Google Ads is the most powerful advertising platform in the world. In 2023, Google Ads generated 39% of worldwide digital advertising revenue, more than Facebook, Amazon Ads, and TikTok combined. And it’s no surprise – Google Ads enables digital marketers to run highly-targeted ad campaigns across a variety of channels including search, display, and video. But with marketing budgets becoming more scrutinized, it’s important for paid marketers to optimize their google ads investments.
This Google Ads optimization checklist provides clear steps you can use to optimize your google ads programs, as well as guidance on how often to optimize, so that you can make the most of your spend in the channel.
The best way to set your Google Ads programs up for success is to get your campaign configuration right from the start. There are numerous philosophies for how to organize your Google Ads account. We’d recommend reviewing Google’s resources here and organizing your account in the way that makes sense for your business. As you’re doing so, here are three tips for nailing your campaign set-up.
Set a target ROAS goal
A great way to maximize the return from your campaigns is to define Target ROAS recommendations in Google Ads. Google’s Target ROAS functionality uses Google Ads Smart Bidding to predict the value of a potential conversion every time a user searches for products or services that you’re advertising and sets your bid to maximize your return.
By defining a Target ROAS, either at the campaign or the program level, you can ensure that your budget is being allocated towards engaging high-intent users, increasing revenue per dollar invested.
Once Target ROAS is set, Google may bid aggressively when it recognizes the opportunity for return, and reduce your bid otherwise. For that reason, Google recommends you remove daily budget limits when using target ROAS, though states that “over a month-long billing cycle, you won't be charged more than your average daily budget would've allowed for over 30.4 days.”
Account for user intent in campaign set-up
Customers engage with your brand at various stages of the customer journey. While some may be exploring their problem for the first time, others may be evaluating your solutions alongside your competitors’.
As you structure advertising campaigns, it’s important to ensure that you are investing an appropriate percentage of your advertising budget in campaigns that drive high-intent users to convert. By designing campaigns around high-intent keywords, such as “best women’s running shoes,” you can ensure your ad budget is being invested in capturing customers that are ready to buy.
On the other hand, you should also make sure you’re not over-investing in engaging low-intent users, as this can lead to low ROAS.
Monitor keyword expansion opportunities
Consumers’ language can shift over time. While certain verbiage may be relevant today, new trends will arise tomorrow. As you optimize your campaigns, it’s important to add new keywords as they become relevant, and remove outdated keywords when they are no longer serving your campaign. This helps you to meet your audience where they are and reduce wasted ad budget.
With the average consumer being exposed to hundreds if not thousands of ads per day across search, video, and display, it’s important to identify the ad variants that capture your target audience’s attention and reallocate your budget accordingly.
A great way to do this in Google Ads is to run split tests using Google custom experiments. Custom experiments enable you to create campaign variants and compare how variants perform against your original campaign over time. The campaign variant will share the original campaign’s traffic and a specified portion of its budget, so you don't need to pay extra to run tests.
Once you’ve drawn a conclusion from your experiment, you can easily apply your campaign variant to the original campaign or convert the variant into a new campaign.
The benefits of optimizing your Google Ads with custom experiments is two-fold: better creative will result in increased Click Through Rate (CTR), which in turn can have a big impact on your Google Quality Score—the metric Google uses to influence your ad rank and cost per click.
Who you decide not to target with your Google Ads can be just as important as who you do target. Mis-targeted ads waste campaign budget, lowering ROAS and reducing the number of ads that can be shown to your ideal customers. Audience exclusions increase campaign efficiency by preventing ads from being served to irrelevant users.
Location and demographics exclusions
Get started by setting location exclusions. For example, if you currently sell your products in the United States of America but aren’t currently able to ship to Canada, you can exclude advertisements from being shown to users in Canada. Google also allows you to set demographics-based exclusions, preventing ads from being served to users based on characteristics such as age and gender.
Negative keywords
Exclude irrelevant audiences from your campaign targeting with Google negative keywords. Negative keywords allow you to list specific keywords on which you don’t want your campaign to be served. For example, businesses promoting reading glasses may want to define negative keywords such as “wine glasses” and “drinking glasses” to prevent their ads being served to users on the hunt for drinkware.
Audience suppression
In addition to leveraging Google audience exclusion capabilities, you can also leverage external solutions alongside Google to sharpen the targeting of your Google Ads campaigns. When a campaign audience is defined using keyword and demographic data, it may end up including active or recent customers that are not interested in your campaign offer. Serving advertisements to active customers can result in not only wasted ad spend, but also a poor customer experience.
Sharpen your campaign targeting by creating customer segments in a first-party data platform and syncing them to Google Marketing Platform, where they can be leveraged as suppression lists on your campaigns. By importing suppression lists to Google Marketing Platform, preventing your budget from being invested in the active customers and ensuring more budget is allocated to target future customers. For example, you may upload an audience of customers that have made a purchase in the last 7 days, and exclude them from being shown ads promoting a new product offer.
When syncing audiences to Google from any external or internal system, it’s important to ensure that you have the necessary privacy controls in place to support user consent management and data privacy. For more information on how Google Marketing Platform processes and handles first-party data uploaded to their platform, you can learn more about Customer Match here.
Bonus: Wherever possible, sync suppression audiences to Google Marketing Platform in real time. This will ensure that customers are removed from your advertising campaigns as soon as they have converted, optimizing campaign costs and improving the customer experience.
Capturing your target customers’ attention with effective search campaigns is a great start. But for most businesses, clicks do not equal revenue. Investing in improving the post-click experience is a great way to translate Google Ad traffic into conversions. Two key things that you can do to improve the post-click experience:
Increase load speed
Recent Google research found that the chance of a user bouncing increases by 32% when page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds; and by 90% when page load time increases from 1 to 5 seconds. Investing in shaving seconds, or even milliseconds, off of your page load speed can reduce bounce rate and increase the likelihood that your target customers will make a purchase.
Personalize the landing page experience
McKinsey & Co. reported that 71% of customers expect personalization, and 76% of customers actually get frustrated when their experiences with brands aren’t personalized. Align your landing pages to the copy and creative in your advertising campaign to create a consistent customer experience, and leverage customer data to tailor the landing page experience to the user where possible.
With so many ways to optimize your Google Ads campaigns, it’s not possible to optimize every campaign every day. And even if you could, it may not be beneficial.
Depending on the size of your ad budget, it can take 4-8 weeks for Google Ads to produce the amount of historical data required to optimize your campaigns. While businesses with large ad budgets can gather data and optimize more frequently, businesses with small ad budgets need to wait longer for historical data.
As you plan your optimization schedule, we recommend tiering campaigns based on budget and ROAS. Campaigns with the largest budgets and returns in your account should be optimized as frequently as possible, because marginal improvements will lead to greater increase in returns for your business. Campaigns with lower budgets and revenue returns should be optimized semi-regularly–you want to ensure these campaigns are up-to-date, but not to the detriment of your priority campaigns. For more information on how to tier your campaigns, we’d recommend reading Andrew Lolk’s 80-20 rule for AdWords management.
John Joe Smith, founder and CEO of WasteNot, is hosted by Tom Triscari, founder of Quo Vadis, for a Q&A conversation on the future of audience suppression.
Many advertisers waste up to 40% of their ad budgets due to inefficient targeting, and they aren't even aware of it. In this article, we'll walk through how brands can use modern audience suppression strategies to improve advertising efficiency and performance.
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WasteNot is the only platform focused on allowing marketers to activate and optimize real time ad exclusions across all biddable media.