Bad news First.
Businesses with substantial budgets are outperforming their counterparts in Google Ads who spend less. This may not come as a surprise, it is frustrating as a small business owner.
But don't give up yet! The truth is, you can adopt many strategies used by these larger advertisers with deeper pockets without increasing your budget. In Google Ads, success is based on being more proactive and taking more actions within your account.
The reason big spenders are aware of this is that they have substantial financial stakes involved. They cannot afford to take chances or neglect their accounts for an extended period. Instead, they diligently monitor their performance and make enhancements on a weekly basis.
The good news is that you can do the same and achieve significantly better results without merely increasing your budget. Let's dig into the top optimizations that major Google Ads spenders employ but you might not be implementing. With these strategies, you can compete with industry giants even if you have a smaller budget.
1. ALWAYS, and I mean always. Use conversion tracking. This cannot be ignored.
Starting with the basics. Conversion tracking is free. It's somewhat easy to implement and is highly accurate. If you aren't seeing your conversions all the other ad metrics simply don't matter. ROI should always be your top priority in your marketing.
If you don't know how to implement conversion tracking. There are several resources available to help. Start with Google.
2. My favorite and soon to be yours, landing pages!
I can't express the importance enough. Landing pages are such a huge part of your ad success and frequently ignored.
Seasoned advertisers understand that when you have numerous ads and diverse offers, you must also have a variety of landing pages. This practice is grounded in the principle that users are far more receptive to messaging that is personalized and closely aligned with the advertisement they interacted with. If all your traffic is directed to a single, generic landing page (or worse, your homepage), it can result in confusion and lead to an increased bounce rate.
It's noteworthy that over a quarter (26%) of lower-budget Google Ads accounts rely on only one active landing page, in stark contrast to the mere 4% observed in high-budget accounts.
3. Tracking is in place. So, how's your conversion rate?
A contributing factor to the greater number of landing pages among larger advertisers is their commitment to optimizing conversion rates.
When striving to enhance your conversion rate, it can be tempting to jump straight to tinkering with your landing pages, particularly if you have multiple options. However, it's advisable to approach the process methodically. Begin at the foundation.
First and foremost, ensure that the keywords you're bidding on are closely aligned with your business. While broad terms may attract a high volume of traffic, paying for irrelevant clicks is an inefficient use of your budget. We recommend that you allocate more than half of your budget to high-intent, top-converting keywords.
It's crucial to ensure that the offers you are directing people to are genuinely compelling. A superior offer can significantly boost your conversion rates, often more so than optimizing button colors and graphic elements.
PRO TIPS:
Writing compelling headlines
Using concise, targeted body copy
Testing to uncover the most eye-catching, enticing CTA for your offer
Designing a user-friendly form (making the journey from ad to purchase as frictionless as possible)
A fast-loading, mobile-friendly design
3. How's your CTR?
Click through rates aren't controlled by budget so if your CTR is low you need to focus on writing compelling, clickable ad copy. Make your ad copy relevant with a clear call to action that users can focus on and take action. Even with the biggest budgets, if ad copy is bad their ads will fail. Keep in mind the copy, keywords and landing pages should be aligned with one another.
4. Ad Extensions
Are you using ad extensions? If not, you need to start right away. Google now offers a variety of interactive extension that are a sure way to increase your ad engagement and your CTR. It also takes up signifanct more space in the SERP than not using them. It makes your ad more powerful in results against other companies. This option is free to use. Don't ignore it.
These include:
Images
Logo and business name
Sitelinks
Call Outs
Snippets
Location
Phone number
App
Price
Lead forms
5. Negative Keywords
I hate to say it, but I've audited countless ad accounts that have no negative keywords added to their campaigns. WHY! Not adding negative terms will cost you so much money and loss of ad engagement. The are the offensive line of any high-functioning Google Ads account: you know they’re there, but you only really think about them when something’s their fault.
If you’re bidding on the perfect keywords (high intent! relevant! volumetrically salient!) but you can’t seem to earn a conversion to save your life, it’s probably not because your prospects don’t like you. Provided you’re tracking conversions, it’s likely that either...
• A lack of negative keywords is causing a deluge of superfluous impressions, many of which are stealing budget away from those interested in your offer
• Overzealous negative keywords are impeding your ability to enter auctions for relevant search queries
If you operate with a lean marketing budget, we’re willing to wager that it’s the former. Why?
Because 8% of low-spending Google Ads accounts have no negative keywords at all, and 62% have less than 250; 98% of top-spending accounts have more than 250 negative keywords.
6. Quality Scores - This one is super important
Quality Score is a metric specific to Google Ads that takes into account your ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate. It’s a valuable metric that, despite countless think pieces, is still shrouded in secrecy. What we do know about QS is that it can significantly impact your CPC.
Quality Score can drastically raise or reduce your average CPC.
A perfect Quality Score can discount your CPC by about 50%;
A terrible Quality Score can increase costs by 400%.
Don't ignore this. Make sure this entire list is implemented to gain valuable increases across your performance KPIs.
Hopefully this helps gain some insight into what actions you can take to compete with the big companies. It's absolutely possible, I see it everyday. Spend time on your account, fine tune these steps and monitor your quality score and I promise you, you'll see better results.
Always here to chat about Google Ads. Book some time with me.
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