So you are trying to cash out some money from Google Ads (Google AdWords previously) ? Well, even though Google makes it pretty simple to get you on-board and quick to take cash out of your pocket to their platform, getting it right from the start is not always easy.
I am sharing below few tips and quick fixes that i learnt from my personal experience dealing with a range of PPC clients. Firstly you need to know that Google gives you custom support and a dedicated account manager if you are already spending some regular money (i seriously dont know how much it is). These account managers (mostly based in India though) are still a good help to optimise your Google Ads account and go through the setting with you quickly over the phone.
However, if you are just starting or a small business and just planning to spend fewer than couple of hundred quids a month, you gotta be your own boss!
The blend of your keywords phrases, text of your ads and landing page experience all counts towards your final ad score. The better ad score you have the lesser you will pay in the open bidding environment on the Google platform. If you are a small business, the good news is that you are already in a better position to target right customers as you do not have a wide range to cover in regards to product/service or the area.
- Keyword Research: The first thing you need to do is a thorough keyword search. If you can manage that properly, the rest is easy. If you spoil it, it ain’t gonna go right till the end. You can do the search using these three simple ways; search using Google Keyword Planner (you must have Google Adwords set up first), Using the search suggestions (which is when you type in search bar and get a list of suggested searches underneath) and finally looking at the competitors ads and websites and piggybacking their strategy.
- Ad Groups: The most important factor that is mostly overlooked is how you arrange your keywords list into proper ad groups. You can make as many ad groups as you like to keep very similar keywords together. I would suggest about 10 ad groups roughly for 50 keywords to start with.
- Ad Text: Once you have keywords and ad groups sorted, its easy now to start creating your text ads. You can create one wonderful ad and get good clicks but still to enhance your quality, create 2 copies of each text ad and modify it a bit to give Google 3 ads in each ad group. Once you open a text ad, you can spot the main keywords on top of the page, so get the idea of how to make a connection of those keywords with your ad text. Its a good idea to rotate these keywords in your three ads.
- Landing Page: So far so good. Now its time to optimise your landing page according to the heading of your text ad. Try to use your ad group keywords in your landing page metas, headings and top couple of lines of your content. This will improve your landing page usability and hence the ad score at the end of the day. If you are using a CMS, or a landing page creator like unbounce for example, you can create a single page and make copies of it with different URLs that go with your ad group keywords. Make few changes in the metas, content, heading etc and that should work just fine. You do not need to create 100% unique content on each page like you do for SEO reasons.
This is just a quick guide on improving your ad score in Google Ads. There is so much continuous tweaking that you would need to do as you move forward to increase your ad score and CTR. You will need to keep an eye on suggestions provided by Google in the Ads interface. These suggestions are primarily good to be incorporated and will give your ad quality a quick boost. However, don’t apply them blindly as sometimes they are not as accurate as you are.
Last but not the least, if you are targeting broad match keywords, don’t forget to upload a generic negative keyword list to avoid searches that are not meant to generate business for you. If you are advertising for SEO Services then it would be good idea to put jobs, training, courses, internship and similar words in your negative keyword list to avoid losing your precious money.
Please leave me a message if you have any questions.
