4 tips to optimize your Google AdWords campaigns

Many articles on the web talk about creating campaigns and give advice on creating ads in Google Ads. However, good performance can only be achieved with optimization strategies. In this post, we’re going to analyze the key metrics to understand the health of your campaigns, and we’re going to propose solutions so you can keep improving your results.

How should I analyze my campaigns?

The first index to consider in the analysis is the CTR (click rate). This is the most important metric for Ads campaigns because it’s the first thing we need ensure that our website is visited by users conducting search queries.

Google believes that a good CTR for the search network is between 1% and 2%. However, this is only a general number that can vary greatly depending on the market segment and also the goals of the campaign, among other things.

In general, the higher the CTR, the better. A click rate High means your ad is communicating exactly what users are looking for and driving more visitors to your site.

Next, we will list the top strategies to increase CTR to the maximum.

1. Expand keywords

In order for other users to be able to see your ad, you have to add additional keywords in the first step. In this way, the ad has a greater reach and consequently more clicks.

It seems obvious, but we would like to recommend you not to add the first few keywords, right keywords that come to mind, but synonyms or expressions that have never been used. An interesting alternative to generating new keywords is analyzing the search terms. To do this, go to the “Keywords” section of your Google Ads account and then to “Search terms”.

Thanks to these search terms, you can discover the phrases that users use when searching for your products and that lead to the ads being printed. Adding these may seem irrelevant keywords on our ads when we think they’re already going to print, but it’s an important measure to increase the Quality Score of the keywords (we’ll come back to this topic later).

It is also not correct to include absolutely every term that we find on this page, as this can result in low-qualified traffic. It is important to choose such words with a good CTR and low cost per converted click, which means that the term generates a lot of clicks, consumes little budget and still brings good results.

In the example below, we see two terms that bring conversions that weren’t added as keywords. If we look at the CTR and cost per conversion click metrics, we see that it makes more sense to add the first term as a keyword since it has a good CTR and at the same time a much lower cost per conversion click than the other term has.

2. Insert negative keywords

Negative keywords turn out to be very important for campaigns and ad groups because they limit ad impressions to low-qualified users.

For example, if the products we have for sale are personalized t-shirts and the ads are generated for keywords like “buy t-shirts,” “cheap t-shirts,” and “custom t-shirts,” the person will search “Buy T-Shirts Wholesale” also sees the ads and is able to click on them, generating a spending budget without making purchases in-store. In this case, the ideal would be to use the keyword “wholesale” as a negative word to avoid unwanted visits.

Another useful tip is to check which search terms are generating high impressions and few clicks (i.e. those that have a low CTR). This helps us identify keywords that are not very relevant to the business.

3. Try different matching criteria

You’re probably already wondering which keyword match is best for your campaigns. The reality is that there is no exact formula to know this. Ideally, you should test how the same term works for the different matching options available.

To run this test, the same keyword must be added within an ad group using the different match types available. After a week, we review which terms have the best CTR and cost per click with conversion. These metrics help us get good results on a small budget.

4. Raise the quality level

It is known that the higher the level of quality and cost per click (CPC), the better the position of our ad in search results. So if the quality of our ads is 10, we can spend less money without losing clicks.

Let’s analyze this with an example. Let’s imagine two advertisers, a Tiendanube customer and their competition. They both sell the same type of product and compete for clicks from their potential customers, but the competitor doesn’t have great marketing skills and their keywords have a quality index of 5. To compensate for the lack of quality, they defined their cost per click to be a maximum of $30. On the other hand, the CloudStore owner, who is more savvy and concerned about staying within budget, has set his keywords’ Quality Score to 7 and set his max CPC at $20.

In this case we would have:

In this first scenario, the competitor’s ad would appear better positioned and attract more clicks. With this in mind, the owner of Tiendanube decides to solve the problem by improving his quality index: he checks his keywords, improves the text of his ads and generates landing pages that are more suitable for users, which allows him to raise his quality index to 10.

After some time, the Tiendanube owner will find that his ad is already on the first positions and also needs a smaller budget to get the same number of clicks.

In this new scenario, we can see that even by reducing the maximum CPC, we keep the position unchanged, no clicks are lost and 20% of the campaign budget is saved, which can be reinvested in other actions.

final considerations

By implementing all the measures mentioned in this article, the CTR of your ads will be optimized and in a short time you should already have benefits such as:

• More visits
• More conversions and sales
• Higher quality traffic to your website
• budget savings

Don’t forget that campaigns need constant updating. It’s important to review the status of metrics weekly and suggest changes, run tests and see success in our marketing campaigns.

If you are not selling yet and are looking for the best place to start, I recommend you try the Tiendanube platform for free for 15 days. It’s easy, fast and no technical knowledge is required.