Optimizing Google Ads: 12 Key Levers

Google Ads is an incredibly popular ad network. If you want to make the most of your Google Ads campaigns, you need to find ways to improve your return on investment — your Google Ads ROI. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it’s the most important thing. 

Many people fall into the trap of thinking that this is an impossible feat, but the truth is that there are many ways that you can accomplish this. Today, I’m going to walk you through 12 key levers for optimizing your Google Ads.

Doing these optimizations will help you basically print money and make the most of your advertising efforts. 

All of my paid ads managers at my paid ad agency use these strategies to optimize Google Ads when setting up ad accounts and marketing campaigns for our clients.

1. Bidding strategy 

The first way to optimize Google Ads is to take a long hard look at your bidding strategy. There are multiple bidding strategy options because different strategies are used for different situations. 

The main bidding strategies are:

• Maximize clicks: this is great when you’re just starting your ads and don’t have much data to work with yet.
• Maximize conversions: this is ideal for SaaS businesses or other businesses that only have one price point.
• Maximize conversion value: this is generally used for e-commerce businesses that offer products in a variety of different price ranges.

Clearly, the type of business that you run will affect your bidding strategy, so be sure to keep this in mind. Don’t just blindly select a bidding strategy. Think about why you’re selecting it. And if you’re not seeing results, maybe check in to see if your bidding strategy still aligns with your goals.

2. Auction insights

One area that people don’t always think about when it comes to optimisation is their auction insights and reports, which can be done at both the campaign and account level. 

Get out your black hoodie and binoculars because this basically means spying on your competitors. Everyone knows that Google Ads is an auction-based platform, so you need to make sure that you know who you’re bidding against. 

For example, if you’re a premium brand going up against a generic company like Amazon, that’s not great. Ideally, you’d want to be bidding against other high-end companies, so you may need to take another look at your keywords if that’s not the case. 

Of course, you can continue to bid against Amazon, provided you add extra value that sets you apart. Maybe you’re coming at customers from a sustainability point of view. Maybe you’re emphasizing that you’re not a soulless corporation, but a human business. 

Either way, taking a look at your auction insights can give you a glimpse into some valuable changes that you could be making to your Google Ads campaigns.

3. Quality score

Quality is good, so logic dictates that the better your quality score, the better your ads will perform. But what exactly is your quality score?

Firstly, this is something that occurs at keyword level. Google starts by looking at your keyword and decides how good it is at satisfying a user’s need. Think about it as a beauty pageant, but for keywords. But Google isn’t just looking at one thing: it’s also looking at your landing page, ad relevance, expected clickthrough rate, and more. 

You can impress Google by making sure that all of these things are above average. Think about what the user is after, and then come up with a plan of action for how you can satisfy their needs.

4. Landing pages

I’ve already touched on landing pages in the quality score section, but now it’s time to get super up close and personal with your landing pages. At a keyword level, you want to look at your landing page to see what Google thinks about it. Does Google think it’s generic, or have you wowed Google into thinking your landing page is above average?

Think about where you’re sending users when they click your ad. Are you sending them to your home page, or a custom landing page designed specifically for the ad and keyword — a landing page that targets their deepest desires?

5. Device bidding 

It’s also important to think about which devices you want to optimize for. Generally, the two big competitors in this area are desktop versus mobile users. Tablet users exist, but they tend to be few and far between.

The number of conversions that you get will differ between mobile and desktop users, and you can use this to guide you through which device you should be optimizing for and which device you should be spending more money on.  

Another tip is to look at your cost per conversion, as these also differ when it comes to different devices. You may want to stop optimizing for certain devices if the cost per conversion is too high. This is also something to keep in mind if you have a small amount to spend on your advertising costs; you can cut your costs by not optimizing for the device that brings in the least amount of users.

6. Locations

Listen, you don’t need to know your users’ exact address. In fact, it would be pretty creepy if you did. But you do need to know more or less where they’re coming from so you can use that information to help boost your return on investment. 

Look at the cost per conversion for the locations you’re targeting in your ads. Just as with devices, you can always turn off certain locations if you’re on a tight ad spend. However, you shouldn’t be too hasty; make sure you have enough data and clicks to make an informed decision. This will help you determine how much of your advertising spend to dedicate to certain locations.

7. Extensions/assets

Next up we have extensions, or assets, as they’re now called. This includes things like:

• Site length
• Call outs
• Image extensions

You can find this data in the ads themselves by navigating to the assets section. This is a great place to come to if you want to look at how different parts of your ads are performing in terms of their impact on your click-through rate, which can give you the info you need to decide which ones to cull.

