Google Ads efficiency is complex and can be quite frustrating when your campaigns are not producing the result you’re after. In today’s blog, we go through the different optimisations you can make to your Google Ads campaigns so that they can be more effective and efficient.
Optimising Your Ad Quality Score
Firstly, what is ‘Quality Score’? Google defines Quality Score as an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages. It works off a 1 to 10 scale and includes expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. You can see your quality score by adding the “Quality Score’ column in Google Ads.
Why is quality score important? A higher quality score can lead to lower prices (cost-per click) as well as better ad ranking and position. Below steps you through two major optimisations you can make to help better your quality score.
Match your keyword with your headline
Matching your keyword with the headline of your ad will help increase your ad relevance and expected click through rate.
To achieve this, we suggest running single keyword ad groups (SKAGs). A single keyword ad group is exactly as it sounds; within your campaign, ensure you have a separate ad group for every keyword you are targeting. The ads showing within the ad group will always be relevant to the search terms matching to your respective keyword; taking ad relevance out of the equation.
If your consumer searches for the keyword “women’s running shoes” and your ad headline matches exactly that, reading “Women’s Running Shoes”, it is likely that the consumer will click on your ad increasing your expected click through rate. Further, this is a great customer experience improving your ad relevance.
Send consumers to the most relevant landing page
Ensure that you are sending consumers to the most relevant landing page that matches what they searched for. This will likely result in a better customer experience and saves your customer from having to browse your site to find what they are after. Additionally, it may lead to lower website bounce rates.
For example, if your ad is for “asics running shoes” send them to a landing page that only shows products for asics running shoes, rather than sending them a generic running shoe category page that might include all brands of running shoes.
Read more about how to create the most relevant landing page.
Optimising Your Keywords
Keyword Expansion for Google Ads Efficiency
Simply put, keyword expansion is adding more relevant keywords to your Google Ads account. The idea here is to continuously improve the efficiencies of your ads by ensuring you are capturing the most relevant audience possible. Further, you will be able to expand your reach to new, untapped audiences.
If you are just starting out, we recommend you begin by reviewing the list of search terms (in Google Ads) which have previously converted and adding those terms as keywords. That way you are adding in keywords which have historically performed well.
You can also use Google’s keyword planner to find new keywords.
Variations of Keywords
Similar to keyword expansion it’s important to also add in variations of your keywords. Adding in variations allows you to target the most relevant customer.
Here are some variations to consider:
- Variations of your brand name e.g. different spellings
- Adding in other terms used e.g. if you have the keyword “womens jeans”, consider adding in “womens denim pants” or “womens denim jeans” etc.
- Add in size, colour, style, material variations where relevant e.g if you sell a selection of coffee tables, you could add keywords such as “marble coffee table” or “glass coffee table” etc.
Ensure that while you add in new keywords and variations you continue to use the single keyword ad group structure. This will result in higher ad relevance and expected click through rate and in turn may reduce your CPCs and increase your ad position in Google.
The results
When doing keyword expansion we’ve found that:
- CPCs dropped across the board – the average search campaign dropped from $0.64 to $0.52. This is a decrease of over 20% (23.24%)
- More bang for your buck – this means that we’re directing more traffic to your site for the same budget leading to more conversions and sales
- Increased clicks – overall clicks increased by 3% across the board
In Summary…
To make your ads more efficient, you need to dedicate time and effort to improving your quality score and finding relevant customers through keyword expansion. This coupled with single keyword ad groups can help increase your campaign performance.
