Google rules the online advertising industry, claiming more than 75% of the U.S. search market shares and even drives paid search clicks of above 90% on mobile devices. This makes Google Ads an essential platform for companies across various industries looking to enhance their online presence.
Google Ads management is quite challenging for organizations that are not familiar with pay-per-click advertising. It needs dedication, skills, and time. With this article, you will learn Google Ads benefits and get a thorough understanding of essential management routines and mistakes businesses usually make when using Google Ads.
Google Ads Benefits
Some of the key reasons that make investments in Google Ads worth every penny:
Achieve Faster Results than the SEO Campaign
SEO is leveraged to improve content and website performance to make it organically more attractive to Google's search algorithm. It includes publishing well-written content, researching keywords, setting relevant backlinks, and ensuring that the website runs optimally. Even though SEO is an essential strategy to enhance website rankings and boost traffic, it needs enough time to offer positive results as multiple companies are competing to achieve the top spot via similar methods.
However, to achieve quick traffic to your website, utilize Google Ads. Google Ads allow you to bypass the time-consuming process of competing in organic rankings. Moreover, the webpage you are targeting will stand at the top of your target audiences’ search results when your campaign is launched. This does not mean that SEO is not relevant, but Google Ads generate faster results by making your website visible to an audience instantly.
Connect With the Right Audience
Google Ads help you customize your targeted audience by keywords, location, interest, language, and more. You even get to target people who have expressed interest in your services or product on the basis of their search history or visited pages on your website. Through this, your website is only visible to high-quality leads, and you don’t waste dollars advertising for the wrong crowd.
Monitor and Outstand the Ads of Your Competitors
Google Ads come as a transparent platform that allows you to track the activities of your competitors and how they bid for keywords. This offers you the opportunity to analyze the effectiveness of their strategies and implement yours accordingly. For instance, if competitors bid on the same keywords as yours, you can go for a higher CPC and try less competitive keyword variations, improve the quality of your advertisement content or target a higher specific user base. You can also switch to other bidding strategies like CPA or CPM bidding.
Maximize Return on Investment
Google Ads offer a significant return on investment for brands. You can minimize your target audience for one ad to those who are most likely to access your website to increase conversions. Furthermore, Google Ads analytics lets you break down campaign costs and determine whether your ads are effective or not. These insights are extremely valuable to organizations seeking to enhance their future decision-making and marketing strategies.
Increase Brand Awareness and Recognition
Google is the top platform where people search for services or products. This is why it is crucial to make your recognition on the most popular search engine in the world.
By promoting your brand website on Google Ads, you can boost the visibility of your brand to the relevant audience. When users come across the same ad multiple times, they are more likely to remember and recognize your brand. This recognition and exposure are essential to gain more conversions, leads, and paying customers.
Stay Connected With Customers
When your website receives visitors through a Google ad but fails to interact with them, your company might lose opportunities for conversions.
Google Ads let you lead all of those visitors by representing banner ads to them on other applications or websites. For instance, you get to create retargeting advertisements for customers who visited and stayed on a product page or a specific service but didn’t go with the purchase yet. These ads might include text, image, and video ads or even dynamic ads that keep following the individual through a specific website. By making the most of retargeting campaigns, you get to stay connected with customers, even when they’re not actively searching for your company.
Measure and Monitor Ad Campaign Performance
Google Ads offer in-depth analytics on your ad campaigns along with impressions, clicks, conversions, traffic generated, and more. Google Ads report also tracks where the leads are coming from, the keywords that triggered the ad, and the highly successful formats. Through this, you easily acknowledge the campaigns that are performing best, enhance them for even better results, and stop campaigns that do not offer the desired results.
Control Your Campaign Budget
By fine-tuning control over your campaign budget, you get to explore the amazing benefits of Google Ads. In the beginning, you target certain keywords and select a bidding strategy based on what’s most crucial for your business. Later, you can set a specific daily budget for every campaign to make sure not to overspend and maximize your reach. Furthermore, you can also pause your campaigns anytime if the costs are higher or if you are willing to modify your advertisement content.
