A good campaign setup is very important for everything that comes next, so try avoiding any mistakes and use your knowledge from past campaigns experience.
Here are few useful starting tips:
- Set a threshold so you always know when is time to act;
- Exclude keywords, placements and content from the beginning;
- Start with actions that could have the highest impact;
- Use multiple key benefits and multiple call to action variants;
- Make sure campaigns don’t intersect;
- Keep track of all changes;
- Always asses results before making the next move;
- Never lose sight of big picture.
Now, let’s see which are the most important optimization actions you can apply to your campaigns in your weekly or even daily routine.
- Budget Adjustments – easiest and biggest impact change you can do in your campaigns is distributing the biggest budget to the campaigns that have best CPA and can bring you higher conversion volume. ”Limited by budget” alerts can be a helpful way to rapidly identify where you can take action.
- Bid Adjustments – when budget cannot be increased or reallocated between campaigns, the same „limited by budget” alert can easily show you when you pay more than needed. Adjust bids in an organized way by using a scale to bid up or down depending on results vs. your target CPA.
- Conversions/Impressions – this metric will help you fastly identify the best performers in both CTR and CVR metrics and understand how your needs better meet with Google needs. This way, you will be able to optimize for better results and at the same time make sure your campaign will still deliver.
- Negatives – constantly add negative keywords and placements to your campaigns to cut out the biggest spenders that don’t generate value. This is a permanent process that could save you a lot of money for more productive targeting methods. Use the threshold you establish from the beginning to help you decide what to exclude from your campaigns.
- Extensions – use and optimize all types of extensions that fit your business to power up your ads.
- Best performers – make sure you isolate best performing targeting methods to prioritize budget for them and try to match them with best performing assets for best results.
- Groups – seeing the big picture is very important and some optimization actions can get you caught in too much detail and leave you with contradictory information. Thus, when you have a large number of campaigns, try to create groups and make decisions by considering the results of each campaign group. This way you will make sure that your efforts will put you in the right direction.
- Test – have a little budget set aside for testing new things each month or week. Just cutting down from current campaigns and making the same moves will get you to a point where you eventually run out of ideas and solutions. Make sure you always try different new things so you are prepared to expand.
A smart setup, together with organized and constant optimization actions, can help you get the most out of the budget you invest in your Google Ads campaigns. Still, as a performance specialist you would like not to limit yourself to these ingredients.
The data provided by Google Ads and Google Analytics also gives you a lot of important insights on what can be improved in your creatives and landing pages. These are things you will not change directly, but you can generate this type of improvement by communicating the interpreted data to the right persons.