Six Ways Improve Your Google Ads Performance
Key Takeaways
- Test different messaging in your ad copy
- Split testing landing pages to find the best performing
- Pin brand or crucial messaging in ads
- Keyword insertion can lead to high CTRs
- Location insertion can show ads based on the user’s exact location
- Realtime countdowns in ads for sales and events
Within online advertising platform, Google Ads, the default standard type of ad is known as a search ad. Whilst there are other newer campaign types within Google Ads, such as Performance Max campaigns, different ad types may be more or less successful for different industries. If search ads tend to work better for your business, read on to discover our top tips and lesser-known hacks for improving the performance of your search ads even further.
- Trial Different Messaging in Ad Copy to improve ad strength
The first of our tips is a simple, but effective way of trialing different search ads to find out if there is a clear trend with one performing better than the other. Creating a second search ad and inputting different headings and descriptions, whilst in keeping with the general message of the website is a good way to see if different wording evokes a different reaction or more engagement from users.
All variations of ads should still include keywords within the ad text in order to ensure a good Ad Strength. If you do not experiment with ad wording, you may never know if a different version of your ad could boost visits to your site and even enquiries even further than your existing ad. Once you have enough data to analyse, you can then pause the lesser performing ad.
- Trial different landing pages to improve Quality Scores
Similarly to our first tip, as well as trialing different ad text, you can also duplicate an existing search ad and change the landing page to another page you think has a chance of performing well. This is especially important if the keyword Quality Score is low for Landing Page Experience.
The landing page which you choose should be relevant to the ad and contain information that your users are interested in. Once again, at a point when enough data has been recorded, you can compare performance in terms of conversions between both ads and review whether one ad has performed better than the other.
- Try pinning headlines/descriptions for key messages
Our third tip that can improve the performance of search ads, is pinning headlines and descriptions. This meaning that you instruct Google to show a specific headline or description first, before any other headings/descriptions.
To pin a headline, if you hover at the right end of a headline slot, a pin graphic should appear, you then click this and chose your pin position. Again, you may want to duplicate an existing search ad and adding the pinned headlines/descriptions to the new version in order to be able to compare performance.
When choosing specific headlines, you may want to choose a clear, descriptive one to pin in position 1 – for example, “Maths Tuition in Hampshire”. This will enable users to understand exactly what it is you offer before reading any other text.
This could be followed up by a call-to-action based headline such as “get in touch today” pinned in position 2 or 3. Same process, once you have enough data to analyse, you can review whether the ad with pinned headlines/descriptions performed well.
Pinning headlines can be useful for ensuring that branding or direct messages are always shown, but don’t ‘pin’ too much as this reduces the number of headlines for Google to test. This can decrease Ad Strength so use carefully!
- Use keyword insertion to improve CTRs
The keyword insertion option within a search ad allows you to have your ad automatically updated with the keyword that caused your ads to show. For example, if you are a tutoring business and a user types in the search “fractions maths tutor”, by using the keyword insertion, you can have Google automatically show this headline to match the search.
This can improve CTR’s as users will see exactly what they have searched for. This helps to make the ad relevant to them and on first impression, suitable for their needs. The text is highlighted in bold so users are drawn to your ad.
You can use the keyword insertion by inserting a brace (curly bracket) into a headline slot, which will bring up the keyword insertion option. You will need to input a default headline, but this will automatically change when shown to users.
- Use location insertion to engage local searchers
Location insertion works in a similar way to keyword insertion, but with the option to tailor a headline to automatically include whichever country or city name that a user is searching for, This is shown at within your headline.
Google uses the location targeting set up within your campaign to be able to use the names of relevant countries/cities. Again, you will need to input some default text – for example, if you were to input the default text “tutoring services”, then Google would automatically tailor that to include the locations featured in users’ searches – “London tutoring services” as an example. This can improve CTRs as the headline will reflect exactly what each user is looking for.
- Include a countdown heading for more sales
Our final tip for improving your search ad performance involves adding a countdown as a headline. This may not be possible for all businesses, but may be relevant for businesses promoting an event or limited-time sales/discounts for ecommerce.
You can create a countdown in the same way as above, inputting a brace (curly bracket) into a headline slot. You will then be prompted to input some details such as the start and end date of the countdown. Using a countdown can be enticing and good encouragement for users to click an ad and take immediate action.
How We Can Help Get The Most Business From Your Google Ads Account
We hope these tips have been useful for you and ultimately this should lead to reducing your Google Ads CPA. If you would like more advice, for an expert to review your Google Ads account or are interested in the PPC management packages we offer, please do not hesitate to get in touch with our team today.