For something to be a Google Ads “hack”, it should be an optimisation that can potentially have a profound effect on the performance of a campaign, and at the same time be an adjustment that is quick and easy to make.

It should act as a shortcut, allowing you to impart a high degree of positive change in the performance of a campaign, within a matter of moments.

Based on this, I describe 3 of my Google Ads hacks to help unlock a campaign’s potential.

1. Negative Keywords Bulk Lists

If you’re not familiar with negative keywords, these allow you to block non-relevant phrases from being targeted by your ads. This can help to improve your campaign’s Quality Score and more importantly, help to avoid wasted ad spend.

For a campaign that is not using an adequate amount of negative keywords, using negative keyword lists could certainly help to unlock that campaign’s potential.

When reviewing accounts, I often see a lack of negative keywords being used, especially with newly set up campaigns, which in some cases have zero negative keywords. This is not only a missed opportunity, but can result in a percentage of the budget being flushed down the drain on non-relevant search terms.

To help speed up the process of adding negative keywords I’ve created the following:

Negative Keywords Cheat Sheet

This sheet contains various lists of common non-relevant terms that can easily be set up within Negative Keyword Lists and applied to your campaign.

This is a massive time saver, especially when setting up new campaigns.

If you manage multiple Google Ads accounts, you can also create Negative Keyword Lists at the MCC level, allowing you to use lists across multiple accounts.

2. Excluded Locations Bulk Lists

Another missed opportunity I commonly see within Google Ads accounts is the use of excluded locations, along with correctly set up location targeting settings.

As a result of this, these accounts end up wasting a percentage of their budget serving ads within locations outside of their target market.

This potential waste of budget can be avoided by choosing to “Target people who are in, or who are often in my target location” within the advanced location settings, rather than the default setting of “Target people who are in, and who show an interest in my target location”.

Additionally for good measure, you can also exclude locations/countries outside of your chosen targeting. However excluding each country manually can be a lengthy and cumbersome process, so to speed up the process I’ve created the following:

Excluded Locations Cheat Sheet

The tabs within this sheet contains a list of all countries to be excluded, with the target country absent from the list.

For example, the “All – Except USA” tab contains all countries, except the USA, so this would be the ideal list to use for a campaign that aims to serve ads to people within the USA only.

These lists can be used to bulk exclude a large number of locations within seconds, using Google Ads Editor.

3. Smart Bidding Strategies

Smart Bidding Strategies allow you to outsource the management of your keyword bids directly to Google’s automated systems,harnessing the power of machine learning.

This is a time saver, as Google’s algorithms automatically calculate the optimal bid in real-time for each and every auction your ad is placed in, without you ever needing to lift a finger.

But the real benefit is the improvement that you can potentially see in performance. The Smart Bidding Strategies are ‘smart’ because they factor in a wide range of contextual signals, at a scale that would not be impossible for a human account manager.

For this reason campaigns that make use of a Smart Bidding Strategy such as Target CPA, can unlock significant improvements in performance with the simple click of a button.

Smart Bidding Strategies do not improve performance for all campaigns, so it is important to test and keep a close eye on the results.

Need Help With Your Google Ads Account?

If you feel your campaigns are not working as effectively as they could, and would like an expert to review your account, then feel free to get in contact with us and we’ll have one of our specialists get in contact with you.

Get Our Responsive Search Ads Template

>>> Click Here to Access The Free Google Sheet Template <<<

Responsive Search Ads Format

Responsive Search Ads (RSA) differ from Expanded Text Ads (ETA) in that the ad format includes a much larger number of headlines and descriptions.

You can define up to 12 separate headlines and four descriptions for each ad, and for this reason it’s useful to have a Responsive Ads Template to hand in order to quickly build ads for your campaign using the new format.

Ad Testing and Headline Positions

Although you can add up to 12 headlines, only up to three of these headlines can show at any one time. Google’s algorithm will cycle the headlines in order to find the combination with the best performance.