Common Google Ads Mistakes
To better manage your ad campaign, you first need to understand what mistakes are generally made with Google Ads. By avoiding these mistakes and then following the optimization path discussed, you’ll be on your way to a highly successful Google Ads campaign.
Mistake #1: Not Grouping Keywords Correctly
Not using ad groups is one of the biggest mistakes people make. Instead of segmenting their ads into groups based on similar types of keywords, they lump all of their keywords into one ad group and show everyone the same ad.
But you should understand that the closer the ad copy matches the keyword, the more likely people are to click on the ad. The more you break up your ads and keywords into themes, the easier your campaigns will be to monitor and optimize.
Example: Samsung sells several different products like laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones. If they didn’t break up their products into different groups, then they wouldn’t be able to show specific ads based on what people are searching for. They would have to resort to an ad with a headline such as “Buy Samsung Products” instead of an ad that matches what people are searching for.
Instead, Samsung uses ad groups for each of their products so they can use headlines like “Samsung Google Nexus S 4G” or “Samsung Galaxy” when people search for those respective products.
Rule of Thumb: To use no more than 20 keywords per ad group. Sometimes, you can get away with using a few more, but exceeding a 20-keyword limit is a sign that your ad copy isn’t matching the keyword being searched as closely as it could.
Mistake #2: Not Using the Right Keyword Matches
The next biggest mistake people make is not using the right broad match, phrase match, or exact match keywords.
- A broad match keyword means that your ads will show if the keywords are used in the search, regardless of the order.
- Example: If you add “Nike running shoes,” your ad will show up for people who type “Nike running shoes,” “Nike free running shoes,” and “Where can I buy Nike shoes for running.”
- A phrase match keyword means the keyword phrase needs to show up in the search as a complete phrase in the order you enter it.
- Example: When you enter “Nike running shoes” as a phrase match keyword, then your ad will show up for terms like “Nike running shoes” and “Where can I buy Nike running shoes.”
- An exact match keyword works just like it sounds. The term being searched needs to match the keyword that you entered in Google Ads exactly.
- Example: If you have “Nike running shoes” as an exact match, it will show up only when someone searches for “Nike running shoes” and won’t show up even if someone searches for “Nike running shoes for sale.”
So why does all of this matter? It matters because the type of match you use will have a big impact on your ads. A broad match will deliver more impressions, but it will be more imprecise since it will show up for terms that aren’t a tight fit for your products or the ad.
On the flip side, phrase and exact matches often provide a higher conversion rate, but they can deliver significantly fewer impressions, which means you may not reach as many people as you need to reach.
The best scenario is to tweak your matches to find what works best for your business.
Rule of Thumb: A good approach is to start with exact matches and then expand to phrases and broad as needed. If you aren’t getting enough impressions and conversions with exact matches, then you can add the terms as a phrase match and eventually as a broad match.
Mistake #3: Not Using Negative Keywords
Another mistake people make is not using negative keywords. Google Ads allows you to use negative keywords as a way to exclude keywords that are not a good match for your product.
Example: If you own an e-retail store that sells designer men’s shoes but not athletic shoes, then you won’t want your ads to show up on searches for “men’s running shoes” but do want them to show up on searches for “men’s shoes.” Thus, you can add “running” as a negative keyword, and your ads won’t be shown for any searches that include the word “running.”
Negative keywords can be added at both the campaign and the ad group level. Thus, if a word should be excluded from only one particular ad group, then you can exclude it at the group level, but if you want it excluded from the entire campaign, then you can do that as well.
Rule of thumb: In order to find words that should be excluded, you need to dig into Google Analytics since it has more detailed information than Google Ads about specific keyword searches. Within Analytics, you can view the exact keyword phrases people are searching for and which ones aren’t converting well.
Mistake #4: Not Trusting Numbers More than Your Creativity
Falling in love with your ad copy can be a problem. You may write some copy and think, “I love this ad!” That’s fine unless the numbers tell you otherwise.
You should always be testing your copy. You can try two different headline variations, the same headlines but different body copy, or the same copy but a different call to action. Testing different variations will help you to know what works best.
