Checklist to Improve Google Ads Performance

We recommend you link your Google Ads account to Google Analytics. This allows more in-depth analysis of your performance. It provides you a fuller picture of how customers are interacting with your business. Ultimately, you get more opportunities for improving your campaigns.

2. Enable Re-targeting

When visitors land on your website but don’t convert, you can use cookies to re-advertise them when they visit other sites. This is a great way to re-engage with past visitors. Enabling remarketing normally means lower acquisition costs. Enable remarketing to increase performance.

3. Not All Match Types Used

Broad match (lowest bid), phrase match and exact match (highest bid)

Broad match modifier removed early 2021

Using all match types brings in more traffic and clicks which leads to more conversions. It allows your ads to get the broadest reach and collects more data on where the best Cost Per Acquisition occurs. It’s best to use all match types when you want to optimise quickly.

4. Conversion Tracking Enabled

Awesome. When you want to know the return on the investment of your campaigns, conversion tracking is extremely important. It allows you to collect vital performance data which, in turn, allows you to optimise even more effectively. Conversion tracking allows you to reduce waste spend and maximise performance.

The best way to make your ad copy as relevant as possible to the keyword is to have only one keyword in the ad group or a Single Keyword Ad Group (SKAG).    Google’s suggestion is to have up to 20 keywords in an ad group all related to one theme.  The problem with up to 20 keywords is how to make the ad copy perfectly relevant to all keywords.

“The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you’ll see higher Quality Scores.” and  “Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.” ~ source Google’s Quality Score Definition

Google needs visitors to click on ads, an ad with a high CPC bid but poor ad copy for the keyword is less likely to get clicked and will be given a lower quality score.
The quality score for ads should increase when the ad copy is focused on a single keyword because the expected click-through rate will be higher.

The next step is improving your landing page to convert that visitor from Adwords into revenue.  If your landing page converts at 1% and you are paying $1 per click for Adwords, then you need to spend $100 to get one sale.  If your landing page converts at 5% you only need to spend $20 to get one sale.

Implementing the right ad extensions for your business is an immediate and highly impactful way to improve CTR at no extra cost. They provide more information about your business and give your ads more real estate. You should be applying all relevant extensions to your account to increase your performance.

Needs testing but enabling Search Partners allows your ads to be shown outside of the Google search engine. This will increase the reach of your adverts. It can also help you achieve a lower average Cost Per Click and higher conversion rates.

Smart bidding helps save time and improve performance. It uses advanced machine learning trained on huge data sets. This enables accurate predictions about how your bid amounts affect conversions and conversion value. Smart Bidding is a great way to optimise your account with minimal effort.

Ad Groups that are empty won’t display. Ad Groups with only 1 advert will not allow you to optimise effectively. Every ad group should have at least 3 quality ads. This way, Google can optimise your performance and you can check your performance data to see which message worked best with your audience.

10. Improve Quality Score

Cost per click drastically increases as the quality score falls. For best performance, improve your quality scores by having keywords that are highly relevant to your adverts and landing pages.

11. Keywords Disapproved

Disapproved keywords are inactive and aren’t showing ads. It usually means there’s an issue with Google’s advertising policies. It could be prohibited content (e.g. dangerous products or services), prohibited practices (e.g. misleading ads) or other reasons. Optimise your account by fixing this issue.

12. Ads Disapproved

Disapproved ads won’t run. It normally means there’s an issue with Google’s advertising policies. It could be that the ad doesn’t follow Google’s Editorial policy, or that there are issues with the ad’s destination. If an ad is disapproved, identify which policy is affecting the ad and fix the issue to optimise.

13. Campaigns With Low Budgets

These campaigns are not showing to potential customers because the budget is too low. These campaigns are losing impression share because of the limited budget, which is affecting the number of clicks and conversions you could be achieving. Only campaigns where impression share could be increased are shown here.

14. Ad Groups With Too Many Keywords

Too many keywords in an Ad Group can hurt you in two critical ways. It can hit Click Through Rate and Quality Score. Combined, this can lead to a failing campaign. Ad Groups needs to be tightly focused on a specific theme for optimum performance. We recommend that Ad Groups never have more than 20 keywords.  See single keyword ad groups above also.