For each headline, and description, you can define the intended position within the ad. For example if a specific headline is intended to go in the first line of the ad only, you can attribute a position of 1 to that headline.

If the position for that headline is not important however, you can leave the position blank, and Google will test that headline in all positions.
Google does not supply advertisers with the performance data for each of the ad attributes, taking all control of the testing out of the advertisers hands. For this reason I recommend testing RSA alongside a number of ETA’s that you continue to control the testing of.

Responsive Search Ads Tips

When creating RSA for the first time:

• Ensure that there are no duplicate headlines or descriptions within your ad
• Use one RSA per ad group
• Test Responsive Search Ads against Expanded Text Ads within ad groups.
• We recommend having three ETA in each ad group.
• Pin headlines to the headline 1, and description line 1. This helps to ensure that your ad will read well.

Do Responsive Search Ads Perform Better Than Expanded Text Ads?

The short answer to this, is that sometimes RSA perform better, and sometimes ETA perform better.

It’s important to test both ad types against each other within ad groups in order to identify which ad type performs better within a given campaign.

Test different headlines and descriptions, making tweaks and adjusments based the results in order to continually improve the performance of your ads.

Do You Need Help With Creating Responsive Search Ads for Your Google Ads Account?

If you’d like assistance with setting up Responsive Search Ads within your account, then feel free to get in contact with us and we’ll have one of our specialists assist you.

When setting up a Google Ads campaign there are a number of pitfalls that many advertisers fall into and this ends up costing them a lot of money in wasted ad spend.

I often see the same mistakes made time and time again the accounts that I review, so here are the five costly Google Ads Mistakes to Avoid.

If you can avoid these five Google Ads mistakes it will help to save you from wasting your money, your time, and seeing poor performance within your campaigns.

Remember: even if the channel you’re considering is all the rage right now, it might not fit your brand. Always make informed decisions that directly relate to your company. Otherwise, your message won’t be delivered to its intended audience and you’ll have wasted time, effort and money.

1. No Negative Keywords

The first mistake is having none or a lack of negative keywords within your campaign.

Negative keywords act as a filter for non-relevant search terms, effectively blocking out clicks from terms which are not related to your product or service.

Having negative keywords helps to prevent your ads from being served to people who are not interested in your what you’re offering; and having a lack of negative keywords can lead to your budget being wasted on traffic from the wrong type of visitors.

Coming up with a comprehensive list of negative keywords and applying this to your campaign before you go live is a good idea to avoid wasting a lot of your advertising budget.

2. Using Broad Match Keywords

There are a number of different types of keywords, which target a different spectrum of search terms.

The different match types are listed below with a the keyword “Google Ads” used as an example:

Exact Match

How it looks: [Google Ads]
What it targets: Only the exact keyword at it appears, or close variants.
Example of Terms Targeted: “Google Ads”, “Google Ad”.

Phrase Match

How it looks: “Google Ads”
What it targets: Any keyword that contains “Google Ads”, in that word order.
Example of Terms Targeted: “Google Ads tutorial”, “I need help with Google Ads”

Broad Match Modified

How it looks: +Google +Ads
What it targets: Keywords that include the words that have a plus sign next to them, in any word order.
Example of Terms Targeted: “How do I place Ads on Google”, “What are the Google Ads best practices”

Broad Match

How it looks: Google Ads
What it targets: Any term deemed by the Google algorith to be related to Google Ads, but this term does not need to contain the word “Google” or “Ads”.
Example of Terms Targeted: “pay per click advertising”, “bing Ads”.

From the above examples you can see that as we go down in the list of match types, the targeting becomes far less restrictive. As a result of this a wider spectrum of terms are targeted, with the Broad Match keyword targeting the widest spectrum.

In the example, if you were intending on targeting only terms closely connected to and based around Google Ads, then you would have the unintended result of targeting terms related to “pay per click marketing”, “Bing Ads”, and a long list of other terms.

This could result in a waste of your advertising budget.

