Digital Marketing & Ecommerce: 5 Google Ads Advertising Tips
Optimizing your Google ads can be a daunting process. Luckily for you, our team of e-commerce experts put together a short list of the top 5 ways you can start improving your ads today. Check out our list below, so you can start maximizing your performance on Google ads.
Match Your Landing Pages to Your Ads
Where you send traffic is one of the most vital decisions you can make as an advertiser. Always do your best to funnel traffic to the highest converting pages, as well as pages most relevant to the searches. If your campaign is focused on a specific product or collection, make sure your landing page highlights the appropriate product. When in doubt, directing the traffic to the home page is rarely a bad idea, especially if the home page has a high conversion rate. Make sure you are testing different landing pages all the time. You might find that certain collection pages may outperform the product page, and vice versa. Don’t forget to look at the data when you make these decisions. Google Analytics is a handy tool to look at conversion rates of individual pages, and can help you measure the impact of your landing pages.
Take Advantage of Ad Assets
Formerly known as ad extensions, ad assets are provided by Google and allow you an opportunity to highlight different features of your company. The list of all possible assets can be found here. The assets allow you additional flexibility in how you get your message in front of consumers, and should be used depending on the goal of your ad campaign. Are you trying to drive additional foot traffic to your brick and mortar store? Try out the location asset, so your ads can feature your business location and contact information. Do you have specific pages you want your ads to link to outside of the primary landing page, such as contact or about us? Sitelink assets allow you to show multiple links below your ad, allowing you to funnel more traffic to other pages. You can leverage multiple ad assets at once, giving the advertiser multiple different tools to get their message in front of potential customers. These can be set up on an individual campaign level, or across the entire account to ensure that there are assets used for every single ad.
Select the Optimal Bidding Strategies
Determining the right bid strategy is one of the most important optimization tools we have. The full list of bid strategies can be found here. When determining which bid strategy to use, it's important to first identify the purpose of the campaign. If your purpose is to drive traffic, then maybe max clicks would be the best option for you. For driving brand awareness, target impression share could be a good option, as well as target CPM. At Milked Media, we primarily focus on conversion-based campaigns, and there are few bid strategy options available to use.
The first is to maximize conversions. This strategy does exactly what it sounds like, it focuses on maximizing conversion quantity through the ads. Then there is maximize conversion value, which is a little more nuanced. Instead of just focusing on quantity of conversions, it focuses on the value of them as well, with the purpose of driving the most possible revenue it can through conversions. Within max conversion value, there is the option for target ROAS, allowing advertisers to set minimum ROAS requirements for the campaign. Over time, the ads should scale its spend accordingly to hit the required ROAS. When using target ROAS, there are two important things you want to keep in mind. First, is there enough historical conversion data already in the campaign? If the campaign is brand new, it may be best to start with max conversions or max conversions value and enable a target ROAS once the campaign has begun to generate data. The second is to ensure the ROAS target is reasonable. Just because you set a 10x ROAS, does not mean the campaign will be able to achieve it. If the ROAS goal is too high, the campaign will not be able to spend the full budget.
Use Negative Keywords
Have you ever seen your ads wasting clicks on irrelevant searches? No matter how specific you make your keyword list, your ads can still find themselves showing up for searches that won’t convert. This is where negative keywords come into play. Negative keywords allow you to block out specific search terms. Maybe you want to block out specific brand names, maybe specific product variations are something you don't want to rank for. Negative keywords allows you to focus your campaign even further, and helps you minimize your wasted clicks that are sure to turn straight into bounces. Negative keywords can be applied at the campaign and ad group level, as well as can be turned into negative keyword lists to apply to every campaign. If you have global keywords you want to avoid in every campaign, we recommend making a keyword list and applying it to each one. This way you can make changes to the individual list, and the new negative keywords can be added to every campaign at once.
Take Advantage of Audience Targeting Options
As important as it is to optimize your keywords, optimizing your audience segments can be equally important. Audience segments are made up of multiple different audience lists, and allows you to identify your ideal customer profile, combining remarketing lists, as well as Google affinity and in-market audiences. Google provides a variety of audiences for targeting already. For a full list of the Google affinity and in-market audiences, check out this article. These audiences can be pulled into any campaign for additional targeting with bid adjustments, or as audience signals in performance max campaigns. When setting up your audience targeting, make sure to leverage the data in your GA4 account. You may notice some audiences convert well that you had not previously been targeting. Use this data to make educated decisions on which Google audiences to focus on and build out your customer profile.
Of course, you don't want to solely rely on Google audiences. Remarketing lists are one of the strongest tools we have as an advertiser, and with Google’s built-in integrations, you can pull audiences from multiple sources. For example, you can integrate your email lists from Klaviyo, to ensure you are getting your ads back in front of your most engaged audiences. You can use GA4 to import past purchasers or shopping cart abandoners. If you have Shopify audiences, you can set up a direct integration to pull your Shopify customer list to help drive additional return customer revenue. When setting up a campaign, we always recommend a mix of both keyword and audience targeting for optimal performance.
There you have it, 5 short tips to start improving your Google ads performance. Of course, this is just scratching the surface. Truly driving the best results takes time and experience. Lucky for you, our team of digital marketing experts has all the experience you need to grow your e-commerce business further. To learn more about our paid search service, check out our paid search page. Interested in working with us? Fill out our inquiry form linked here. We look forward to helping you grow your online presence and drive additional revenue through the Google ads channel.