Improving your
return on investment:
In general, you'll want
to focus on improving your conversion potential through attracting the right
customers to your business. Here are some basic strategies and specific tips
about how to optimize your keywords, ad text, bids and budget.
Basic ways to improve your ROI
If you find that a large
percentage of visitors have clicked your ad but haven't made a purchase or
performed an action you'd like them to take, the following steps may help you
increase your conversions and ROI:
·
Use a landing page that's most relevant to
your ad: When customers click your ad, they expect to see a webpage
highlighting the exact product, deal, or information described in your ad. If
they don't find what's promised as soon as they arrive, they're more likely to
leave your site without making a purchase or signing up for your service. Be
sure that any promotions and discounts mentioned in your ad text are visible on
your landing page.
·
Use highly relevant keywords and ad text: If
you use general keywords and ad text, a customer may arrive at your site
expecting to find something that you don't offer. Highly targeted keywords and
ad text help ensure that your ads show only on searches relevant to your
product or service.
·
Adjust your bids: The bottom
line for any keyword is how much value it generates compared to its cost. For
keywords that show a profit, increase the bid to increase exposure and generate
more traffic. For keywords that aren't profitable, decrease the bids to lower
your costs or even consider removing those keywords.
·
Add successful sites as placements: For
campaigns running on the Display Network, you can use the Placements tab to see
all of the web pages, apps, and videos where your ads appeared. If you find
that your ad performs particularly well on a given website, try adding that
website as a managed placement.
·
Use
negative keywords to eliminate unwanted clicks: You can use negative keywords to filter
out searches for different products or services, searches that aren't relevant
to your business, or people who aren't likely to make a purchase.
·
Remove
duplicate keywords: Google shows
only one ad per advertiser on a particular keyword, so there's no need to
include the same keywords in different ad groups or campaigns. Since the better
performing keyword will trigger your ad more often, remove the duplicate that
performs worse. Keep in mind that it's okay to include duplicate keywords for
campaigns targeting different geographic regions.
·
Optimize
low-performing keywords: It's
essential to regularly review your keywords to ensure that they're all
performing well and providing you with a good ROI. If a keyword is not directly
related to your business, website, and ad text, it'll trigger impressions and
clicks that are not likely to convert into actions you care about, like
purchases or signups. Here are some key measurements to look for to identify
whether a keyword is performing well or not:
·
Keyword
diagnosis: Performing a
keyword diagnosis will give you a detailed view of each keyword's Quality Score
along with tips for improvement. To diagnose your keywords, hover over the
speech bubble icon next to the status for any keyword in the
"Keywords" tab. You'll see a help bubble appear with information.
·
First
page bids: Check your
keywords' estimated first page bids, which is the approximate cost-per-click
(CPC) bid needed for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results
when a search query exactly matches your keyword. You can use this estimate,
which is based on the Quality Score and current advertiser competition for that
keyword, to get greater insight when planning your bidding strategy.
·
Understand
the buying cycle: To maximize your
ROI, try to understand what stage within the buying cycle a customer might be
in: the awareness stage, the research and comparison stage, or the buying
stage.
·
Use keywords to
separate the serious buyers from the online equivalent of window shoppers. For
example, customers searching with terms like "reviews" or "ratings"
are probably still researching the product and might be less likely to make a
purchase at that stage. By understanding the buying cycle for your specific
product or service, you can filter out such customers with negative keywords or
direct these customers to more research-friendly parts of your site.
·
Ad
text can also help
you reach customers in the right stage. The call-to-action should reflect the
action that you consider a conversion, whether that's a sign-up, a request for
more information, or an actual sale. Conversion-related
calls to action will set the right expectation for customers in
various stages of the buying cycle.
·
Enhance
your ad with extensions: Ad
extensions tend to improve the click through rate (CTR) of your ads. Depending
on the products or services that your business offers, you might consider using
different ad extensions. For example, sitelink extensions allow you to add
links to your website and help people find what they're looking for, call
extensions let people click a button to give you a phone call, and location
extensions help people nearby find your nearest storefront.
·
Experiment
with bids and budgets to see what works: Test different bid amounts and budgets and measure how
effective the change is, test bids for profitability and ROI, and test budgets
for ad exposure. We suggest adjusting amounts in small increments to allow your
keywords to accrue conversion statistics and performance data with the new
settings. Allow at least a few days between changes so you'll have enough
performance data to make an informed decision.
·
Allocate
your budget according to performance: An important aspect of budgeting is making sure you have
appropriate budgets for each campaign. For keywords that are profitable, you
probably want to show them all the time. To do this, the campaign's budget
needs to be sufficiently high so the campaign isn't limited by budget. If you'd
like certain keywords to receive maximum traffic, make sure they're in
campaigns whose daily spend isn't reaching or exceeding its daily budget
consistently. Try to prioritize your products or services and then match
budgets to each campaign based on priority. If your overall advertising budget
is limited, find budget from campaigns that have unused budget or that don't
convert well, then reallocate that budget to high performing campaigns that are
limited by budget.
·
Adjust
your keyword bids: With conversion
data, you'll better understand how profitable your keywords are with their
current bids and can identify which keywords could be more successful with
adjusted bids.
·
For keywords
that show a profit (such as having high conversion rate and low
costs), you might try increasing their maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids. While
costs may increase, your ad position could rise and provide more ad exposure,
potentially increasing your conversion rate and ROI. In other cases, it may
make sense to lower the bid for a keyword even if the keyword is profitable. By
lowering the bid, you'll lower the average amount paid, which may increase the
profit margin for that keyword.
·
For keywords
that aren't profitable (such as having a low conversion rate and high
costs), you might try decreasing their bids to lower your costs. A lower bid is
likely to decrease the keyword's average position, the number of impressions
and clicks it receives, and as a result, the cost it incurs. Not only can this
strategy improve your ROI on low-performing keywords, but in some cases, it can
also free up part of your budget so you can invest in more valuable keywords.
·
Use
ad scheduling to automatically change your bids throughout the day: Ad scheduling includes an advanced
setting which lets you adjust the pricing for your ads during certain time
periods. Use the bid adjustment feature of ad scheduling to automatically take
these actions:
·
Increase
your CPC bids by a certain
percentage on days or times of day that are most profitable for you. For
example, if you find that your ads get the best results before noon, you can
set your bids higher during that timeframe to try and get more impressions and
clicks.
·
Decrease
your CPC bids on days or times
of day when appearing in a high position doesn't result in profitable clicks.
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