Example: Sometimes, mentioning a benefit will increase click-throughs and/or conversions. Other times, a different headline will improve your results.
Rule of thumb: Always be testing. Once you have a winner for one test, turn off the loser and change the ad copy again. Always try to beat the winner until you’re happy with the results. You may be surprised that this kind of testing can eventually lead to doubling your conversion rates and halving your cost per acquisition.
Mistake #5: Not Bidding on Your Own Brand
A lot of people make the mistake of not bidding on their brand. They assume that since they already rank for their brand, they don’t need to advertise for it.
But another way to look at it is that if you aren’t advertising for your brand, other companies will. They’ll use your brand name for an ad group and target your visitors. Yes, you’ll rank first for the organic term, but your competitor may be advertising directly above that result.
Example: If Samsung was not bidding for its laptops, it gives a chance for its competitors like Apple or Dell to run an ad on its search showing its best products. This might lead to losing your customers.
Rule of thumb: In many cases, it makes sense to bid the highest for your brand since people who are searching for your company are the most likely to convert. You want to make sure you’re at the very top for your brand name, which means you can spend the most on branded terms.
Mistake #6: Not Knowing the Lifetime Value (LTV) of Customers
Have you ever calculated the LTV for your customers? If not, there’s no way to know how much you can spend on Google Ads per acquisition.
A lot of companies don’t know their LTV, so they don’t know what a good CPA (Cost-Per-Action) is. If customers stay with you for an average of six months and pay $30 per month, then your LTV is $180. In this scenario, you’ll be doing okay even if your Google CPA is $100. It all depends on what you’re selling and what the LTV is for your business.
Example: Let’s say your LTV is $12. This means that you’ll earn $12 on average over the lifetime of doing business with your customers. If you’re paying $8 per acquisition, then you’re ok because you’re making more per customer than you’re spending. But if your LTV is $6 and you’re spending $8 per acquisition, eventually, you’ll go out of business.
Rule of thumb: Calculate the LTV for your business, and then manage your campaigns accordingly.
Mistake #7: Not Testing the Optimal Ad Position
Without testing, there’s no way to know which ad position is the best for your business. Sometimes, being in one of the top two positions works great, but other times, positions 3-4 provide a better return.
If your goal is to improve branding, then it’s a good idea to be in one of the top two ad positions, but if your goal is to get the best results, sometimes it’s better to be in position 3-5.
Example: With the top two positions, people may click whether they’re seriously interested or not. But if your ad is in position 3-5 (or possibly lower), then it’s not the first thing people see. People have to look at the side of their screen, which usually is something they do only after they’re not able to find what they’re looking for. Thus, being on the side acts as a filter.
Rule of thumb: Test to find the optimal position by raising or lowering your bid on cost per click. Lower it and then see what happens. If Google suggests a $1 to $3 bid, start with $1 to see what the results are. If they’re good enough, you may not need to pay more per click.
Mistake #8: Not Knowing Who You’re Competing Against
Another mistake is not knowing which ads your competitors are using. You need to know who you’re competing against, what keywords they’re using, and what their landing pages look like.
Specifically, you want to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and see which ad you’re most likely to click on. Then, once you do click, pay attention to their landing pages and compare theirs with yours.
Example: The ads that Apple and Samsung run may be equally good, but the one who is able to make them stay on their landing pages benefits. So, create a checklist based on the things you find in your competitor's pages and see to it that you are doing much better than for your customers.
Rule of thumb: Do your research to know who your competitors are and build strategies accordingly.
Mistake #9: Expecting Too Much from Google Ads
A lot of people have a really small budget and expect to launch the next big business with that tiny budget. They want to get in front of a large audience but have only $100 to $200 to spend per month. That’s not going to get you very far.
If your budget is too small, you won’t have enough to test your ads until they start performing well. Rarely does anyone nail a campaign right off the bat. It takes time to run and optimize your campaign to improve your return.
A small budget also means you’re going to burn through your campaign and will have to wait until more money is available. That gets frustrating. You’ll feel like, “This doesn’t work for me. I’m going to try something else.”
