Ensuring the long-term success of your Google Ads campaigns is crucial to achieving your organisation’s objectives but it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day PPC management, and lose sight of your goals.
To achieve long-term success, it's crucial to audit your campaigns, ads, keywords, and conversion tracking settings regularly. Here are five tips on how to ensure your Google Ads remain optimised and help you to achieve your goals.
1. Account Set-up and Conversion Tracking.
Before starting any keywords or ad copy optimisation, always ensure your Google Ads conversions are being tracked. This is key to demonstrating the return-on-investment of your campaigns.
Depending on your set-up, you can either use the Goals section of the Google Ads platform or go directly to Google Tag Manager and set up triggers for each conversion. When you are sure tracking is properly set-up, you should verify that data is flowing correctly into GA4 to gain deeper insights and for long-term reporting.
To boost productivity and for a streamlined process, if multiple team members manage your Google Ads account, it is important to review your campaigns structure, giving easily-recognisable campaign and ad group names, and establish accurate targeting settings including location targeting and days/time when your ads will appear.
2. Reviewing or Setting-up Brand campaigns.
Brand Search campaigns are highly beneficial in bringing in customers with high-intent who may already be aware of your organisation.
We’re often asked if I rank organically in position 1 for my brand name, why do I need to pay to run Google Ads for my brand name too? As we’ve seen a number of times, if your competitors are also running Google Ads, chances are they’ll put your brand name in their keywords so their ads show up when customers are looking for your company. Because Ads show up before the organic rankings, they’ll see your competitors' results before yours, and that new potential customer could go straight to your competitor. So, we always recommend running brand ads.
Once you’ve reviewed your account set-up, optimise your Google Ads Branded Search campaigns. If you already have a brand campaign, ensure you review your keywords, optimise ad copy, targeting and create or update a Brand List to help bring traffic from branded search terms without having to enter misspellings, variants, or versions of your branded keywords.
If you don’t have a Brand Campaign yet:
- Create a Brand List.
- Compile a list of branded keywords to use in your campaign.
- Create a new search campaign in Google Ads and select your keywords.
- Use high-quality ad copy, relevant landing pages, and bidding strategies to maximise conversions.
- Track key metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions to optimise your campaign performance in your next audit.
3. Optimising your Keyword Strategy.
Building a well-crafted and comprehensive keyword strategy is crucial to successful Google Ads management. Keywords help you target your ideal audience, maximise conversions and increase your return on investment.
Start off by analysing your current keyword lists, including their relevance to your campaigns and landing pages, match types and performance. Use tools like Google Ads’ Keyword Planner to discover new keywords, get search volumes and forecast how your keywords could perform. It is also important to check Search Trends under Insights to understand what people are searching for and prepare to capture demand with new terms suggested by Google.
In most cases, creating a negative keyword list can also be highly beneficial to avoid showing ads to users who are unlikely to be interested in your products or services, saving ad spend and improving ad relevance.
For example, a professional software company might include “free” in their negative keywords to avoid reaching anyone searching for a “free software”.
4. Improving your Google Ad copy and Targeting.
Review and optimise your ad copy to ensure it is of the highest quality, is relevant to your target audience, and check your headlines and descriptions, making sure you have included as many keywords as possible. When reviewing ad copy, you must also look over your landing page copy to ensure your content is consistent. Your landing page copy should match your ad copy and calls to action need to be obvious.
When it comes to targeting, make sure the correct locations (town, city, county or country), demographics and user interests are selected as this will help you reach the correct target audience. It can also be beneficial to experiment with your targeting to gain deeper insights and reach new people in a specific area.
5. Adjusting your Bidding Strategies.
Google Ads has many bidding strategies which you can choose from for your campaigns. Like many aspects of Google Ads Management, you should pick your bidding strategy carefully to ensure it aligns with your business objectives. You can choose from strategies which will either maximise conversions, clicks or conversion value, target impression share, target Return on Ad Spend or target Cost Per Acquisition. Each strategy has its own purpose and experimenting with different bid strategies can also be beneficial in the long run.
Top Tip: Remember your overall goal and always align your bidding strategy to it. If you’re running Google Ads to get more leads and conversions - pick maximise conversions, if you want more traffic, optimise for clicks.
Continuous Optimisations of your PPC campaigns.
Every week: Check in to your Google Ads account to get an overview of campaign performance and make tweaks based on what the data is telling you. Don’t make too many changes too often otherwise you wont be able to pinpoint what changes worked well and what hasn’t.
Every month: Optimise your ads and landing pages based on search trends, keyword performance and ad copy performance. Also try setting up more campaigns, maybe with slightly different wording or keywords to see if they work better.
Every six months: Run a full audit of your Google Ads account, checking through all of the above points
Does your business need a Google Ads agency based in Wiltshire?
Getting return on investment from Google Ads can be quick but only if you have the right set up and optimisations in place. Failing to set up your Google Ads properly can burn through the budget quickly and return very little.
Let us handle the creative and technical aspects of Google Ads Management for you, so you focus on what you do best: growing your business and leading with confidence. Get in touch and let’s generate measurable success.
