10 Google Ads Optimization Tips and Best Practices for Search Campaigns 2020

what's up everyone welcome to the Surfside PPC youtube channel today gonna be going over 10 Google ads optimization tips and best practices for your search campaigns so I'm gonna get right into it I'm running a search campaign here in my Google Ads account so this is the campaign I'm gonna be using for a lot of my tutorials this year if you're interested in some more information for how I built this campaign you can watch my video tutorial here it's my Google ads search campaign tutorial how to create successful search campaigns I'll link this video in the video description so you can watch it if you want to see how I built this campaign so now that I've been running the campaign for a little bit I'm gonna go over some of the things that I do to make sure that my campaign is performing as best as possible so we're gonna get right into it number one is gonna be build an organized campaign from the start so it doesn't really matter what types of changes you make as you go if you build a bad campaign and you get started it's really not gonna perform well and it's gonna be much more difficult to optimize so my thinking when I'm building a Google Ads campaign is to make sure that my ad groups here match my keywords match my ads and match my landing pages so if you see here I have an ad group for farmhouse curtains so if I click on this ad group you can see I'm only bidding on two keywords within this ad group to phrase match keywords so if we look at the search terms that people are typing in to actually find my advertisements it's all based around farmhouse curtains people might be looking for different lengths different styles but ultimately they're all looking for farmhouse curtains and most people are just searching this exact match keyword into Google and then they're gonna see my advertisement so if we look at my advertisements for this individual ad group you can see here it's all based around farmhouse curtains so that's what I mean when you really want things to be organized is when someone types in one of your targeted keywords you want to make sure that they're seeing a very targeted advertisement and then when they click through these landing pages now I'm actually testing multiple landing pages within this ad group I'm gonna be doing that with all of my ad groups but if they click through this advertisement they're either gonna come to this page here which is just a listing of farmhouse curtains or they're gonna come to this page here which is more of a blog style post with a little bit more inspiration different types of products and some different ideas that people can use when they're purchasing curtains for their homes so you want to make sure that you build a very organized can and that starts with your ad groups so making sure that your ad groups are all grouped together by theme making sure that the keywords are all very closely related so you can see here I even have different categories for Rae done this one is exact so I'm just targeting the exact match version of the Rae done and rate done pottery keywords this one is all based around Rae done mugs this one is around Rae done canisters so if I click on Rae done mugs for this ad group you're gonna see I'm targeting just one keyword in here and if we go to ads and extensions you're gonna see I have four advertisements in this ad group as well and if people click through this landing page it's going to be a listing of radon mugs for sale so you want to make sure you're giving people a very seamless experience so when someone types a keyword into Google you want to make sure that they're seeing an advertisement and then seeing a landing page that's going to closely match that keyword as best as possible so that's me number one is build an organized campaign from the start it makes it much easier to optimize your campaign as you continue to run it next is gonna be number two so if number two you're seeing this status here limited by budget this means that you're able to spend more within your campaign based on every setting that you currently have so the bids that you have set you're able to spend more every single day so if I'm limited by budget what you can do is click here on the budget Explorer and it's gonna tell you to change your daily budget so if I have my current budget this is my weekly conversions weekly clicks and my weekly cost so if I'm willing to spend more per week and I'm willing to spend $36 per day I can just increase my daily budget here and it's gonna add more conversions for me it's gonna add more clicks and it will actually lower my cost per conversion slightly so I'll still see the same exact performance even with increasing my budget to $36 now let's just say for example I don't want to increase my budget which I don't I just want to keep it at ten dollars per day right now so we're gonna keep it at ten dollars so what I can do is rather than increasing my budget is coming over to my campaign and going to my keywords and decreasing bids for my keywords and I would recommend just starting with the keywords that are driving the most impressions for you and driving a good cost per conversion and a strong conversion rate so if I'm looking right here this is the exact match keyword for Rae done this is driving the majority of my clicks and the majority of my impressions for this campaign so one of the things I can do is just lower my max CPC bid and if we come over here you can see I've driven 37 conversions for this individual keyword at a cost per conversion of one dollar and 54 cents so compare that to farmhouse TV stands which is much higher here farmhouse curtains which is actually much lower so if I look at some of these different keywords what I can do is take the conversion right here and take the cost per conversion and use that to guide myself lowering my bits so with farmhouse TV stands I can lower this bid because it's really not performing well for me so we'll go down to 10 cents and then with Rhea done we'll do the same exact thing we'll just lower all these bids and I can keep lowering my bids until I reach that perfect point where I'm spending 10 dollars per day but I'm also driving as many conversions as possible and driving a lot more clicks to my website as