4 Tips to Improve the ROI of Your Paid Search Campaigns

Even for those who are in the tool all the time, executing a Google Ads campaign well – particularly in paid search – can be daunting. Like any ad platform, it takes to time to understand the nuances and functionality, as well as learn to implement best practices that can help you maximize your goals. We often see marketing specialists and managers who know how to do Google search ads campaigns but don’t quite get the why behind what they’re doing, or have a strategy or framework to follow.

The important thing is not to feel down about what you don’t know. But take the mindset that you’ll keep learning new things from various experts and then slowly add any new techniques to your repertoire. As part of our mission to help businesses and individuals excel at digital marketing, we hosted a Feb. 4th webinar on “4 Tips to Improve the ROI of Your Paid Search Campaigns in 2021,” which focused on some ways to improve the effectiveness of your current ad spend in Google and other platforms. Here are some of the 4 tips below as well as some basic concepts that are critical as you go about maximizing ROI on the platform.

Tip No. 1: Revisit Your Campaign and Ad Group Structure

When we conduct a paid search audit for clients, we often see issues that stem from a poor campaign and ad group structure. Like building a home, a good account structure lays the foundation for executing your ads well. The benefits of a good campaign and ad group structure are the following:

You can improve your impression share, certainly a key metric that we’ll discuss a little more later on.
You won’t compete against yourself for terms. Sometimes, we’ll see issues where different ad groups will compete on the same keywords, limiting reach and in essence, creating campaigns that compete against themselves!
You can improve your quality score with improved relevance. Having a tight campaign structure can mean your ads are more relevant for that particular landing page experience you’re setting up, improving your ad quality and expected click through rate. We’ll cover more about Quality Score below.

Here are some loose guidelines:

Start with the campaign and understanding the campaign’s goals
Develop ad groups by theme or product line within that campaign. A few guidelines:
7 to 10 ad groups per campaign
20 keyword max per ad group
2 to 3 ads per group

Is there a perfect structure? Not really. Much will depend on your industry and business. A few ways that others have successfully built campaign and ad group structures:

By alignment with the website. If you have a well-structured website, it makes sense to structure your Google paid search ads campaigns similarly, especially if you offer products and services and have separated them accordingly on the site.
By location. If you have a very location-specific business (sell events in different geographic locations) or you have multiple retail stores or outlets in different places, you can consider structuring your campaigns by location as well.

Tip No. 2: Adjust Your Keyword Match Types and Strategy

One of the areas we often suggest to clients is to start any search ad campaigns with a ‘broader” view. After all, even with extensive keyword research, it’s hard to know what exact searches your potential customers will use (or even misspellings) that will convert for your product or service. Hence, it helps to cast a wider net at the beginning. Broad match is often used by marketing specialists and managers to do just that, but it should be noted that broad match can often be “very broad” – so much so that you may not recognize the terms you’re showing up on. You can easily waste a lot of money quickly here if you’re not careful in applying negatives. The option instead would be to use “broad match modifier,” which will only show the ad to phrases marked with a + sign in front of it. So +instructional +design +course will only show when individuals have searched for all of the words with a plus in front (or close variations of each word). [Note: The match types were recommended before the Google update as of Feb. 4, 2021, which will eliminate broad match modifier. Going forward, broad match modifier will fold into phrase match.]

Other match types to consider:

Phrase match allows your ad to show only for searches that include the exact phrase, or close variations of that exact phrase, with additional words before or after.
Example: “adopt a kitten.” Searches that can match, include: adopt a kitten, adopt a kiten (misspelling), how to adopt a kitten.

Exact match allows your ad to show only for searches that use that exact phrase, or close variations of that exact phrase, and no other words. Example: “adopt a kitten.” Search that can match include: adopt a kitten, adopt a kiten (misspelling).

Negative match ensures that your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term. With any strategy we recommend using this one to make sure that you’re not showing up on irrelevant searches, where you could end up paying for mistaken clicks. One example is that you may not want to show up with the word “free” if you charge for products or services, hence you can type in: “-free”. Searches that won’t match: free kitten adoption, free kitten calendars, “who wants to free the kittens”

Other suggestions to try:

Keyword insertion

This technique enables you to create an ad that contains text more specific to what the searcher types. For example, let’s say you’re advertising sofas. You could use a keyword insertion code in your ad headline: Headline: Buy {KeyWord:sofas} – Google Ads will try to replace this code with one of your keywords in your ad group (“clearance sofas,” “sectional sofas” “Chesterfield sofas“ etc.), but when it can’t, it’ll use the word “Sofas.” Keyword insertion is great in that it can help improve ad relevance and click-thru rate because the ad will match what the user is searching for.

