October 26, 2022
So… you’ve found this blog. Chances are you’re looking for guidance on improving your paid search account and performance, right? Well you’ve come to the right place. Our Associate Director, Sarah Williams, has over a decade of experience in improving the performance of Paid Search campaigns and has shared her top tips below…
If you’re in need of improvements to your paid search, there could be a whole host of reasons you aren’t seeing great results - but before we delve in to them - a few questions you should ask yourself:
- Do you have objectives for your account overall, or specific objectives at a campaign level?
- If you do have objectives/targets in place, are these realistic? Before you can assess performance, you need to know what your actual results should be working towards. Can you back your forecast up with historic/evidence based data?
- Is the market you operate in how you predicted when you created your forecast for paid search? I.e. Are there no external factors impacting your performance?
Once you’ve said yes to all of the above questions and your paid search performance still isn’t where it should be, read the below tips to improve your paid search account and performance:
Double check your tracking performance correctly
Our first tip is ruling out there being an issue with your tracking. Are you tracking conversions inline with your objectives, e.g. sales, calls, lead forms etc and are these collecting data correctly? Have a check in to the Tools & Settings section of your Google Ads account to see what is being tracked at the moment and the status against these.
Another tracking check whilst you’re in your Google Ads account is to see if Enhanced Conversions are in place. This powerful feature improves your conversion measurement within Google Ads, and that means the more conversions it is measuring, the more conversion data the bidding algorithm has to improve performance.
Another feature to check in on is the attribution model your paid search account is running with. The best practice model is data driven attribution if this is available to your data, but if not, go with one which seems a right fit for your objectives and business goals.
Review your bidding strategies across your paid search campaigns
We are no stranger to seeing accounts we audit with a real mixed bag of bidding strategies being utilised, which usually screams that there is no strategy/clear objectives for the account. For example, if you have a revenue or ROAS objective for your paid search results - but you have bidding strategies like Target CPA or Maximise Conversions etc running on some of your campaigns - you’re not actually letting Google know there is a revenue/ROAS objective and chances are - you’ll not hit it as a result!
Are your current campaigns inline with Google Best Practices
You would really hope so… but chances are the campaigns are a little outdated. Are you spreading keywords out too thinly across a large number of campaigns? Are you running with outdated match types for your keywords? Are you making use of all of the ad extensions that are relevant to your business? Are any of your ads disapproved/limited as a result of Google Ads policies?
These are all important checks to ensure nothing is holding your performance back! The recommendations tab in the Google Ads interface can help a lot with digging this information out for you!
Investigate where your ad spend is actually being spent
Take the time to assess where your budget is potentially “leaking” in campaigns. Dig in to each campaign, which potentially looks great from a campaign level perspective - but when opening the campaign… are there keywords which aren’t driving sales/leads at all but taking a chunk of the daily campaign budget? Are there products which are soaking up a lot of ad spend within Performance Max/Shopping campaigns but never converting? Are there display ads running with outdated assets which are driving no conversions once they hit your site?
By finding this information out - you can then decide what to do about these leaks. Are keywords spending and not converting because the search terms pulling through aren’t relevant? In that case, exclude the search term! Or is the user being taken to poor quality landing pages? In which case, either improve the landing page or choose a more relevant page to land the user on.
Are you overpaying for each CPC?
Similar to the above point, if your account is rich in keywords - a huge tip of ours is to review your keyword quality scores. You should always aim for a 7/10 or higher - which usually means your ad relevance, expected CTR and your landing page experience ticks all the boxes for Google's scoring!
Work through your keywords (we’d suggest prioritising those which drive the most traffic but have a low quality score first for maximum impact!) using the guidance within the platform itself on what is dragging the score down and work on this! You should find scores improve, so you’ll essentially pay less per click but for the same ad position you were previously in = more clicks/conversions available out of your daily budget! Winning!
Review your DSA set up
If you’re running with DSA campaigns, you need to be checking what pages you’re actually targeting. Once your targeting is correct within Google Ads, assess the pages themselves - will the content on the pages trigger ads to show? Are the relevant terms to the product on those pages, to help Google marry up a user's search with the page?
When you have peace of mind over that, the final thing to check, and check again (weekly!) is the search queries coming through. These are ever-changing, and also as new pages are added to site/content refreshed, new queries can begin to trigger DSA ads, so always keep on top and be aware of these - making sure you use this information to direct keyword strategy - and negative out any pesky irrelevant terms to save your ad spend!
Analyse your Shopping campaign data
If you’re looking to improve your Shopping/Performance Max campaigns, firstly check your bidding strategies are inline with business objectives and that you’re targeting the right products within the campaign (sounds really basic but you’d be surprised how many shopping campaigns we see where products are pulled in the wrong campaigns!). If these are all correct within your campaigns, it’s time to look further into what drives these campaigns - the shopping feed itself! Have you checked on it recently for things like disapprovals, suspensions etc? If your feed is full of active products, look at any warnings within the merchant account for things like incorrect or missing attributes - all of these help contribute to a healthy feed!
Finally, do your product titles within the feed lend well to how users actually find and search for each of your products? If you’re missing the colour of your product for example out of the product title, but it's common for users to search for the product with colour in the search term - make sure it's added in for a boost in visibility and relevancy too!
Make sure you’re caught up with all things Paid Search
There’s barely a day that goes by when something new doesn’t land in the world of Paid Search, so keeping up to date with not only best practices, but new features/releases is super important for any paid search account. Staying ahead of competition with new ad formats/targeting options/campaign types means you’re getting to test what is coming and gain data on these ahead of a lot of accounts!
We’d suggest following our own blog (obviously!) for new features/testing we’re on with for Paid Search, but also sign yourself up to paid search/SEM newsletters online too. Read more of our insights using the button below!
