Google Ads, the former AdWords, has many different options to confuse the inexperienced new user as well as the experienced marketer. How do you know what is going to be effective without spending your money on the wrong tactics?
That can be difficult with all the different settings and of course, Google changes things up regularly. So, you can’t always say, “do it this way” or “this way works.” Every business and ad account are different. You need to make sure you don’t just set it and forget it.
- Don’t Set it and Forget it
We all know we aren’t supposed to launch a campaign and leave it to run without any optimizations. Yet life happens and before you know it, it’s been weeks or months since you checked your campaigns. This is not excusable. Optimizations can be as quick as 15 minutes to an hour in order to tweak something – even if you’re only going by Google’s recommendations. Google gives you some great recommendations within the user interface on what you can do to improve your campaign efficiency.
- Don’t just rely on Google Recommendations
Yes, it’s easy to get your optimization score up to 100% without doing anything or doing everything. However, it is not always a good idea to just go ahead and try something for all of your campaigns. Test with a campaign or account before you decide to execute a tactic across everything. You may find that automated or smart bidding is increasing your prices while not converting well. Sometimes, you should be implementing a strategy across your accounts, campaigns and ad groups, such as expanded text ads and responsive text ads in your ad groups. Remember, the recommendations are suggestions to help guide you, but there are other optimizations like search term history.
- Use More than 1 Ad Copy per Ad Group
Yes, it’s true. All the things you read from Google about having multiple ad copy per ad group are needed. Don’t overwhelm the ad group with ad copy and don’t starve it either. Google reps and documentation suggests that you keep to 3 expanded ads and 1 responsive ad per ad group. This amount of ad copy is recommended as the best for the algorithm to find and serve the best performing copy.
- Don’t Forget to Check Your Conversion Setup
Occasionally, for various reasons, your conversion tags may stop recording. This could be the result of a website update, Google Tag Manager update, a landing page was brought down or not working, etc. For whatever reason, don’t let it affect your reporting. If you see conversions are slow or fast (sometimes your trigger could have been moved), double check your settings in Google Ads/Google Tag Manager via the website and Google Analytics.