well so lowering your bids can be a great way to handle limited by budget if you don't want to increase your budget okay next is gonna be number three and we're gonna come back over to the campaign screen again so I won over B if you're a limited by budget now one of the things you're gonna see here is my optimization score so if I click on my optimization score one of the recommendations that it's giving me is to change my bidding strategy so it's telling me to add new keywords here and then it's telling me I can bid more efficiently with target CPA so one of the things that you want to do is test bid strategies because one of the main questions I get is what is the best bid strategy and really it just depends on the campaign that you're running and your overall goals now for me I've always seen the best performance starting with manual CPC with in hand CPC so what I'm gonna do now is come into the settings for my campaign and if we come down here you're gonna see bidding is set at the campaign level so right now my bid strategy is manual CPC and help increase conversions with enhanced CPC and optimizing for conversions so you saw I just lowered my bids for all the keywords in my account so what you can do with manual CPC is have much more control over how much you're bidding for each individual keyword but one of the things I can do is change my bid strategy and I can come down here to the drop down and let's just say I want to use target CPA it's saying my recommended target CPA is one dollars and 32 cents based on my past average cost per conversion in this campaign so I can use this recommendation or I can go slightly lower we'll go at dollar twenty-five and then I can test this bid strategy so what I would recommend do is coming back over here clicking on all campaigns we're gonna continue without saving for now so I'm still using my manual CPC bidding strategy and you can look at data and let's just say we look at the last 14 days so you can look at the last 14 days you can see I've spent $89.95 65 conversions a dollar and 38 cost per conversion so I can take those two weeks of data and what you want to do is you want to record this data and then what you want to do is go over to your settings so clicking on my campaign and then coming into the settings for my campaign and then what you want to do is change your bidding strategy what I would recommend doing is testing manual CPC using enhanced CPC if you're using conversion tracking and then if you're using conversion tracking eventually switching to target CPA and also testing maximize conversions now if you're polling in revenue then what you want to do is use target return on adspend and maximize conversion value because that's gonna be more focused to driving as much revenue as possible within your budget so what I can do now is switch the target CPA and go to a dollar 25 for example and I can start there and then for the next two weeks run target CPA see how my performance is compared to manual CPC and then I can go over and test maximize conversions and I can test that for a couple of weeks and you might notice after a week or you might notice that for several days that the new bidding strategy is either outperforming or underperforming and you can always switch back to the other bidding strategy that you're using now I'm most comfortable with manual CPC especially when I get started with a campaign but what I eventually do after I test for a month or two is I switch over to target CPA and I try to continue to drive as many conversions as possible within my budget but with bidding strategies the only way to know what's gonna work best for your campaign is to test so my general strategy is start with manual CPC which is what I'm gonna keep it at for right now using enhanced CPC and using conversion tracking and then I switch to some of these other automated smart bidding strategies like target CPA target return on adspend if I'm polling in revenue or maximize conversions and maximize conversion value so test all of them for several weeks see what performs best for you see what drives the most conversions and then continue with that bidding strategy as you move forward okay so number for we're coming back over to the campaign screen again what you want to do is add negative keywords constantly into your campaign so when you set up your campaign you start getting data one of the things that you're gonna have is if you come here to keywords and we come here to search terms we can actually see the search terms that people are typing in to trigger our advertisements so you can see ray Dunn is the main search term that's driving the majority of my clicks so that's why I got a lower that bit and I can even keep decreasing that bid so I can start getting clicks from some of these other keywords a little bit more so what we can do is if you start scrolling down you want to look for keywords based on the intent of what people are looking for so as I scroll down here some of the things I try to do is find exactly what people are trying to look for when they do click on my advertisements so one of the examples right here is redu barstools farmhouse so that's someone who's probably looking for projects for how to redo their farmhouse barstools so someone who might be looking to put new fabric on their barstools may be looking to add a fresh coat of paint to them or whatever it is what they're looking for is how to redo a bar stool in their home now if I keep scrolling down you can see there's another one here DIY farmhouse TV stand so looking at some of these different things that people are typing in I don't want anybody who's looking for DIY projects or people who are looking to refinish or redo anything for their house I want people who are looking for new products to purchase for their homes so what we can do is instead of coming here to search terms go to negative keywords you can also click on an individual search term for example and add it as a negative keyword in the search terms report but what I like to do is we're just gonna go right to negative keywords we're gonna click on the plus sign and I can add negative keywords or create a new list so I'm just gonna add some negative keywords to the campaign level and let's just say finish so people who are looking to finish their barstools