How to create a successful Google Ads Search campaign
It is not just about the money you spend on Google, it is about your ads titles and descriptions, your landing page and the keywords you chose.
Google has made it pretty easy for anyone to create a search campaign. All you have to do is press the + button, then “New campaign” and you will follow Google’s steps to create your campaign. But there is more you can do to improve your performance.
Bidding
You have the option to bid on conversions, conversion value, clicks and impression share.
This bidding process is important and should be taken seriously. If you want people to see you in the search bar, then impression share is the way to go, you prefer people to visit your site, then clicks is what you are looking for, if you care about leads to fill a form or to sign up, then conversions is a good option, finally, for purchases or clients who you can assign a value, conversion value is the best option.
Note that each option increases in complexity, impressions and clicks are easy to track for Google Ads and don’t require much of you, whole different story for conversions and conversion value, both require you to install a Tag, either from Google Ads or Google Tag Manager.
Tags and Tag Manager will be covered in another article.
Why is this step so important? Google is going to optimize based on this bidding strategy you decided, that means that the algorithm is going to find out which people can convert more easily and show them your ads.
Keywords
This step is crucial, you have to find keywords that are related to what you are advertising. It can seem like an unimportant step but is arguably the most important because your Quality Score is calculated per keyword (more on quality score later).
Keywords are grouped into four groups:
- Broad match. If your keyword is “bicycle”, the broad match will show your ad to searches that contains bicycle or a synonym like bike, mountain bike, bicycle movies, etc.
- Phrase match. If your keyword is “electric bicycle”, the phrase match will show your ad to searches that contains the words electric and bicycle or synonyms like electric bike, bicycle for electric people, etc.
- Exact match. In this case if you selected the keyword “bicycle race”, then, your ads will only show to people searching bicycle race.
- Negative keywords. These are keywords that you don’t want to appear in, if you have “electric” as a negative keyword, your ads won’t show on electric bikes or electrical engineering.
As noted before, Broad match will show to broader searches than Phrase match which in turn will show to broader searches than Exact match.
You can read more about keyword matching types in this article by Google.
Extensions
People tend to not take extensions seriously, but they can improve your peformace. As a simple rule, you should include at least the following extensions:
- At least 2 sitelinks
- At least 2 structured snippets
- A callout
Image extensions can improve peformance but if you are new you might not see the option to add them. Call extension, Forms extensions and App extensions depend on your business and objectives.
Extensions are great ways to improve your ads, but some of them depend greatly on you Quality Score (Again the quality score?) in order to be effective.
And finally, the so called Quality Score.
Quality Score
According to Google:
Quality Score is a diagnostic tool meant to give you a sense of how well your ad quality compares to other advertisers.
And this determines how much you pay per click, whether your extensions show or not and your place on the search results.
What drives the quality score?
The quality score takes into account your CTR (Expected clickthrough rate), Ad relevance and Landing page experience.
Expected CTR. How likely your ad will be clicked by a person watching it. To improve this metric is important to make ads that grab attention and are related to your keywords.
To exemplify this, if you decided to target in phrase match “bikes for adults” your ad might show to someone searching “electric bikes for adults” and if you don’t have nothing about electric bicycles in your ads or landing pages, this might low your Expected CTR. To avoid this, remember to use negative keywords.
Ad relevance. This is how relevant your ads are to the user who is searching, if someone searches for the new iphone reviews and you targeted that search with a keyword, you might lower your own ad relevance because that person is not trying to buy yet.
Landing page experience. Google likes to see if your landing page is relevant for the people who clicked on your ad and arrived on it.
You have to ask: Is my landing page easy to understand? Is it related to the ads that drive traffic to it? Is it related to the keywords on the ads?
A good quality score can really help you boost your Google Ads Search campaign, we have had higher CTR (clickthrough rate), lower CPC (cost per click) and finally, higher quality on leads.
Final notes
You should think like your customer would and ask: In which phase of the customer journey are them? Then adjust your bidding strategy, extensions, keywords, ads and landing pages accordingly
Remember that this is a continuous process and you have to create a hypothesis, test, analyze results and start all over again.
Hope this helps you to build better Google Ads Search campaigns!
