Optimizing your Google search campaign is key to achieving the best results from your advertising budget. It can make a massive difference in the number of people who see and click on your ads, leading to more traffic and potential conversions.
When you optimize your search campaign, you improve the relevance of your ads and increase your chances of showing up at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). This means more potential customers will see your ads and be more likely to click through to your website.
Optimizing your search campaign can also lead to cost savings by improving your quality score, which results in lower cost per click (CPC) and better ad positioning, this helps improve ROI.
In addition to cost savings, optimizing your search campaign can lead to increased conversions, such as purchases or sign-ups. By targeting the right people and attracting those most likely to be interested in your products or services, you can increase your overall performance and drive more business.
Optimizing your Google search campaign is a crucial step for improving your visibility, relevance, cost savings, and conversions. By maximizing your advertising budget and targeting the right people, you can achieve your business goals and drive more success.
Set realistic goals for your Search Campaigns
When setting up a search campaign, it’s essential to have clear goals in mind. Here are some common goals for search campaigns, explained in everyday language:
Increase website traffic: If you want more people to visit your website, you can set a goal to increase your website traffic through your search campaign. This can be helpful if you want to raise awareness about your brand or generate interest in a new product or service.
Generate leads: If you want to gather contact information from potential customers, you can set a goal to generate leads through your search campaign. This can involve creating a lead form that visitors fill out when they click on your ad.
Boost sales: If you’re an e-commerce business, your main goal might be to increase sales through your search campaign. You can set up your campaign to focus on driving conversions, such as purchases or sign-ups.
Increase brand awareness: If you’re a new or lesser-known brand, your goal might be to increase brand awareness through your search campaign. By showing up at the top of search engine results pages, you can introduce your brand to new potential customers.
Promote a specific product or service: If you want to draw attention to a particular product or service, you can set up a search campaign focusing specifically on that item. This can be a great way to increase interest and generate sales for a new product or service.
Overall, the goals for your search campaign will depend on your business and what you’re trying to achieve. By setting clear and specific goals, you can make sure that your search campaign is set up to deliver the results you want
Test the conversion action
Before proceeding to put hands to a campaign, implement a test to verify that the pixels and codes installed are working. This process avoids having duplicated conversions and will save a lot of time for you and your client.
It can be identified by comparing conversions in the campaign report and using google analytics. If the client has an online store and uses Shopify or Woocomerce you can compare numbers.
Important: Take into consideration that depending on the attribution model used in the conversion setup there might be delay in conversion reporting.
Check the campaign structure
Clients who create their own campaigns usually do so following Google’s recommendations and the campaigns don’t follow a solid structure, as a ppc professional our job is to make sure that the campaigns have a good structure and follows the business objectives.
Make sure that ad groups and ads are related to the keywords..
✅Identify opportunities for improvements
By having the right campaign setting and structure, it can be easier to optimize and identify opportunities for growth.
Bidding strategy
Use the right bidding strategy in accordance with the campaign goal.
There are several bidding strategies depending on the client’s focus.
The current bidding strategies for search campaign serve different type of advertising goals.
Consider maximize clicks if the goal is to increase the site traffic or use maximize conversions if the goal is to get conversions.
Negative keywords
It is common to create campaigns and forget completely about the negative keywords or terms that you don’t want to pay for when a user types into the google search. Negative keywords can help save money and optimization tasks.
Understand user behavior
Revise what days of the week is the campaign getting the best out of.
Check what device types are registering more conversions.
In the location section, you can filter by region or cities and range by conversion. Exclude areas where the budget has drained.
Hours of the days are key too, verify how is the conversion flow mornings vs afternoons.
What keywords are the best performers?
Check the search term query to find valuable keywords
Make sure that ads extensions have a decent CTR
Ad extensions can boost quality scores as they can improve the CTR to 15%, and by increasing the quality score, the quality rank improves.
Check network configuration
Verify if they are showing on partner sites and he displays the network, if so, check how is the performance in these placements.
There might be occasions where 80% of the budget is being wasted because the ads are showing on partners sites and this don’t generate conversions.
Use audiences in your campaigns
See what types of audiences and custom combinations are being used.
Tip 💡 Use audiences the right way, clients sometimes can be reluctant about using audiences. The platform allows advertisers to play beyond audience definition and segment.
Analyze metrics
This might be obvious but ignored by advertisers. Check the performance in the last 7 and 15 days. Compare data, take notes if you find a sudden swing in the graphics. Browse through the change history report to discover possible optimizations actions causing the imbalance in the numbers.
Create custom dashboards
Reviewing data and analyzing the performance of a campaign can be exhausting. Fortunately, you can customize your dashboards to only show related metrics in each view, for example:
Identify audience targeting strategy
When launching a search campaign, it is important to know whom to target.
There are different strategies to implement when arranging the keywords.
Informational, Commercial, transactional, and branded keywords.
Let’s quickly review each of them.
➡️Informational keywords are question-based, for example.
How can I use a tablet?
What tablets are best for kids?
➡️Commercial keywords include ‘’best’’, ‘’review’ ’or compare.
➡️Transactional is product o service-related and their intention of use is to lead to sales or conversions.
For example “Buy a laptop”, “purchase a laptop’’‘.
➡️Branded keywords use the name of the brand in them.
Measure what matters
- If you aim to increase conversion, analyze the metrics linked to it.
- Bid higher on the keywords that have a higher conversion rate
- Update your negative keyword list to avoid spending the budget on unrelated keywords
- Find out which keywords trigger search terms using the search term report.
- Use coupon offers or any promotional offer to bring the attention of potential clients
- Ensure that your ads and landing pages are relevant
- Make correct usage of responsive ads; these let you create up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions.
Final thoughts
When it comes to google search optimization, there is always so much to talk about.
Always test and measure what is important; there is no secret formula or strategy that can work for all search campaigns, go beyond and test something different, this varies according to the industry, the budget, and strategy and always think about your potential clients.