finish a piece of furniture DIY people who are looking for DIY projects or some DIY inspiration redo so the exact keyword that someone typed in was redo bar stool farmhouse and then the last one that I'm gonna add is refresh so I'm just gonna add these four negative keywords now if you add a negative keyword like this this means that if anybody types in DIY with their search term they're not gonna see my advertisements or any of these other terms here now for example let's just say I wanted to add di why project what I would recommend doing is adding a phrase match negative keyword that means if someone's looking for a DIY project then you can make sure that you're excluding that entire search term from your campaign so that your ads are never gonna show and someone's looking for DIY projects but for this DIY finish redo refresh these are all gonna be good negative keywords for my campaign because I want people who are actively looking to purchase something new for their home so we're gonna save we're gonna add these negative keywords so that's one of the best ways to keep your campaign optimized is to always look in your search terms report and make sure that your search terms are as relevant as possible so I'm really happy with all the search terms that are in here for the most part but if you keep scrolling down you're always gonna find some different ideas sometimes you might find people who are looking up Amazon or Home Depot or specific stores you can exclude those stores if you want to people who are looking for specific brands if you don't carry those brands then I would exclude them from your campaign okay so now from number five we're looking at my list of ad groups I'm gonna go over some different ad group ideas when you're trying to optimize your campaign and really optimize your individual ad groups so we're gonna come in here to farmhouse curtains again I'm gonna keep using this as my example for the video so if we come in here one of the things you want to do is come over to audiences and a best practice is to add audiences to the ad group level so right now I have them added to the campaign level and one of the things you're able to see is if you have your audiences added to the campaign level you can see how they're actually performing for your campaign so right now I have this home and garden home decor in market audience for my entire campaign but a better practice is to come in here and add audiences to the ad group level once you add them to your ad group level then it's gonna remove the campaign audience targeting so you want to remove the campaign audience targeting first so we're gonna come over to our campaign I'm gonna take this audience targeting and now you can see how this is performing so people who are in this home decor in Market audience I have spent 58 dollars and 27 cents on them 42 conversions $1 and 39 cost per conversion now my cost per conversion for my campaign is a dollar 38 but I'm also bidding higher 25% higher for people who are in this end market audience audience targeting is going to allow you to reach a better audience especially if you start using some of your retargeting audiences which I'm going to show you right now so we're gonna remove these from the campaign level and we're gonna start adding them to our ad group level so permanently remove them and we're gonna come back over to our ad groups and we're gonna go into our farmhouse curtains ad group again and what we want to do is again come down to audiences and click here to add a new audience to the ad group level I always recommend using observation targeting is gonna narrow your reach to those specific audiences when they search your search terms observation allows you to bid higher or lower without narrowing the reach of your ad group I mean my curtains ad group so what I can do is search here for curtains so we're gonna see if there's any in-market audiences so perfect curtains and window treatments we'll take this one add it to our ad group level click on save okay so what we're able to do is bid slightly higher to people who are in the market for curtains and window treatments when they search our farmhouse curtains keywords so you know you're reaching a really targeted audience so let's just take our bid adjustment will increase it by 15% so that's fine for right now you can always increase it higher as you get more data here like you can see above now the other thing you can do is to take it a step further is to add one of your remarketing audiences based on some of the pages that people have visited on your website so maybe we're going to do is use this all users 540 days audience so we'll come here to the ad group level again observation come to browse and you can see these are all the different options we have to add to our search campaign remarketing and similar audiences in market audience combinations I don't really ever use detailed demographics or affinity audiences I try to stick to these down here so we'll click right here to remarketing website visitors all users 540 days and click on save so now we have that added to the ad group level along with curtains and window treatments in our curtains ad group to take it a step further we're gonna come over here to Google Analytics and what you can do is create audiences in your Google Analytics account and as long as you have your Google Ads account linked to your Google Analytics account which I do then you're able to create audiences and publish them directly to your Google Ads account so I can create a new audience here and you can use any of these different options but I'm gonna do users who visited a specific section of my website audience name I'm going to do curtain and we're just gonna do 60 days so anybody who's been to any of these pages over the last 60 days if they're still looking for curtains they're still searching farmhouse curtains key words I want to make sure they see my advertisements so we'll do curtains and we're gonna click here it's gonna say page contains and there's just a slash here all I need to do is add the word curtains so this is gonna count for this page for this page for this page it is also going to work for shower curtains that's fine but what I can do is page contains curtains or page contains drapes so that's gonna count this page