Improving your Return on Investment (ROI) from Google ads requires careful planning, optimisation and continuous monitoring. However, if you dedicate the time to achieve this, it’s possible to make quite a difference to your campaign results.
It’s about making the most of all elements of your campaign. It’s about adding in stuff that’s missing and as importantly weeding out or improving (or optimising to use the official Google phrase) stuff that isn’t working.
Here are seven top tips to enhance your Google ads ROI.
1. Keyword research:
If you didn’t start your campaign a with keyword research phase, then you are bound to have missed opportunities. The obvious phrases are those that will be most competitive, and by targeting these your ROI will suffer. In almost all cases the real value comes from the longer length phrases within which the user has indicated an intent to act. Focus on these and you’ll have success.
- Conduct thorough keyword research to identify high-value keywords relevant to your products or services.
- Focus on long-tail keywords that have lower competition and higher conversion potential.
- Regularly review and refine your keyword list to eliminate irrelevant or underperforming keywords.
- Utilise keyword match types (broad match, phrase match, exact match) effectively to control ad visibility and costs. Broad match is almost always unnecessary within a highly optimised campaign, unless reach is more important than spend.
- Make sure that your visitors always arrive on a page that’s highly relevant to what they were searching for. You do this by having many ad groups. Not just one landing page per product, but multiple landing pages for all variations. These landing pages can be hidden from your main site navigation but will be highly optimised to appear as natural website listings in the normal Google organic search results.
2. Optimise, optimise, optimise:
By utilising the many customisation opportunities within the interface, you can make a huge difference to performance. The trouble is that many of them are well hidden by Google who want as many users as possible to focus on the lower performing search terms in order to maximise their revenues.
- Create compelling ad copy that is relevant to the selected keywords and resonates with your target audience.
- Implement A/B testing to experiment with different ad variations and optimise your click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates.
- Vary your bid prices to ensure maximum exposure for those ads that are working best.
- Set up ad extensions like sitelink, call-out, and structured snippets to provide additional information and increase ad visibility.
- Use ad scheduling to display your ads at the times when your target audience is most likely to be active and buying/enquiring.
3. Conversion tracking and landing page optimisation:
- Implement conversion tracking to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in driving purchases, sign-ups or downloads.
- Continuously monitor and analyse conversion data to identify areas for improvement.
- Optimise your landing pages to ensure they are relevant, user-friendly, and load quickly on both desktop and mobile devices.
- Conduct A/B testing on landing pages to improve the conversion rate and user experience.
4. Budget management:
- Set a realistic budget based on your goals and monitor your spending regularly to ensure it aligns with your ROI objectives.
- Use bid strategies like automated bidding where appropriate to optimise your bids for maximum ROI.
5. Quality score improvement:
Improve the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages to achieve a higher Quality Score, which can result in lower costs per click (CPC) and better ad placement.
6. Negative keywords:
Use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic and reduce wasted ad spend.
7. Geo-targeting:
Refine your geographic targeting over time to focus your ads on regions where your buying audience is most concentrated. If necessary, create secondary campaigns to target lower value regions with a different bid strategy.
The Google Ads platform is extremely powerful, but complex. Don’t hesitate to seek the advice of professionals if you are uncertain about whether or not you’re getting the maximum ROI possible. Remember that Google Ads is an ever-evolving platform, and what works today may not work tomorrow. Staying up-to-date with industry trends and Google Ads best practices is crucial for ongoing success and ROI improvement.
