Optimisation Techniques For Google Ads You Might be Missing
Here is a quick checklist our Google Media Buying team put together on the core optimisations you should be performing for your Google Ad account.
Note in general we usually look at a running 7 day total to assess performance, sometimes longer if the product is in a high-consideration category. But for audience, device, demographic and more granular data you need a longer look-back window to ensure you have valid data.
Audience PERFORMANCE and BID ADJUSTMENTs
When you launch a campaign set up core audiences to observe. Think about the types of audiences you think might be interested in your products and add them when you set up your campaigns. Later you can come back and use the data to improve your campaigns.
A month after launching campaigns or when they have 100 clicks per audience you can analyse the audience data to improve performance.
Look at the audience data with a 30-day lookback window. See which audiences are performing best. Add a multiplier to the audiences that are performing best. Add a positive multiplier to the audiences that are performing less well.
Initially start with 5% bid adjustments. You can go up to 90% bid adjustment once you have a lot of data.
You can completely exclude an audience that is consistently under-performing.
USE NEGATIVES TO WEED OUT IRRELEVANT TRAFFIC
Negative keywords reduce wasted clicks from irrelevant traffic. This is something many brands neglect and it’s an obvious, easy optimisation that can make a huge difference to your account.
Keep the negative keyword lists clean and organised.
Go weekly into your search query report, and add filters so that it only shows you keywords that are neither excluded nor included. Order by interaction.
Find the keywords that obviously aren’t relevant and add them as negatives to your keyword lists.
This is how we organise our lists at Webtopia - to keep them clean and easy to understand, and to avoid excluding the wrong keywords from the wrong campaigns.
Products
Competitiors
Generic negatives
Non converting keywords
Demographic BIDDING
Look at a 30 day window to see if particular demographics are performing better or worse, and test excluding/adding them.
Keep a close eye to see whether the spend is still on track after making the changes. Adjust accordingly.
Day Parting
Set up the day in small parts that are relevant to your brand and then observe the data.
After you have a few weeks or 30 days of data - see if you notice big differences in performance once you can then optimise by upping or lowering the bid for certain times of day.
Device BIDDING
If for a certain campaign one device is doing better/worse then optimise by upping or lowering the bid for certain devices.
A good example for this could be a YouTube video ad where TV or laptop/desktops could be doing better than mobile phones.
Keyword Quality Score
Check the overall quality score and the quality score of individual keywords.
Brand quality score should be 9 or 10.
For keywords that have a low quality score it’s a good idea to move them into their own ad group and create highly relevant, highly optimised copy that matches the search term, and send them to highly relevant optimised landing pages or if they are low performing - remove them.
Search Networks / Display Network
Check for big differences in performance across the various placements and bid accordingly.