all of my farmhouse drapes pages or and I'm gonna use valence ah's so these are all very similar farmhouse balances now last but not least I can come to Oregon and I can do window treatments okay so page contains curtains drapes balances or window treatments so you can see I have or in here click on apply and we'll see over the last seven days I've had 754 people visit these pages so now I can click on next step and I can publish this audience directly to my Google Ads account my Google Analytics account and what we're gonna do is click on publish okay so now I'm able to use this in my Google Ads account so if I come back over to audiences we click we're adding it to the ad group level we're here in observation I can click on browse come down to remarketing and similar audiences website visitors and our curtains audience is right here the one that we just created so it's showing size zero because it's still populating so we're gonna click here and now if anybody is on our all users 540 days audience our curtains audience or in this in market audience we can bid higher so let's just say we're gonna set these this bid at 20% for anybody who's visited our website and then for this one right here and it's saying too small to target for Google properties I need to have at least 1000 active members as soon as this continues to populate it's a 60 day audience I should be able to have a large enough audience to bid higher so we're gonna increase it by 25% click on save so this is a best practice for your campaigns especially if you're getting a lot of traffic to your website then you're gonna have a large pool of people who are gonna be searching your targeted keywords and you can bid higher on them to make sure they visit your website it works really well in competitive industries so now anybody who's visited these pages or is in this in market audience is gonna be more likely to see my advertisement okay so now is gonna be number six at number six is in every single ad group for your campaign you should have at least one expanded text ad and at least one responsive search ad so for this I have two expanded text ads and two responsive search ads in all of my different ad groups so that's four total advertisements per ad group but I only have two unique advertisements in here so number six is to make sure you at least have one expanded text ad and one responsive search ad in every single ad group for your campaign and that's gonna take me right into number seven so with number seven what I've done is I created my one expanded text ad one responsive search ad and then I duplicated each advertisement and I'm sending people to different landing pages so one of my landing pages like I showed before is just a listing of products so it's a shop page so people come here they can scroll down they're just seeing a listing of products all farmhouse curtains the other page is a blog post so this one has a lot of the same products on the page but I also have some inspirational pictures I have some more ideas about how to choose farmhouse curtains what are the different themes and styles so this these pages tend to do better for SEO and my shop pages tend to do better for Google Ads and pay-per-click advertising but it's not the same across the board so what I've done is I've taken my expanded text ad this one goes to one landing page and this one goes to the other landing page I've taken my responsive search ad duplicated it same exact advertisement but they just go to separate landing pages so number seven is if you do have one expanded text ad one responsive search ad and you have multiple landing pages you can test one of the best ways to increase campaign performance is to just duplicate those advertisements and then what you want to do is just change those landing pages because what Google Ads is going to do is serve the top-performing advertisements so whichever our driving cost per conversion at the lowest rate so for example this advertisement is going to continue to serve more and more and you're gonna see it has the most impressions and that's most likely because the conversion rate is the best and the cost per conversion is the best so the ads that drive the lowest cost per conversion are going to be more likely to be served over time so even if you have duplicate advertisements with different landing pages Google ads will serve whichever advertisements are driving you converge at the lowest cost okay so now number eight to continue on our advertisements use ad group level ad extensions so you can see right now I have different sitelink extensions that are added to my ad group level for farmhouse curtains so you can see shop curtains farmhouse drapes balances farmhouse curtains and then the farmhouse gold shop so these are all ad group level so you can see level ad group so all my sitelink extensions for this ad group are set here so even if you have campaign level ad extensions you should still set up ad group level ad extensions because they take precedence and if you can create different site links and call-outs and structured snippets even call extensions or price extensions that enhance your existing ad group then you want to make sure you're adding them to your AB group level I would say this is one of the things that takes a lot of time as you're building large campaigns but now I can come down here to my call-out extensions top rated curtains drapes and balances hundreds of farm curtains curtains started $13 structured snippet I have some different styles that people can find Buffalo check modern ruffled blackout and rustic so all of these are gonna enhance my advertisements because when people are searching for farmhouse curtains they're also going to see extensions that match farmhouse curtains so if you come here to the plus sign most of these different extensions can be added to the ad group level so I can use price extensions and show individual products you can use call extensions for your ad groups now lead form extensions are only used at the campaign level so you're not able to add everything to the ad group level but sitelinks call-outs and structured snippets if you're able to enhance an ad group then make sure you're using ad group level ad extensions now number two nine and ten are gonna be all about keywords and they work