Optimizing Google Ads: Most Effective Tips for Business Owners

Published on: 14/10/2020 | Updated on: October 25, 2024

A new business always comes with many new exciting experiences, but it also comes with many uncertainties and challenges, especially if you run an online venture. Running an online business is trickier because even though the constantly changing online world gives many new possibilities, it is also challenging to keep up to date with the industry’s most recent trends.

Missing out on new promising opportunities is one of the most common mistakes that let your competitors get ahead. So, to keep your business recent and on top of the list, you need to work with Google Ads so that your potential customers would be able to find you.

But only working on Google Ads won’t cut it – you will also have to constantly monitor and optimize your advertising campaign if you want to get ahead of your competition. And as the online business competition is bigger than ever, today, we are going to help you get more customers through Google Ads and share some Google Ads optimization tips.

Tips on Optimizing Google Ads

Tip #1: Focus on Location Targeting

One of the most effective ways to increase the return on investment metric with Google Ads is to use the Location Targeting option. Location Targeting’s main idea is mainly focusing on those areas that have the most potential – those areas where most of your target audience is living or spending their time.

Today, you can filter and narrow down the Location Targeting by so many different criteria: tiered demographics, your business locations, places of interest, Google My Business locations, radius around a location, entire countries, and areas within the country itself, for example, a specific neighborhood or territory. 

Even better, there is an option that also lets you exclude specific locations from the search. So, for instance, if your product or service is very unlikely to sell in a particular country, you can stop showing the search result in that country. Say you are selling air heaters. It would not be wise to invest in ads for tropical countries because they do not have a demand for air heaters.

Tip #2: Use the Google Keyword Planner

If you want to generate more traffic to your website and end up with a higher number of leads, first of all, you need to understand and learn to think like your potential customer. In other words, you need to consider the customer’s journey – the way this person makes decisions. When you have information about potential customers’ behavior, you can plan your keywords based on the information.

It has been noticed that a potential customer that has already made the decision to buy your product or service will use shorter and more direct keywords for their search. Therefore, a customer who is still indecisive and in doubt of choice will use a wider range of keywords.

Luckily, Google has an easily accessible free tool called Google Keyword Planner that can help you choose all the right keywords in a very short time. Your biggest challenge is the indecisive people; therefore, they are the ones you should target by choosing and adding long-tail keywords.

Tip #3: Add Negative Keywords

To avoid wasting money on keywords that might mislead people, you can add negative keywords. Therefore, if a person is using Google Search and enters your keyword but has another specific keyword that doesn’t describe your business at all, you can add that word into the list of negative keywords, and your search results won’t be shown if a specific word or phrase is used with your main keyword.

For example, suppose you are selling regular everyday shoes, and you often notice that people who are looking for specific shoes like climbing shoes are also clicking on your ads. In that case, you should add the word “climbing” as a negative keyword. This will help you reach more people from your target audience.

Also, the method of using Negative Keywords will save you from losing advertising money, especially if you have chosen a pay-per-click strategy. Because if you have, you probably know that each click on your ad will cost money. And there is a very low chance that someone searching for climbing shoes will bother with a standard shoe store and decide to purchase a regular pair of shoes instead.

Tip #4: Improve Your Quality Score

Sure, improving SEO ranking is essential to every online business on the market. But you will have to take a lot of steps to get there. And the first one you should start with is improving your Quality Score, which can vary from 1 – being the lowest score, up to 10 – being the highest possible score.

To improve your Quality Score, you need to make sure that you write a good, engaging copy for your ads and that the content people see on the ads is relative to the landing page. The less relevant it is, the more people will leave your website immediately and lower your Quality Score.

Tip #5: Measure the Lost Impressions

Any successful Google Ads campaign is built on the data of your advertising campaigns – that is why each case is so different and it is the main reason why there is no single trick that would work to boost any Google Ads advertising campaign. So the more valuable data you are able to collect, the more you can improve your campaign to perform better. And one of the most important data metrics is Impression share.

To get access to Impression share data, you will have to add the column Search Lost IS in Keywords reports and Ad groups. This metric will show you how often in percentage your ads have not been shown because of a low budget or poor ranking. Obviously, this metric will help you discover which opportunities you are missing out on and what parts of your ad campaign need improving. 

If you discover that you are losing quite a lot of impressions, it is crucial that you take action because this change could have significant effects on the profits that a specific ad campaign on Google Ads is bringing for your business. Hope this five tips on optimizing google ads will help you to optimize your marketing.