Rule of thumb: Start with a large enough budget that allows you to drive a significant amount of traffic and gives you time to tweak and optimize your campaigns. Make sure you also stick with the campaigns long enough to give them time to gain traction and to give yourself time to figure out how Google Ads works and how you can get the highest return.
Mistake #10: Not Directing Visitors to the Appropriate Product or Category Page
The biggest mistake of all that people make with Google Ads is not directing customers to an appropriate product or category page. Instead, they direct everyone to their homepage.
Even if you have a pretty homepage, you don’t want to take people there directly, especially on e-commerce sites where you have category and product pages. It’s better to take people to a landing page or a product or category page where people will see a direct match to the ad they clicked.
Example: If you sell wedding-related items, create ad groups based on themes like “bridesmaid gifts” and “groomsmen gifts.” Then, take people to category pages for each of these items instead of your landing page, where they’ll have to click around to find the products they are interested in.
Rule of thumb: Make sure the page people land on matches the ad copy they clicked.
The rule of thumb gives you an idea of what can be done to optimize your campaigns using Google Ads. Now, here is what you should make: A Weekly Checklist in order to reap the best results of the recommendations made. avoid the common pitfalls most people get stuck in with Google Ads.
Steps for Google Ads Management
Google Ads is quite a complex tool and one that not everyone can understand. That leaves many people in the dark about arguably one of the most important aspects of online marketing. So this is what you can do to avoid the above-mentioned expensive mistakes!
Monthly Google Ads Management
You might believe that monitoring your Google Ads account on a weekly or daily basis might be enough to have well-optimized Google Ads. However, it is not so. It is crucial to perform a detailed Google Ads audit once every month to catch issues that went unnoticed during your short-term Google Ads optimization.
There are multiple tools to help you save money and time when performing this extensive Google Ads optimization analysis. For example, you can use a Google Ads audit tool to analyze the Google Ads account at each level and receive actionable insights to get the most out of optimizations from the audit dashboards directly.
In this broad Google Ads optimization process, you focus not only on bids and keyword performance but also on geographic and targeting performance. Moreover, you also focus on bid modifier evaluation, pausing or stopping underperforming campaigns, keywords, or ad groups, and creating new ones if needed.
Weekly Google Ads Management
Check Bids and Budget
Even though you can depend on Google Ads to manage your ad bids, a hands-on bid management approach offers your team useful advertising information and an opportunity to optimize your ad spending.
This part requires an investment of time, but experts recommend using it. This is the reason why Google Ads management services include strategies with management. On the basis of your ad campaigns and strategy, your team must dedicate sufficient time to strategic management.
You also need to be smart about your budgeting strategy, which includes the amount you are willing to spend on search campaigns, especially when running several ads at once. Set a weekly budget that works for your business objectives, and consider the fact that some days might be more successful than others.
Pause Poorly Performing Keywords
As an important element of your Google Ads management, you must work on refining your keywords and remove the ones that perform poorly. For the launch of your campaign, your team must collect data on keyword performance to analyze the ones performing well and the ones performing poorly. Through the collected data, you can analyze the keywords that are driving the highest clicks and the ones that do not drive any clicks. The keywords that are not performing well must be paused and replaced with the ones that have a better chance of performing.
Perform Keyword Research
Another major step that several advertisers avoid is performing detailed keyword research to monitor the ones performing well and to dig into negative keywords. Negative keywords are added to the negative keyword list of your campaign when they are not relevant enough for your business. Furthermore, avoid using the wrong keyword match as it will increase the difficulty of your advertisement in reaching and engaging with your target audience. Clear and detailed keyword research also helps you identify your potential customers, their interests and their needs.
Optimize Ad Text
Ad text optimization includes boosting the performance of the text pay-per-click advertisement by enhancing its click-through rate performance on search engines, both in terms of quality and value of response. Furthermore, optimizing ad text includes creating search-friendly content, offering uniqueness and value, and answering FAQs.
Improve Campaign Relevancy
To improve the relevance of your Google Ads campaign:
- Using keywords aligning with your business and matching the search query of the users
- Ensure that you do not use broad keywords, as it will result in your ad being displayed to irrelevant audiences.
- Create and test several ads at once to find the one that offers the best results.