For this reason it is best to not use Broad Match keywords unless you desire a very expansive (and expensive) form of targeting.

3. Location Settings

A very common issue that I often see within campaigns is in the location settings.

There is a very important option within the advanced settings which is overlooked because the setting is very obscure.

This option gives advertisers a choice between:

“Target people who are in, and who show an interest in my target location”

and

“Target people who are in, or who are often in my target location”.

The difference between these two settings may seem somewhat subtle, but it is extremely influential on the performance of your campaign.

The former setting (which is recommended by Google) allows your ads to show in countries other than the one you have selected for targeting.

For example if you selected the USA as your target location, your ads can show to a person within Australia, or within Russia, or anywhere else in the world, if they have an interest in the USA.

This can of course result in wasted ad spend.

To save money, simply select the latter option.

4. Poor Landing Page

Having a poor landing page is another common mistake which can result in a large amount of wasted ad spend.

What is a poor landing page you say?

Before you have adequate data to confirm whether your landing page is effective or not, it can be difficult to know whether your landing page is going to be successful. Whether a page is good or not can be very subjective.

However, if you are unsure, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does my landing page have a clear call to action? If not then it is likely that visitors will find it difficult to know what to do next to get in contact or purchase your product or service.
• Is my home page my landing page? Your website home page may be the best option for organic traffic, but is it the most relevant page for your paid search campaign?
• Does my page talk about the features or advantages of my product or service? It’s imporant that visitors are given enough informaton to make a buying decision.
• Does my page load quickly? These days visitors are not in the habit of waiting, if your page doesn’t load within 1-2 seconds, they might not stick around.

If you think your landing page might not be up to scatch, it’s definitely worth investing in making some improvements early on, because if your page enage your visitors and convert them, then it could up costing you a lot more in wasted ad spend.

5. No Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking can often be overlooked within accounts, but it is absolutely crucial to the success of your campaigns.

Your campaigns need to be tracking when a prospective customer has called you, filled out your contact form, made a purchase, or carried out any other action which represents business value.

Without this it’s very difficult to gauge the success of the campaign and identify the areas which are working well, and those which are not.

A campaign without conversion tracking is therefore likely to end up wasting a lot of money on keywords, or other forms of targeting which are not generating any new clients or sales.

Need Help With Your Google Ads Account?

If you feel your campaigns are not working as effectively as they could, and would like an expert to review your account, then feel free to get in contact with us and we’ll have one of our specialists get in contact with you.

You might be wondering, “is my Google Ads manager doing a good job?”

Well if that’s the case then there are three quick and easy ways to check if your Google Ads manager is doing a good job of optimising your campaigns.

 

Geographical Targeting Settings

The first section to look at is the campaigns geo targeting to ensure that it doesn’t include any of the wrong locations.

You can imagine that is could potentially be a very costly mistake to make within a campaign; it is however a very typical issue that is seen within Google Ads accounts.

As it is both a very common and significant issue, this is one of the first places that I look within a client’s account.

To access this report, select ‘Locations’ from the left hand menu when logged into your Google Ads account. Then selection User Locations from the sub menu.

Are there any countries that you don’t want to target within the report?

Within the report you can view the associated impressions, clicks and costs for each of the locations to see how much of your budget has been spent serving ads in these unwanted locations.

Part of the reason that this mistake occurs is because of an option within the location settings:

“Target people who are in, and who show an interest in my target location”.

This setting allows a much wider range of countries, outside of your intended targeting to be served with your ads, at your expense.

It’s the recommended (by Google) setting and is easy to overlook, and this is the reason why new or inexperienced Google Ads managers can make this mistake.

 

No or Very Few Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are used in order to block non-relevant search terms from being targeted by your campaigns.

The negative keywords can be checked for each campaign by navigating to the Keywords tab, and then selecting the Negative Keywords tab.

If there are no negative keywords set for the campaign, you should also check whether a negative keyword list is being used by selecting the “Tools and Settings” menu at the top of the page and then “Negative Keyword Lists”.