8. Ad testing

Of course, one of the most effective ways of improving your return on investment when it comes to your Google Ads campaigns is . . . drumroll please . . . your ads themselves. Your marketing efforts will go to waste if your ad campaign isn’t performing well. 

Think of your ads like infants. You can’t just set them up properly and then leave them. They need you to regularly check back in on them and see how they’re doing and what they need. 

More importantly, your ads require A/B testing. I’ve said it multiple times and I will continue to say it: you don’t know right off the bat which ads are going to work. 

I don’t either, despite this being what I do for a living. Sure, we can each make a pretty educated guess, but the only real way of determining which ads are going to make you money is to test a variety and let the data speak for itself.

Test two ads against each other and see what you can learn. Does one have a higher clickthrough rate than the other? Does one yield a much lower rate of conversions?

In the end, your ads will determine your Google Ads ROI, so make sure that you’re putting the most effective ads in front of your audience.

9. Day of the week 

You also need to make sure that you are looking at the different days of the week to learn which days your ads perform best. 

It might be the case that your ads only do well during weekdays, in which case, you may want to stop optimizing your ads for Saturdays and Sundays. Or maybe it’s even more random than that, and your ads are doing great on Tuesdays but failing on Fridays. Again, you’ll know which days to optimize for.

Look at all the data when considering this. Look at not only your conversions, but also your cost per conversion. Then, if necessary, get rid of the day that performs the worst. 

You can also use all the information mentioned above and apply it to the different times of the day. 

Of course, this is another thing you shouldn’t rush into. Make sure that you have enough data to back your decision. If your ad performs badly on the first Wednesday that it’s live, that doesn’t mean you should turn it off and stop optimizing for Wednesdays completely. But if it underperforms on Wednesdays specifically for months on end, well, turning it off is a pretty safe bet.

10. Amount spent versus budget

Another key thing to think about is what your Google Ads costs are how much is actually being spent. 

To keep things simple, let’s say that you have an ad spend of $10 per day. Theoretically, that would mean you would spend around $300 per month. But because Google is search-based, it doesn’t always spend your money evenly. 

With a smaller budget like the one mentioned above, it will be easy for Google to spend your entire ad spend. But if you have very tight targeting and keywords, or you have a lot of negative keywords or a small geography or a whole host of other factors that limit your searches, you might not actually be spending all of your budget. 

People always say that you’ve got to spend money to make money, and this is true when it comes to paid ads. The more you spend, the better your ROI will be, so not tapping into your full budget will harm your ROI in the long run. 

11. Conversion tracking 

If you haven’t noticed by now, a big part of improving your Google Ads ROI is simply regularly taking a closer look at various factors within your Google Ads campaigns, getting to know them more intimately, and adjusting them if any element is missing or underperforming. 

Conversion tracking is no different. Conversion tracking simply means knowing which ads your leads or sales come from. In other words, you need to track which ads convert users into customers. In order to maximize your ROI, you need to know which ads are properly converting, so that you can spend more money on that, which would in turn increase your return on investment. 

Don’t neglect this. Make a point to regularly look at your conversions as well as your conversion actions. 

Check the following:

• Are all your conversion actions working?
• Do they have the correct action optimization (so, are they set as primary or secondary)?
• Are their click-through rates properly set up?
• Is there a conversion value set?

And then also look at your website. Have you made any changes that could impact your conversion tracking, such as adding additional pages or steps that can be tracked? Maybe you’ve added an email to your footer, and you want to track that.

One of my key mantras when it comes to paid ads is “the more data the better.” I like to track as many things as possible. Of course, this can be a lot to take in if you’re new to paid ads, so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. However, as with most things, paid advertising becomes easier the more time you spend doing it, so focus on the end result, not the temporary struggle!

12. Professional insight

I run my own ads agency so I might be a bit biased here, but I think that having professional ad managers work on your accounts is a great idea. After all, we trust experts with so many other things, from managing our finances to cutting our hair, so why should it be any different when it comes to paid ads?

Simply put, if you are a business owner juggling a million different tasks, you’re probably not going to have the time to regularly perform all of these checks and optimizations. But if you have a dedicated ads team working on your account, it’s literally their job to do this. 

You don’t need to worry about remembering all of these different things because they will do it for you!

Final words on optimizing Google Ads

This has been a quick overview of a few things that you should be optimizing if you want to improve the return on investment of your Google Ads.

But in the end, it all really boils down to one thing: making sure that you are regularly checking on your ads and looking for new things to try and new improvements to make. Becoming stagnant is the easiest way to fall behind in your paid ads, so always be curious to explore new avenues of success.

As mentioned above, you don’t need to do this alone! Get in touch with my PPC ads agency by emailing max@snowballcreations.com, and allow us to do the heavy lifting to optimize your Google ads while you watch your ROI grow.