Google Ads Quick Health Check

Are you using Google Ads? Do you want to make sure you’re not wasting precious budget?

Here’s are the top things on my Google Ad health check. Make sure you’ve got these covered and you’ll be well on your way to a tip-top healthy ad campaign!

Negative Keywords

A negative keyword is a word or term that you don’t want your ads to show for.

For example, if you offered IT servicing in Hampshire, you might not want your adverts to run when someone types ‘IT servicing Leeds’. So you can add the word ‘Leeds’ to your negative keyword list. This has the benefit of removing low-quality clicks, but it also helps improve your click-through rate (CTR) since your advert will be more targeted.

Other common terms surround things like: free, cheap, low cost, how to, download, salary, job etc.

There are many ways you can come up with a list of negative keywords:

• Brainstorm: Start making a list of all the terms you don’t want to show for
• Analytics: Look at the ‘Search Queries’ report (Acquisition > Google Ads > Search Queries)- are there particular search terms that are giving you a high bounce rate? These might be terms that you want to avoid in future
• Google Ads: Look at the ‘Search Terms’ report, to see what searches have resulted in a click on your ad. There may be searches here that you know instantly are irrelevant

Landing Pages

You should make sure you’re sending searchers to the most relevant page possible. The best way to do this is to create targeted landing pages for each ad group/product/service.

Not only will this provide the searcher with what they’re looking for in terms of content, but you can also use this page to help improve conversions. Getting visitors to do what you want them to do with carefully crafted calls to action.

Testing

The Japanese have a philosophy called Kaizen. It stands for continuous improvement. This is something that should be applied to your Google Ads and other PPC campaigns. You must always work to improve your performance.

There’s so many things you should be testing:

• Landing pages
• Adverts
• Keywords
• Phrase/broad/exact match keywords
• Minimum bids
• The time of day you deliver your ads
• Device
• Demographics
• Location

Testing is a never ending process and will help improve your campaign continually.

Many people assume that they can set up their Google Ads account and just let it run without any proactive management. Yes you only pay for the clicks you get – but you need to make sure those clicks are high quality clicks. Don’t run the risk of wasting your money. Additionally, the better managed your campaigns, the less you pay for those clicks.

If you need help setting up or managing your Google Ads campaign, talk to me. I manage campaigns with budgets from £200 a month all the way up to £100,000+ a month and I love helping my clients get the results they want.