The absence of negative keywords is a red flag, and this issue can result in the campaigns budget being wasted on non-relevant search terms.

 

No Device Bid Adjustments

Typically there will be a difference in performance for each of the devices that ads can be served to users on: desktop computers; mobile phones; and tablets. Bids can then be adjusted within the settings for each of these devices.

To view the bid adjustment settings, select the Devices tab in the left menu.

Review the conversion rates and cost per conversion, and if you see a clear difference between these and also see an absence device bid adjustments, then it is likely that this has been overlooked and needs attending to.

Not using device bid adjustments could result in sub-optimal performance and/or wasted ad spend.

 

Conclusion

Those are the three quick and easy areas to check within your account to confirm whether or not your Google Ads manager is doing a good job.

If you need help to review your account, and would like an expert to review your campaigns, then feel free to get in contact with us at contact@optimiselab.com.

Are Automated Bidding Strategies Worth Using?

 

Automated bidding strategies have been around for a while within the Google Ads platform, enabling advertisers to offload their bid management to Google’s automated system.

The use of these strategies, are however, still a contentious issue within the pay-per-click marketing community.

Do campaigns generally get better results with manual bids? Or do the machines outperform their human counterparts in this department? Or is it a mixture of both?

The answer can vary between account managers, and depend heavily on the type of campaign and objectives.

There are a range of different automated bidding strategies on offer to help advertisers meet their marketing objectives:

The Automated Bidding Strategies to Choose From

 

Can an Automated Bidding Strategy Help to Maximise The Volume of Sales Generated by Your Google Ads Campaign?

Google’s automated bidding strategies utilise the wealth of stored up campaign performance data, in addition to real-time user behaviour data, in order to help determine the optimal bid for each auction.

Therefore, the success of any automated bidding strategy will be contingent on the amount of data within your campaign, and also the level of user behaviour data that Google possesses on prospective customers within your target sector.

Some campaigns may benefit from the use of an automated bidding strategy and see an uplift in sales, while some campaigns may not.

Testing is Essential

The only way to really determine whether or not a particular bid strategy will be effective for a campaign, is by testing it.

In order to ensure the test is fair, and to confirm whether the given increase or decrease in performance is due to the change in bid strategy, both bid strategies need to run concurrently.

This testing can be carried out by duplicating the campaign and running both bid strategies side-by-side, or by using a campaign experiment.

Based on the results of the test, the better performing bid strategy can be identified and selected for ongoing use.

A Word of Caution

It’s important to be aware, when handing over control of bid management to an automated strategy, significant, and in some cases unintended changes can be made to bids. Average CPC’s can increase drastically, and beyond the level of profitability.

It is wise to always set a cap on the maximum bid where possible, and to keep a close eye on the performance, especially in the early stages.

It’s also important to realise that the process of optimisation carried out by the system can take days, or in some cases weeks, while the system tests different levels of bids to find the optimal setting. During this period, overall performance may see a dip before it improves.

Conclusion

There is a range of bidding strategies available to choose from, depending on the specific objectives of your campaign.

Automated bidding strategies can help to maximise the number of sales generated by your campaigns, and to achieve a variety of other marketing objectives; but the effectiveness of these strategies will depend heavily on the level of performance data within the account, and the level of user behaviour data possessed by Google.

In some cases, the machines will outperform their human counterparts, and in other cases, manual bidding will be the most effective option.Ultimately the only way to concretely confirm if a particular bidding strategy will be effective for meeting your campaign’s objectives, will be through testing.

Close observation of the performance is advised!

Google’s Average Position is Going Away

 

We plan to sunset average position in September of this year.
– Google Ads

 
In place of the average position metric which will be going away, Google has added a number of new metrics which are meant to give advertisers a greater level of clarity when reviewing the performance of their ads.
 

What is Average Position?

