Google Ads Optimization Checklist: 10 Tips for Better ROI

Did you know that Google Ads can extinguish your budget quickly if you allow it to? The worst thing about it is that it’ll be too late before you realize that a big chunk of your budget has already been spent. 

It doesn’t matter whether you have the best copy, an impeccable landing page, or an engaging audience list; you’ll still not get a strong ROI. In case you’re facing this exact scenario, we’ve compiled a checklist for Google Ads optimization that you can refer to from time-to-time. 

This checklist will help you get a lot more success and even manage multiple clients seamlessly. So, without any further delay, let’s get started. 

1. Try to expand your keyword list as much as you can

There are many tools available nowadays that you can leverage to explore a lot of expanding opportunities. For a starting point, you can use Google Ads Keyword Planner for researching new terms. 

You can enter keywords, and the Keyword Planner will provide you with data related to those specific keywords and similar keywords as well. Furthermore, it will recommend keywords according to your website. 

Google Keyword Planner gives out results depending on the averages. That’s why it can’t tell you for sure whether the new keywords will convert or not. However, it’ll tell you about the low to high-end range related to the estimated cost per click. 

2. Get more control with the help of SKAGs

Do you know about the right way to get the most control over your Google Ads campaigns? A sure-shot way is to use Single Keyword Ad Groups(SKAGs). 

With the help of SKAGs, you’ll be able to set up your PPC campaigns to get a great amount of control over each little detail of your campaign. For this purpose, you can set up one keyword per ad group, then make a set of ads with headlines which will feature that keyword at least once. 

SKAGs can give you a lot more flexibility. It’s because by using 10-20 keywords that trigger one set of ads, you’ll get what’s known as the Iceberg Effect. This means the keywords you see in your PPC accounts won’t match the exact search terms for which your ads appear. 

While using SKAGs, you’ll have a 1:1 ratio of keywords to ads, and you might get to see a set of ads that gets featured in the headlines. This is bound to give you a lot more relevance to the keyword when the user searches for it or similar terms as well. Google surely likes to see the most relevant ads in the auctions. 

3. Target particular audience segments using RLSAs

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads(RLSAs) is a feature provided by Google that lets you layer a remarketing list audience on top of the search campaigns. You might not know this, but remarketing lists can be pretty useful for a lot more than display campaigns. 

When remarketing, audiences are layered at the top of the search campaigns, new opportunities are surely going to open up so as to niche down your keyword traffic. It will be narrowed down to searchers who have already visited your website. 

It will give you a lot more flexibility and the broadness of the keywords as well. While using RLSAs, you’ll be telling Google that you only need to show ads to people who are searching your keywords and have also already visited your website. This will help in better qualifying them as prospective customers. 

Moreover, you can also optimize your Google Ads by using third-party cookie deprecation. This could make this strategy a lot more difficult to implement. If you want to minimize the impact of the privacy shifts on your Google Ads performance, you should consider using first-party data so as assemble RLSAs in your Google Ads account.

4. Utilize prospecting display ads to optimize your funnel

It’s a fantastic thing if you want to invest in display ads. The reason behind this is that it is a top-of-funnel medium, which will not get as many conversions because display ads are a lot more about awareness and exposure. However, display ads inform in-market list targeting and tailored audience targeting. 

You need to think of your sales funnel at a holistic level, and it is not just the bottom of the sales funnel. At an ultimate level, you need a lot more people at the top of the funnel to get more people to the bottom. That’s where display ads can come into the picture and help you achieve your goals. 

Furthermore, display ads complement the search component of marketing as well. In fact, they’ll also fuel the bottom-funnel audience. The more high-intent prospects you have, the bigger success you’re going to achieve. 

5. CTA must be in tune with the intent

Did you know that there are distinct temperatures for every stage of the conversion cycle? Display visitors mostly match up colder intent with similar-natured CTAs. The main goal of understanding these temperatures for any Google Ads agency across their campaigns is to determine which CTAs will work best for different visitor types. 

When you optimize Google Ads, you need to match the intent of the visitor with that of the CTA. In case someone lands on your website from a display ad while having a colder intent, you should ask for their contact information. 

So, when it comes to running display ads, you should do so with a proper CTA and offer, such as a downloadable asset. You can also ask for minimal personal information, such as name and email address. 

You might not get a great amount of traffic for your offer, but you’ll still give them something valuable that helps them remember your brand and offerings. This will ensure that you get a lot more conversions eventually. 

