13 Actionable Google Ads Tips You Must Leverage

Google’s revenues in 2016 were around $90 billion. In fact, the most revenues come from its advertising platform - Google Ads.

The revenue tells us how important Ads is to Google. Without Ads, there wouldn’t be Google, I dare to say. Advertisers should always try to optimize Ads campaigns as much as possible.

In this blog post, you’ll find 13 actionable Google Ads tips where you’ll learn how to:

• Get more clicks
• Decrease cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Optimize landing page (get more conversions)

Let’s see!

#1 Optimize Quality Score

Quality Score is the metric which measures how relevant your landing page and ad are to the keywords you’ve picked.

Simply said, it’s an estimate of the quality of your ads. According to Google, three factors determine your Quality Score:

• Expected CTR
• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience

Expected CTR is just an estimate how likely is that your ads will get clicked. There are three possible statuses: above average, average, and below average.

When you have below average CTR, it means that you MUST change your ad text. For example, maybe you should use magnet words since they tend to improve CTR.

Ad relevance measures how targeted keywords are related to your ads. In other words, you have to be smart when creating a campaign's structure.

Finally, landing page experience has the same statuses as Expected CTR. Having “below average” status is a sign that you need to optimize your landing page.

Maybe adding some A/B tests may improve landing page experience? No worries, I’ll talk about this later.

#2 Separate Social Network and Display Network

Social Network and Display Network are two main networks (campaign types) where you actually place your ads.

I said two main networks because when you start creating a new campaign, you’ll be able to choose other campaign types as well.

For example, Video type is the type that you use to display video ads on YouTube and partners site. However, most advertisers use Search Network and Display Network.

The best advice that someone will give you about choosing campaign type is to: separate search and display network.

Why?

When you target email marketing software (e.g.), and select Search Network with Display Select, it means that your ads will show:

• Search results when someone searches for it
• On partnered sites that are related

That’s not good. Optimizing will be few times harder, and you should always “slice” your campaigns.

#3 Spy Competitors

Knowing what your top advertisers do on Google Ads may significantly increase your Ads success.

You can always do a simple Google search and see which competitors are in paid search section. If you search for “heat maps” you’ll see Crazy Egg’s ad.

But, the real thing is knowing how much does Crazy Egg spend on AdWords campaigns.

Thanks to SpyFu, that information is available to everyone. Of course, this is only an estimate that comes from Keyword Planner. Only Google knows how much do specific advertisers spend.

Now, you should open the app, enter crazyegg.com and press enter.

It appears that Crazy Egg spends $1,600 every month.

In the menu, you should click on PPC Research because there you can see more details like which paid keywords Crazy Egg share with competitors, which doesn’t share, who are top competitors, and so on.

You can even see the history of ads, so you can learn how they change a headline, for example.

#4 Optimize Landing Page

Landing pages must be:

• Fast
• Mobile ready
• Specific

Otherwise, conversions will drop. A fast website is a key for success. Nobody likes to wait.

According to Forbes, Amazon discovered that every additional 100ms of page loading will decrease sales for 1%.

Do the simple math and calculate how much money they would lose if their site gets slower for only 1 second.

Next, use tools such as Yandex (free tool) which enables you to see how visitors use your landing page and how they actually scroll.

It’s absolutely wrong when you put your CTA in the place that’s NOT above the fold.

#5 Limit The Number Of Keywords

You know that I said that the Ad relevance measures how relevant ads to your keywords are. Imagine how adding 50 keywords (e.g.) to your Ad group would affect the Quality Score.

I think your Quality Score and CPC will skyrocket. Now, when you limit the number of keywords per ad group, managing your campaigns will be simpler.

The real question is how many keywords an advertiser should add in Ad Groups? Google suggests 5 - 20, but some marketers tend to use SKAG tactic which stands for Single Keyword per Ad group.

The concept is simple. You only use one keyword in an Ad group and you use that keyword in the headline and description.

This way, they set up an Ads campaign easier and optimize it as well.

#6 Install Conversion Tracking Code

Conversion Tracking code occurs when the conversion happens.

Thanks to the piece of code, you can see which keywords are the reason of conversions, and which are the horrible keywords.

Simply said, after you install conversion tracking code, you should add negative keywords and avoid those keywords that don't add any value.

In order to install a tracking code, you have click on Tools - Conversions. After that, choose + CONVERSION.

Now, you have to select the source of the conversions that you’d like to track.

You’ll probably pick Website as the source, and after that, your have to set a conversion value. Of course, you can choose a dynamic value if needed.

Finally, place your code between <body></body> tag.

Next, installing conversion tracking code enables you Target CPA bidding method which does bidding for you automatically.

You only have to provide a sample of 30 conversions, and Ads will thankfully to its machine learning algorithms figure who’s most likely to convert, and bid automatically to that users.

#7 Bring Your Visitors Back

Online stores usually struggle with an abandonment rate. I don’t know which industry you work in, but if you work in Style & Fashion industry, you should see an abandonment rate of 71.9%.