- Understand your targeted audience to learn what they want.
- Retargeting campaigns often perform significantly better than regular display ad campaigns.
- Make sure that the content on your landing page is well-aligned with your ad.
- Create an uncluttered, meaningful, relevant and clear landing page and ad copy.
Complete PPC Reporting
You must complete PPC reporting as it provides you with an insight and overview of your advertising clicks, impressions, and conversions. In addition, it even includes conversion rate, cost per click, total ad spends, geolocation, and estimated ROI. With a complete customized PPC report, you can receive an in-depth breakdown of the impressions. For complete PPC reporting, you can use the Report Editor or Google Data Studio in your Google Ads account.
Daily Google Ads Management
There are certain crucial indicators to monitor in regard to Google Ads optimization on a regular basis.
Monitor Significant Fluctuations
If a click fluctuates by less than 15–20% in a day, it is nothing to worry about. However, if the keyword shifts from spending $5 in a day to $5000 and vice versa, you are having a problem. However, don't worry; you don’t need to check your Google Ads account continuously for this. You get to set alerts to receive email each time there is a piece of crucial information that you must be aware of.
Google Ads provide several useful features, such as helping you monitor the number of conversions dropping, the number of impressions or clicks falling, overall account spending moving upwards, and more. All these factors help you notice major issues and shifts in your Google ad campaigns.
Control Your Bidding Strategy
Multiple bidding strategies can be applied to your Google Ads optimization:
Automatic cost per click
Google automatically adjusts your words to receive the maximum possible clicks with the budget you set. This strategy is beneficial if you are willing to minimize your budget without losing any impressions. However, you might lose control over your budget. For instance, you will not be able to edit bids at a keyword level.
Manual cost per click
This helps you set bids at each level, so you achieve the maximum level of control. This is the reason that the bidding strategy is recommended to new advertisers.
Enhanced cost per click
It provides Google with the freedom to lower or raise your bids by around 30% when searches are likely to convert or vice versa. This bidding strategy is not recommended if you want control of your budget or if you don’t have a huge budget in place. It can be quite dangerous to spend money on Google Ads.
CPA bidding
This is a conversion optimizer, and it makes an effort to increase the objectives you have put forward as a conversion. This kind of Google Ads optimization for bids is highly effective for display campaigns.
CPM bidding
It lets you target bids that get accumulated after 1000 impressions. Through this, you do not get charged per click but impressions. You must be careful, as Google counts an impression even when your ads are presented below the fold where the user is not able to see them.
It is not an easy task to manage your Google Ads account. It is challenging as it needs constant attention from the business. That consistent management and attention will, however, result in amazing rewards, such as leads, sales, and revenue for your brand. Once your company recognizes the true value of Google Ads management, it can explore amazing benefits by utilizing it to the fullest. Moreover, in the Google Ads optimization process, you must not only aim toward keyword performance but also your targeting performance. Furthermore, it also focuses on pausing or stopping campaigns, adding or removing keywords or groups that are not performing well and creating better enhancements in your Google Ads.
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With ReportGarden, you get to combine valuable Google ad data along with visualization, providing an amazing alternative to the heavy data-loaded and dull report alternatives. Moreover, you also get Google AdWords dashboards, helping you present all the major KPIs at a glance. Whether you want to create campaign performance dashboards, keyword performance dashboards, or network performance dashboards, ReportGarden is here at your service with amazing custom-built templates.
FAQs
Q1. What are the Google Ads management challenges?
Some common challenges that come, along with google ads management are:
- Budget management issues
- Competition
- Overlooked campaign settings
- Overlooking audience targeting
- Deleted Google Ads account
- Deeper internal Google Ads analysis
- Quality score
- Incomplete keyword research
- Ignoring negative and broad keywords
Q2. How do I set marketing goals for Google Ads?
To set marketing goals for Google Ads:
- Create your custom goal
- Select the advertising objective
- Set a conversion goal
- Change a campaign goal
Q3. How many hours does it take to manage Google Ads?
For a larger campaign with several running ads across different platforms, it can require around 20 hours in a week or above to manage them.