6. Double down on your campaign’s KPIs

It’s a common scene to get obsessed with micro metrics while optimizing Google Ads, and forget about the ultimate purpose. You mustn’t fall into this trap and focus on details that don’t matter much at the end of the day. Some of those metrics are quality score, impression share, and even click-through rate(CTR). 

Those metrics have their own place, but if they aren’t contributing anything to your bigger goal, then they won’t tell you much. It’s because these metrics won’t tell you about the real progress of the Google Ads campaign optimization process. 

Instead of focusing on these details, you need to ask yourself whether your PPC campaigns are generating more ROI or not. Alongside this, you also need to know the ROAS as well. These two benchmarks will help you a lot more than any other metrics put together. 

7. Pay your money where there are chances of conversions

In case you’re targeting the U.S location and other leading nations, you can’t really expect the same type of results for all of your campaigns. On the other hand, treating each location similarly despite the results they bring is not the right approach at all. 

Let’s say you’ve increased the number of countries that you want to target through your campaigns to 8. You thought that these locations would offer higher value, but only one of these locations was converting, so wasting money on the other 7 isn’t worth it. That’s where the need to follow the data arises. Here’s how you can do it in the right manner:-

Adjust your bid as per the location

In the locations tab, you can place a bid adjustment as per the location. You can place positive adjustments on those locations that are performing wonderfully well. On the other hand, implement negative bid adjustments on the ones that aren’t up to the mark. 

Get rid of poor-performing locations

The best way to optimize your locations is to let go of those that are a waste of money. Just focus on the locations that are performing spectacularly well. 

Segregate the campaigns based on the location

You can also separate the best-performing locations into their own focus campaigns and spend more money there. Alongside this, pulling back the budget on campaigns with poorly performing locations is a great strategy as well. 

8. Understand the demographics deeply

The performance of your ad campaigns also depends on income levels, gender, and age. If you want to check out the demographics data, you can select a particular campaign and go to the “Audiences” tab as well. 

When you click the tabs at the top of the demographics box, you can change the age, gender, and income data depending on the factors that affect your campaign performance. 

A substitute for this is to exclude a demographic entirely so as to place a negative bid adjustment on it. With the decline of cookie tracking, you should assess the campaign performance by filtering it through demographics, which has become a lot more difficult. 

It’s a real possibility that many of these conversions will be coming from the unknown category. However, if you see an opportunity to omit a known demographic that’s making you spend a lot and get a little in return, you know the drill well enough. 

9. Utilize bid adjustments

There are very few places where you can leverage bid adjustments correctly, and they are locations, ad schedules, and demographics. Alongside this, you can also add bid adjustments to audiences and devices as well. 

In case you find out that the desktop performs best for your business, you must adjust your bid adjustments for the desktop. It will help in ensuring that you’re spending a lot more where the conversions are mostly coming from. 

When you place a bid adjustment on audiences across the different Google Ads campaigns, that can be very helpful for your campaigns’ performance. You can carry it out while your target audience segment is currently in the observation mode. 

10. Increase your keyword list and refine the existing one

The keyword list, which was one of your most important assets, doesn’t hold that status anymore. It doesn’t matter what you feel about the relevance of keywords; the data is much more important than that. So, you need to refine them on a consistent basis. 

Analyze all of your keywords and see where your money got wasted the most. Then, you need to get rid of those leakages at all costs. You shouldn’t get attached to your keywords at any cost. 

You might think that someone would get attached to their ad keywords, but it happens a lot. There are many advertisers who have a selected keyword list, and they never let go of the underperforming ones. The reasons behind this phenomenon are as follows:-

• Their competitors are advertising on those keywords, and they want to maintain a solid presence on those keywords as well. 
• They want to ensure that those keywords are quite relevant and will perform amazingly well. 

When a PPC agency optimizes its Google Ads campaigns, its data will help it a lot in determining which keywords to target. It’s not at all a valid reason to focus on the keywords that the competitors are appearing on. 

The reason behind this is that maybe your competitors aren’t getting any great results by using those keywords. So, the more you refine your keywords, the better your ROI will be.  

Final Words

When you have a clear idea about what you want to optimize, then more than half your work is already done. However, you should understand that Google Ads needs considerable time to learn from your changes and provide the right data on how those changes affected your account. 

So, you shouldn’t make any big changes each week. Many marketers make tweaks almost daily, and you shouldn’t do it. It can hamper your account’s growth more than helping. That’s more of the reason why you should understand that marketing perfectly takes considerable time. 

So, invest in experimentation, analyze what’s working well and double down on it. At last, follow the above Google Ads optimization checklist and get a much better ROI for your Google Ads campaigns.