Once you have started delving into Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Pay-per Click (PPC), you are probably wondering how you can improve your SEM campaign. We will explore a few different strategies that you can use to optimise your Google Search Ads campaign.
Setup and Track Conversions of your Campaign
Before we talk more about the ways you can optimise your Search Ads campaign, it would be good that you have set up conversions tracking for your campaign.
Conversion tracking is a powerful tool in Google Ads that allows you to identify how well your campaign is generating leads, sales, downloads, email sign-ups, and other key actions for your business. The data recorded by conversion tracking allows you to identify which areas of your campaign are working and not working, so you can optimise your bids, ad text, and keywords accordingly.
However, if it does not apply to your business goal or objectives, then you do not need to do this step.
What is the Benchmark for your Conversion Metric?
This is probably one of the most important factors that you would need to take note of while running Google Ads. Once you have identified what the conversion or key metric of your campaign be, you can proceed to set a benchmark based on the goal or objective. Alternatively, you may also refer to existing benchmark data that is readily available from resources such as Wordstream for your respective industry. However, data like that are generally derived from the US market and not Singapore.
Add or Remove Targeted Keywords
Before you even consider increasing your budget, you should analyse your targeting first. Running successful Search Ads or SEM campaigns involves a good understanding of the intent of your target audience and their search behaviour. Thus, targeting the correct or related search keywords is crucial in ensuring that you achieve your campaign’s goal or objectives.
In addition, you can also make changes to the keyword match types used for our PPC targeting to extend your campaign’s potential reach.
Add Negative Keywords
Another form of keyword optimisation would be to add negative keywords into your campaign or ad groups. This would help you filter out certain search queries that are not relevant to your campaign.
You can start by clicking on the Keywords option on the left sidebar menu. After which, you may either select the Search keywords or Search terms options.
- Search keywords: This refers to the words or phrases that you are bidding on that determines whether your Search Ad would appear on the SERPs.
- Search terms: This refers to the words or phrases that users typed into the search engine to make your Search Ad appear on the SERPs.
Improving Interaction or CTR (Click-Through Rate)
A clear indicator of your Google Search Ads campaign’s performance is the interaction or CTR. Therefore, to improve the campaign, we would want to find ways to improve this metric. You can start off by pausing the ads that are not garnering a lot of clicks. However, you can create another ad with different headlines and descriptions to test if it helps improve your campaign’s overall CTR.
Overall, improving your interaction or CTR would usually revolve around writing more compelling ad copies that are relevant to your target keywords and would entice users to click through.
Optimise Ad Quality Score
The Quality Score is an important part of your campaign. It is Google’s rating of the user experience that your ads and landing pages provide to users when they search for your keywords. In other words, the quality score is basically an indicator of whether your ads and landing pages are relevant to users.
That said, there are 3 factors that affect Quality Score, which includes:
- Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Ad Relevance
- Landing Page Experience
Hence, to achieve a higher Quality Score, it is recommended to tweak your ads and landing page to improve the expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience.
Optimise Bidding
This strategy involves identifying the keywords that are below the first page bid and manually adjusting the Max. CPC amounts to the one that Google suggests to land out Search Ads on the first page of the SERPs.
For example, if you are bidding for the keyword “digital marketing agency singapore”, you would need to decide how much is the amount you are willing to pay for the keyword. At the start, you can set the Max. CPC amount to be $0.60. However, if under the keyword status it states that the amount is below the first page bid ($1.15). You would need to adjust the amount to $1.15, which Google suggested to have your Ad appear on the first page.
However, there is a simple way to work around manually bidding for keywords. That solution is to use Google’s automated bidding strategy.
To use automated bidding, you would need to go to your campaign Settings, and navigate to Bidding > Change big strategy > select Maximize conversions. In addition, you can also select the option Set a target cost per action (optional). However, during the initial stages of your search campaign, we recommend not selecting this option first. You may decide to select it at a later stage where you see a decrease in the cost per conversion.
Conclusion
Those were some of the ways that you can optimise your Google Search Ads campaigns. It is important to remember that you should make decisions using your ad campaign’s data. With these different optimisation tactics, you should be able to improve your search ad campaigns in a simple and easy manner!