Google has a lot of different features. One of those features is called content targeting. With it, you can choose the topics related to the websites where you want your ads to appear. You can also choose specific websites or apps on the Google Display Network where you want your ads to show.
Editor’s note: Paid ads that use information about the target audience obtained from third-party websites to match the search traffic will soon become inactive for Google ads users who have third-party cookies disabled.
Once these cookies are banned, marketers will only be able to rely on the first-party cookies, i.e. the user information gathered directly on their own websites.
You can learn more about Google banning third-party cookies here
When it comes to targeting, it’s also important to make use of exclusions and filter out the topics or types of content that you don’t want your marketing campaign to be associated with.
Just like with negative keywords, you should regularly check the placements where your ads appear and rid of those that are irrelevant or perform badly.
4. Spend extra time on the creatives
Setting up a new campaign takes a lot of research. There are many elements of the Google ads campaign you need to take care of:
- Targeting options
- Ad group levels
- Specific keywords
- Bidding strategy
So many, in fact, that it’s fairly easy to treat the actual copy and images for your Google ads as an afterthought.
That approach might have worked a couple of years ago when users weren’t bombarded by ads on every corner of the internet. Now it takes a lot more effort to stand out from the crowd.
So, if you notice that your campaign isn’t performing well, the problem might not lay in the campaigns’ settings, but rather in blandly looking (or sounding) ads.
How to create Google ads creatives that convert
Your best indicator that something is not right with your ads’ creatives is a low CTR. Fortunately, there is a handful of things you could try and do to address this issue. Here are some Google ads best practices for creatives:
Check if your visuals are in line with Google’s best practices, and make sure the designers at your company always follow them.
- Don’t bet it all on one ad — prepare different sets of creatives and test them out to see which ones perform best and continue to improve from that. Try running A/B tests or rely on Google’s custom experiments to help you decide on a winning variation.
- Under no circumstances, do not reuse the same copy and visuals over and over again!
- Stay creative throughout the process and try to have fun with your campaigns. It pays out in the long run!
- Prepare high-quality landing pages
We briefly mentioned the importance of landing pages when it comes to the Quality Score, but this really is a topic that needs its own discussion. You can have a perfectly tailored campaign, but if it leads users to a mediocre page, then it’s not going to bring the results it should.
Here, a high bounce rate is your best indicator that it might be time to reevaluate your landing pages.
How to create a perfect landing page to direct your Google ads to
First off, remember that creating an ad-friendly landing page comes down to more than just the appearance.
One factor that is sometimes overlooked here is loading speed. Google’s study tells us that “the probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.” PageSpeed Insights is your best friend here, and you should always aim for a score of 80 or more for the sake of all your PPC efforts.
Relevance to the user should also be a top priority when using a given landing page for your campaigns, and this is something that Google tends to be very strict about. As an absolute must, you should always include your campaign’s keywords on the landing page.
Also, there is another catch. Using an already existing page on your website as a landing page for your campaign might seem like a good idea. Yet, you always double-check for any information featured on the page that may not be relevant to what you’re advertising in a given campaign. If there’s too much of such content — better create a brand new landing from scratch.
Being straightforward is your best bet here, which is why landing pages created entirely for the purpose of PPC campaigns tend to work best.
Create and edit landing pages almost effortlessly with our AI-driven Website Builder — access dozens of customizable templates, drag-and-drop editor, and complete marketing suite within one solution!
6. Keep your account organized
This one often gets overlooked amongst all the Google Ads best practices. After all, how hard can it be to organize campaigns?
And that’s true, it’s not really rocket science. But as your campaigns grow in size and number, you’ll start to see how important it is to keep a consistent, clean structure across the entire account from the very beginning.
How to keep track of all your multiple ads
Starting from the campaign level, make sure all your campaigns are labeled correctly. By this, we mean avoiding names like “Promo campaign 1” or “Search2”. Why? Because even though such labels make perfect to you when you have 3 or 4 campaigns running, it will quickly get confusing as you add more to it.
Therefore, it is best to always specify the campaign type and follow it with a specific campaign name. The same thing should happen at the ad group level.
The general rule when it comes to a Google ads account organization, regardless of the structure you choose to use, is to be as clear as possible and declutter your campaigns on a regular basis.
It will save you lots of headaches in the future.
7. Take all Google Ads tips with a grain of salt
… Okay, we know it’s a weird thing to say in an article that’s essentially giving you a bunch of different Google Ads tips. But hear us out on this one!
There are some tips that work for most people when they run Google Ads campaigns. However, you should not think of them as rules that everyone needs to follow.
Some of the tips you’ll read from experienced marketers will be helpful, but some may not work.
It’s possible that you may have to sell your home even if you followed the guidelines perfectly. It doesn’t mean that you did something wrong.
Every business is different, so your Google ad should be too. Not all of the tips will fit your specific case. That’s okay!
You should always evaluate the advice you get in the context of your goals and the business itself. For example, your friend who works in retail might have told you that display ads are doing wonders for their marketing efforts, but it can turn out to be different when you’re trying to reach your B2B customers.
It is important to test things out to see what works for you and your business. You should find a balance between general tips and what you need to make your business successful.
With GetResponse and our paid ads creator, you can connect your Google Ads account to the rest of your marketing operations and manage everything from a single dashboard!
>>>Join The One Funnel Away Challenge<<<
