Running a successful Google Ads account can come with a myriad of challenges. One of the more surprising challenges is knowing when to follow Google’s advice & leverage one of their features, or when it’s wiser to chart your own course.
Read on below to see 6 quick ways to chart your own course to improve your results and save more money in your Google Ads account.
1. Turn off the display network for your search campaign
When creating a new campaign, Google can include the display network as a default placement. By targeting both the search and display network in one campaign you will taint your performance, your targeting, and your data.
2. Turn off automatically created assets
Automatically created assets can generate some new and interesting ideas, but Google will always skew to a higher CTR, which makes more money for them, at the expense of conversion rate, which drives more money for us. This feature is also turned on by default and should be turned off when creating a new campaign to ensure control of your messaging and your data.
3. Only target people in or regularly in your included locations
Another sneaky way Google squeezes out extra spend and impressions out of us is by expanding our location targeting as a default selection. Most advertisers have no interest in targeting users outside of their targeted location so turning off this option is often an easy win.
4. Ensure you are leveraging all available ad extensions
Ad extensions improve your quality score which in turn will bring down your cost per click and if done correctly can increase your conversion rates. While everything should be tested, leveraging ad extensions is an easy win that will help improve your bottom line.
5. Don’t forget about manual CPC
With the heavy push to automation and automated bids, manual CPC is often overlooked. It’s important to remember that in spite of all the recent advancements there is still a place for manual CPC, specifically for new campaigns, brand campaigns, and campaigns that struggle to bring in the minimum number of conversions for automated bids to work. By switching one of clients’ brand campaigns from automated bidding to manual CPC we drove a -81% decrease in CPCs and a -76.5% decrease in CPAs.
6. Make sure conversion tracking is set up
As mentioned above, Google is pushing more and more towards automation which is fed by the conversion tracking that we set up. Not only do you need the initial lead generation goal created, it’s critical that you also push additional conversions into Google that can be used to guide Google to quality conversions in addition to the quantity of conversions.
