Defining Your Google Ads Strategy
Whether you're an established business or launching your first advertising campaign, these tips will help you make your campaigns more successful.
It's time to optimize your Google Ads.
Your Google Ads campaign will look very different depending on your business model and industry.
We offer 7 tips to help you achieve the highest possible ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) from your Google Ads campaign.
🔎 1 - Structure Your Google Ads Account Clearly and Efficiently
🔎 2 - Choose the Right Network: Search Network vs. Display Network
🔎 3 - Utilize the Right Bidding Strategy Based on Your Campaign Goals
🔎 4 - The Optimal Mix of Ad Titles and Descriptions
🔎 5 - Regularly Analyze and Optimize Your Campaigns
🔎 1 – Structure Your Google Ads Account Clearly and Efficiently
A well-planned account structure is crucial for the success of your campaigns.
Create separate campaigns for different products, regions, or target audiences, and organize your ads into specific ad groups.
This way, you maintain an overview and can precisely adjust budgets and bids.
Every online marketing agency always starts with a precise overview of its account structure – and so should you!
Source: Google Support
Within each Google Ads campaign, you can create different ad groups with relevant keywords and offers for each product and service. These groupings should be separated by product (allowing you to increase or decrease your offers and budgets for each ad group).
Utilize the Google Keyword Planner tool to gather new keyword ideas!
🔎 2 – Choose the Right Network: Search Network vs. Display Network
Consider what you want to achieve here. Where do you want your ads to appear?
Google Search Network
The Search Network is excellent for reaching people who are actively looking for specific products or services.
Your ads appear when users search for your specific or similar keywords.
Google Display Network (GDN)
The Display Network, on the other hand, is ideal for branding and remarketing campaigns, as ads are shown on Google partner sites like YouTube and Gmail.
Additionally, Display ads can also be shown on any other website that has «Google AdSense» installed.
Display ads are primarily used to promote brand awareness or to run remarketing campaigns.
Performance Max
This campaign type covers all Google channels (Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Discover) and is based on machine learning.
Performance Max campaigns offer extensive reach and focus on maximizing conversions. They are particularly suitable if you want to run a unified campaign across multiple channels and rely on AI-powered optimization.
Source: Google Support
As a certified Google Partner Agency, we are happy to help you successfully implement Google Ads campaigns.
🔎 3 - Use the right bidding strategy based on your campaign goals
The choice of bidding strategy should support your specific campaign goals.
Google Ads offers a variety of automated strategies optimized by machine learning:
Target CPA (Cost per Acquisition): Ideal if your main goal is to generate conversions cost-effectively.
Target ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend): This strategy optimizes bids to achieve the desired revenue share from your ad spend – perfect for campaigns focused on maximizing revenue.
Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value: Suitable if you want to achieve the maximum number of conversions or the highest conversion value with a fixed budget.
Maximize Clicks: Use this strategy if your goal is to increase website visits and generate as many clicks as possible, for example, to boost website traffic.
Maximize Impressions: This strategy is useful for brand awareness and reach. It allows you to achieve as many visible impressions as possible, particularly suitable for campaigns focused on brand presence, such as by placing ads in prominent areas.
By choosing the right bidding strategy, you can efficiently adapt your campaigns to their respective goals and get the most out of your advertising budget.
🔎 4 - The optimal mix of ad headlines and descriptions
A balanced mix of ad headlines and descriptions is crucial to effectively target your audience and boost performance.
With Responsive Search Ads, you can add up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, which Google dynamically combines to show the most relevant variation.
Vary your wording to highlight different aspects of your offering and address diverse user needs.
Tip: Regularly test new combinations to achieve the best results and continuously optimize your campaigns, and don't forget the call-to-action.
🔎 5 - Regularly analyze and optimize your campaigns
Continuous optimization is the key to effective campaigns.
Review KPIs such as Conversion Value per Cost, Click-Through Rate (CTR), and Costs.
Use Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics to gain deeper insights into user behavior and continuously adjust your campaigns.
Additional Tip: Utilize Negative Keywords to avoid irrelevant clicks and thus increase your campaign's efficiency.
🔎 6 - Set Up Conversion Tracking Correctly
Without Conversion Tracking, it's nearly impossible to accurately gauge the true success of your Google Ads campaigns and precisely measure the Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).
Conversion Tracking shows you exactly which clicks lead to valuable actions like purchases, calls, or form submissions, thereby enabling an exact calculation of your ROAS.
These insights are crucial for targeted campaign optimization and continuously increasing the profitability of your advertising spend.
We are happy to assist you with Conversion Tracking.
🔎 7 - Optimal Keyword Matching Options: Focus over Breadth
Careful keyword selection is important and can help avoid high costs.
Instead of using a broad range of keywords, it is advisable to focus on 5-10 highly relevant keywords per ad group. This targeted selection allows you to target your ads to users who are specifically searching for your offerings.
Especially during the testing phase, many tend to use too many keywords to try out as many variations as possible. However, this can quickly become costly and dilute performance.
Instead, it makes sense to start with a few, well-chosen keywords and adjust the targeting later based on performance.
Tip: Use keyword matching options like "Exact Match" and "Phrase Match" to target your audience more specifically and avoid unnecessary clicks. This way, you increase the efficiency of your campaigns and optimize your ROAS.
Often, it is best to have only very similar and related keywords per ad group to achieve the most targeted ads.
As of 2024, there are essentially 3 different Keyword Match Types in Google Ads. This results in the following options:
1. Broad Match
This is a very broad query where your ads can be shown for all search queries that are related to your keyword. This also includes search queries that do not even contain your keywords.
Here is an example:
Source: support.google.com
2. Phrase Match
This is a slightly more restricted search. Your ads can appear for search queries that contain the meaning of your keyword.
It's also possible that the search queries have a more narrowly defined meaning, and the keyword's meaning is inferred.
Source: support.google.com
3. Exact Match
This is the most restrictive option for keywords. Ads are displayed for search queries whose meaning or intent exactly matches your keyword.
Source: support.google.com
Important: Negative Keywords
You can add negative keywords to your ad groups, campaigns, or negative keyword lists to ensure your ads are NOT shown for certain keywords. For instance, if we don't offer leather shoes, we might add 'leather' to our negative keywords.
It's better not to use [buy leather shoes] as a negative keyword if we want to keep 'leather' as a potential keyword, in case someone searches for something like 'don't buy leather shoes' :)
Launch your more professional-looking and better-targeted ads with onlineKarma – your certified Google Ads specialist and Google Partner agency.