 
Average position is represented as a number that indicates which order your ad appeared in relative to the ads of other advertisers. An average position of 1 for example would indicate that on average your ad appeared in the 1^st position, the highest position on the results page relative to the other ads.

However sometimes the placement of ads in the search engine results can begin at the bottom of the page, below the organic results. An average position of 1 doesn’t necessarily mean your ad appeared at the top of the page, only above the other ads, and this is partly why Google have introduced the new metrics.

Why Is Average Position Being Replaced?

 
Google has constantly developed the way ads are presented within the search results, and on the display network, across a myriad of devices. The placements of ads is now more dynamic, and to help advertisers understand where exactly their had has appeared, a new set of metrics is needed.
 

 

The New (Improved?) Position Metrics

 
To help offer advertisers more clarity on the position of their ads, Google has introduced the following new metrics:

• Impr. (Absolute Top) % – is the proportion of impressions your ads have received while in the very first ad position, above the organic website listings.
• Impr. (Top) % – is the proportion of impressions your ads have received anywhere above the organic website listings.
• Search (Absolute Top) Impression Share – indicates the proportion your ad received of the total available impressions at the very first ad position, above the organic listings. For example, if there were 1000 impressions available, and your ad received 300, then your impression share of the Absolute Top would be 30%.
• Search (Top) Impression Share – indicates the proportion your ad received of the total available impressions anywhere above the organic listings.
• Search Lost Abs.Top IS (budget) – indicates the proportion of available impressions your ad missed out on in the ‘Absolute Top’ position, due to budget constraints.
• Search Lost Abs.Top IS (rank) – indicates the proportion of available impressions your ad missed out on in the ‘Absolute Top’ position, due to a low ad rank.
• Search Lost Top IS (budget) – indicates the proportion of available impressions your ad missed out on in the ‘Top’ position, due to budget constraints.
• Search Lost Top IS (rank) – indicates the proportion of available impressions your ad missed out on in the ‘Top’ position, due to a low ad rank.

 

 

 

What is the Advantage of These New Metrics?

 

Greater Clarity for Potentially Better Decisions

 
The new metrics provide more clarity on how often your ad has been placed at the actual top of the results page, above the organic listings, where it will be likely to get the greatest exposure and volume of clicks.

The additional metrics also provide clarity on how you can increase the proportion of impressions your ad will receive at the top of the page, whether this is by increasing your budget or improving your ad’s rank.
 

Dominating Branded Terms

 
The new metrics are especially useful for when targeting your own brand keywords. Instead of bidding to attain an average position of 1, you can now more clearly see how often your ad is appearing above the organic listings for your branded keywords.

 

Are there Any Drawbacks?

 

Clarity on Competition

 
Although the new metrics do add clarity regarding how often an ad appears above the organic search listings, without the Ad Position metric, it is difficult to know how your ad has been placed relative to your competitors. This is especially true in cases where the ad listings have appeared below the organic site listings.
 
With Google Ads, we are competing with other advertisers, not the organic listings. With this in mind, it makes sense to have an idea of how our ads are positioned in relation to our competitors.
 
Without the Ad Position metrics, we won’t be able to see if our ad is on average being placed in position 2 or 3, and to estimate the cost for improving our position.
 

Increased Costs

 
The change could potentially lead to an increase in competition, with higher bids in the auctions as advertises vie for the top/absolute top positions.
 

Adapting to The Change

 
Would it be nice to continue to have access to the Average Position metric? Yes. But with the changes we are seeing within the marketing landscape, Ad Position is becoming less and less important. Instead we are focusing more on audiences, context, and intent.

The new metrics can help to lend more insight into where on the page users are viewing and engaging with our ads, and should be embraced for what they can offer.

In anticipation of Ad Position being removed, any bid strategies for processes which make use of the Ad Position metric should be switched for those that incorporate the new metrics.

Additionally, it can be useful to view the new metrics in conjunction with the current Ad Position metric, to both see how the new metrics relate to the old, and to get accustomed to using the new metrics to optimise campaigns.