Together with email marketing automation, remarketing is a powerful way of returning your visitors back. Today, there are many ways how to bring your visitors back:

• Standard remarketing
• Dynamic remarketing
• Remarketing for mobile apps
• Remarketing for search ads
• Video remarketing
• Email-list remarketing

For example, you can target visitors who added a product to the cart but didn’t finish the order.

One of the reasons why consumers leave your site without placing an order is the unexpected shipping cost.

What do you think about offering free shipping to customers who abandonment?

That could be awesome if your margin profit is large enough.

#8 Use Dynamic Ads

Imagine that you have 10,000 products and you want to advertise all of them, but the problem is it takes lots of time to create all ads. It would be 10,000 ads. That’s ridiculous. What should you do?

You should create a DSA campaign. DSA stands for Dynamic Search Ads. Simply said, Google will automatically target keywords and write headlines for your ads. Now, you can target the following:

• All pages on the website
• Specific pages
• Page feed

A page feed mean that you can upload the list of URLs that you want to advertise.

Keep in mind that bulk editing/uploading is only available by using Google Ads Editor. Ads editor is available only on Mac OS and Windows. Linux users, sorry!

#9 Calculate Your CLV

This is the most important metric in the business. Period. It tells you how much an average customer pays you until he leaves you because nobody wants to be your customer forever.

Knowing that your average customer pays you $100/mo for 24 months means that your CLV is $2,400. Here’s the formula.

Churn rate is the percentage of people who canceled the subscription (for SaaS businesses).

Calculating CLV in E-commerce business is a bit different, but not impossible.

SaaS companies usually spend 30% of the CLV on acquiring a new customer.

Now, if you know that you can spend $720 (2400 × 0.3 = 720) on acquiring a new customer, and if a click costs you $1, that means you need to get 1 customer in every 720 clicks.

There’s no good AdWords campaign without CLV metric.

#10 Ad Extensions Are Important

Ad Extensions will definitely make more attention to your ads because this way you add extra pieces of information about your business. Look at the following photo.

A taxi driver can add a phone number and Google will charge him whenever someone clicks (and calls). He added a call extension. It’s important to say that we have two types of ad extensions:

• Manual extensions
• Automatic extensions

Manual extensions are controlled only by you, and here are all of them:

• Location extensions
• Affiliate location extensions
• Callout extensions
• Call extensions
• Message extensions
• Sitelink extensions
• Structured snippet extensions
• Price extensions
• Review extensions
• App extensions

Automatic extensions are just as the title says - automatic.

Rich snippets make your automatic extensions more accurate because that’s how Google understands your content easier.

Here is the list of automatic extensions:

• Dynamic sitelink extension
• Consumer rating extension
• Seller rating extensions
• Previous visits

I always prefer manual extensions because they give me more control. Keep in mind that ad extensions show when your ad’s position and Ad Rank is high enough.

#11 Use A/B Tests

With A/B tests you can realize which ads bring the best CTR and the lowest conversion cost. For those who are not familiar with A/B tests, here the short explanation.

The idea is to create two different versions of Ads ads - version A and version B.

Once you do it, you only have to check which version brings better results. But, be careful! The results MUST be statistically significant.

Marketers should waste their valuable time on calculating it. Instead, they should use calculators such as Get Data Driven.  

Within a few seconds, you’ll see if your results are statistically significant, or you need to continue advertising getting a more accurate sample.

#12 Leverage Ad Customizers

I mentioned that companies with lots of products use DSA campaigns and let Google target keywords based on the content of the website.

There’s another way too you can use when you have thousands of products. The feature called Ad customizers enables you to dynamically change the headline and/or description.

DSA and Ad customizers are similar, but they’re not identical.

With Ad customizers, you can write the headline and description on your own, and when you pick a DSA campaign, Google does it for you automatically.

Specifically, you upload a spreadsheet file and use attributes.

As for targeting, it’s possible to target by keyword, location, or you can use it across a campaign or ad group.

#13 YouTube Is Great For Branding

What Google Ads specialists usually like about advertising on YouTube is that they pay only per view, and a view is counted when someone watches your video for at least 30 seconds.

Currently, we got two video ad formats:

• TrueView Ads
• Bumper Ads

TrueView Ads are those ads that force you to watch at least 5 seconds before Skip Ad button appears, and they charge you after 30 seconds of watching.

Anyway, this is great for building a brand awareness since you can say a lot in the first 5 seconds.

On the other side, Bumper ads are 6-seconds videos and YouTube users aren't able to skip the video.

I always suggest you retarget your visitors and increase the brand awareness because YouTube advertising is cheap!

Conclusion

Google Ads may increase the number of conversions dramatically, so I hope you read this carefully. There are so many things and features to worry about, but one thing is for sure.

You have to measure and learn from measuring. Every campaign should have its goal, and without implementing conversion tracking code, everything would become useless.

Of course, consider A/B test seriously because that’s the important part of optimizing. Good luck.