hand-in-hand so number nine is gonna be as you start to get more data and you want to expand your campaign what you can start doing is adding more keywords to your ad groups so you can see here I'm in Mike farmhouse curtains ad group still so if we click on the plus sign what its gonna do is it's gonna pull up some of the most relevant keywords here on the right hand side so what I can do is add some of these different options here and we'll say I'm already bidding on a couple of these but let's just say country curtains say farmhouse kitchen curtains and we'll do primitive country curtains so these are all relevant keywords for my campaign so if I wanted to expand my campaign what I would add all these key words I would use phrase match keywords I don't recommend just using broad match keywords so broad match keywords would be if I enter these with no quotes with no plus signs so with phrase match keywords I put quotes around this anytime someone types this phrase into Google it'll trigger my advertisements so what I can do is add all of these directly to my ad group I'm not going to be doing that I'm just showing you some examples of what you can do so one of the things Google Ads is gonna do is they're gonna give you different ideas on the right-hand side so if I click on cancel here we'll come back over to our campaign and let's just say we come to our optimization score again it's gonna usually tell you to add keywords over time so it's gonna say show your ads more often to people searching for what your business offers so I would recommend viewing these recommendations but don't just add everything look at them one at a time so this is telling me to add rustic shower curtains and farmhouse shower curtains to this curtains ad group I would not recommend doing that so you can always come in here and just dismiss these options it's not me to add a farmhouse sign the exact match keyword to my ad group so what I'll do is I'll take this one and we'll apply so for number nine its to always look through these recommendations see if there's any keywords that are good to add to your campaign so for example something like country primitive curtains if I wanted to expand a little bit for my campaign then I would add this keyword since I have such a small budget and I'm already reaching my budget without a problem I'm not gonna add any more keywords that are gonna make it a little bit more irrelevant for my campaign but that's gonna burn me into number 10 so for number 10 what I like to do is look at the recommendations that Google Ads is giving me so for example here rustic curtain rods look at some of these recommendations and also coming into my keywords and looking at my search terms report and specifically what I'll do is I'll come to farmhouse curtains and I'll look at my search terms report for farmhouse curtains and you can see here if I'm looking at impressions one of the things is farmhouse curtain rods so I can use this keyword to create a new ad group and what it allows me to do is not only create a new ad group to make sure I'm sending people to the best landing page for farmhouse curtain rods but on my website I only have a selection of farmhouse drapes farmhouse balances and farmhouse currents right here so to enhance my own website to enhance my search engine optimization strategy what I can do is add farmhouse curtain rods to my website I can use that to not only create a new ad group around farmhouse curtain rods but I can start driving some SEO traffic to that page so that's something that I need to do is create that page for my website so one of the things you can do as you're optimizing your campaign is just open up notepad or open up Microsoft Excel for your existing keyword list and just make a list of some of the keywords that you want to add to your campaign or some of the keywords that you can add to enhance your website so I can add this to my SEO keyword list farmhouse curtain rods and then I can also use it as one of my ad extensions so I can use it as a site link in that ad group I can create a brand new ad group for farmhouse curtain rods so it gives me a lot of different ideas for my web site allows me to expand my campaign and hopefully helps me drive more search engine traffic as well so these are ten different Google ads optimization tips so I would recommend going through your optimization scores some of these recommendations I need to do this my optimization score drop down below 70% again so sometimes just just dismissing some of the optimization ideas that give me but going through each of these individual ideas from bidding strategies to lowering your bids for your campaign adding keywords to ad groups making sure your responsive search adds expanded text ads making sure you're testing your landing pages ultimately a good google ads campaign comes down to organizing your ad groups and testing your advertisements testing keywords testing landing pages and using conversion tracking to see what is driving conversions for your business so you can go through each of these individual ad groups see what's driving conversions see what's driving conversions at the lowest cost and it's always going to help you expand your campaign and then find ideas for optimization opportunities so I can even come here and pause this farmhouse TV stands ad group because it's performing way less than some of these other ad groups here however for now I'm okay with testing this a little bit more but those are ten different optimization tips for Google Ads if you have any questions please them in the comment section make sure you subscribe to my youtube channel and thanks for watching my video today

Channel: Surfside PPC

Views: 34,621

Rating: 4.908884 out of 5

Keywords: google ads, google ads optimization, google ads optimization 2020, google ads tutorial, google ads optimize, optimize google ads, google ads optimization tips, google ads optimization tricks, google ads optimization checklist, google ads optimization techniques, google ads optimization score, optimize google ads campaigns, how to optimize google ads, google adwords optimization, optimize google adwords, how to optimize google adwords, google adwords optimization 2020

Id: _xfggHtl3X0

Length: 26min 36sec (1596 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020