Google Ads can be a game-changer for reaching new customers and boosting sales, but success isn’t just about throwing together a catchy headline and hoping for the best. You need a smart, strategic approach to make your ads stand out and drive real results. Let’s review eight tried-and-true tips to help you create ads that actually convert and deliver great returns on your ad spend.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Before creating any ad, it’s crucial to understand your audience:
- Who are they? Define demographics, interests, and behaviors.
- What are their pain points? Identify their needs and how your product/service addresses them.
- Where are they in the buyer’s journey? Tailor your ads to attract awareness, consideration, or decision-stage customers.
2. Conduct Keyword Research
Keywords are the backbone of Google Ads. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to:
- Identify high-intent keywords related to your business.
- Focus on long-tail keywords for better targeting and lower competition.
- Avoid overly broad keywords that can lead to irrelevant clicks.
3. Write Compelling Ad Copy
Your ad copy needs to grab attention and communicate value instantly:
- Headline: Use clear, action-oriented headlines that include primary keywords.
- Description: Highlight benefits, unique selling points, and a strong call-to-action (CTA).
- Match Search Intent: Align your messaging with what users are searching for.
4. Leverage Ad Assets
These three core ad extensions provide additional information and improve ad visibility:
- Sitelinks: Direct users to specific pages on your website.
- Structured Snippets: Give visitors a preview of the range of products and services you offer.
- Callouts: Use callouts to highlight potential offers, benefits, and information about your business and products.
5. Test and Optimize
Testing is key to finding what works best:
- Test Performance Max asset groups with the same audience signals but different messaging.
- For a Performance Max campaign without a feed, do a 50/50 experiment to test if expanded URLs perform better than those without that option.
- Test landing pages – does a product page perform better than a collection page?
- Analyze performance data regularly, and refine your strategy.
Ongoing Optimization
Here are three more tips to help improve performance once campaigns have been running for a while.
6. Monitor and Adjust Bids
Smart Bidding Options:
- Start your campaigns on manual CPC to collect data, then move to automated bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value once enough information has been gathered (at least 30 conversions in 30 days).
- Your next step would be to move to target Cost per Conversion (tCPA) or target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) – use your baseline CPA or ROAS, and only adjust in 10% increments once the prior change has stabilized and come out of learning mode.
Reviewing your device, location, and time of data information can be really helpful.
- If you are on manual CPC, adjust bids based on device, location, or time of day to reach your audience more effectively.
- If you are on smart bidding and know that mobile devices don’t perform or certain times of day spend money, eliminate them completely (-100% bid, as Google will ignore any other adjustments).
7. Use Negative Keywords
Negative keywords help prevent your ads from appearing in irrelevant searches. Looking at your search queries should be part of regular optimization:
- Identify terms that don’t align with your offerings.
- In Search campaigns, this data is found on the Insights > Search Terms tab.
- In PMax campaigns, you’ll need to review your Insights on the Insights and Reports tab. Scroll down to Search Term Categories and review to make sure it’s aligned. (Google Ads is rolling out campaign-level negatives in Performance Max soon. It’s currently in beta. You can ask your Google rep to whitelist you or create a Negative Keyword list and ask them to add it to the campaign. If you don’t have a Googler, you can use this form for negative keyword list implementation.
8. Identify Areas that Need Expansion
Over time, you may see that a certain category in a Performance Max campaign can be getting a lot of clicks or driving more conversions. That’s a great time to create a new Asset Group geared directly to that category.
Or perhaps there’s a particular audience (found on the Insights tab under Audience Insights) that’s really resonating. Or perhaps it’s ages or demographics. Those are all reasons to create a new asset group to target them directly.
Mastering Google Ads takes time, testing, and continuous optimization, but when done right, it can be a powerful driver of growth for your business. By understanding your audience, crafting compelling ad copy, leveraging the right keywords, and fine-tuning your strategy with data-driven decisions, you can create high-converting campaigns that maximize your return on investment. Keep experimenting, analyzing, and refining your approach to stay ahead of the competition and ensure your ads deliver the best possible results. Start applying these eight PPC advertising strategies today!