Tip No. 3: Target Audiences Better

Let’s say you’re a car dealer for Toyota in New York. You create your campaign and ad groups, and define the keywords and match types and one of those keywords is “Toyota.” So, you put together your ad and launch. It looks something like this.

From a best practice standpoint, you’ve executed everything relatively well. Great call to action in the headline, use of sitelink extensions. Maybe not much of a description but OK. The problem is you didn’t target the ad to just New York. That means you’re showing up as the first result for people searching Toyota from anywhere in the country. People are clicking on your ad (as a New York car dealer) but they certainly aren’t traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to buy a car. So, all those clicks become wasted money down the drain. That’s what happened in this particular case and it’s an example of how setting your targeting is key ahead of time to make sure you’re getting in front of the right audiences. In other words, just because someone searches for a particular phrase doesn’t necessarily qualify them to be shown one of your ads.

A few ways you can target audiences in Google search. It’s not quite as expansive as, say, Facebook, but there are still ways to do it well. In the setup, under Targeting and Audiences, you can choose to limit your ads by location. You can also select audiences by industry, based on the data Google has about the searcher themselves. Or you can create a custom audience in Audience Manager, either uploading a list of registered users or using the data from, say, the Google Ads tag or Google Analytics of those who have visited the website. In this way, you can retarget individuals who have come to your site with specific ads. The latter are often great prospects as they already have knowledge of your brand and tend to be lower in the purchase funnel. One key to retargeting is also layering – adding that same additional targeting criteria to users that have visited the website. You’ll want to make sure that you’re not retargeting individuals who aren’t in that audience to start with, which can happen if you get visitors via organic search or other means.

Tip No. 4: Monitor Key KPIs to Improve ROI

Like other digital marketing channels, paid search should never be a “set-it-and-forget-it” activity. You should continually monitor and adjust your performance based on how you’re progressing in core benchmarks. Here a few to watch:

Impression Share. A measure of the share of impressions you are currently getting on an ad, a low number can indicate a need to improve the ad structure or copy, adjust the campaign and ad group setup, or the even pumping up the budget. The average search impression share on ads is generally between 60% to 85%, so anything falling below that is a warning sign.
Quality Score. You should always monitor your quality score in Google as it determines how much you pay to place an ad and ultimately your ability to make your ad visible. A bit more detail: Each ad gets a Quality Score on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest. The higher the Quality Score, generally the less you need to bid to reach the first page. Hence, higher quality ads typically lead to lower costs and better ad positions. Three factors make up the quality score: 1. The expected click-thru rate; 2. The ad relevance (how closely the ad matches the users’ search intent, and; 3. The landing page experience.
Conversion Rate / Total Conversions. You can measure conversion rate in Google Ads by dividing the number of conversions the campaign received by the total clicks. If the conversion rate is low, a few things might be going on:
- Poor landing page experience.
- You’re optimizing for clicks rather than conversion. (Note: You can only optimize for conversions if you have at least 15 in the last 30 days.)
- Poor data. You’re not tracking goals accurately.

Bonus Tip: Sometimes, It’s Your Ad Headlines

We often see businesses that advertise in Google search produce headlines that simply repeat the title of a page, which often will replicate the organic results below it (if they have good SEO for the search term). The problem with that is that the ad does nothing to grab the attention of the searcher. A flat headline produces no click-throughs, after all. What can you do? You can draft headlines with:

Active calls to action. Maybe the searcher can “Build Their Own ____,” “Explore Options” or even “Buy ______ Now.”
A sense of urgency: “Limited-Time Only” “Now in Stock,” “Offer Expires ___” etc.
Expanding on a feature or service: “Free Shipping in the US,” “Award-Winning ____,” or “Best-Selling Model” etc.

What’s critical is to develop headlines that can stand out against the usual and get noticed. After all, the primary goal is to get clicks to the website. Then, it’s up to your website to convert.

Conclusion

We hope the above tips have been helpful as you structure your paid search campaigns. If you need help, you can always call us at Marketing Nice Guys. We’re here to help you excel in digital marketing. We wish you the best of luck in all your marketing endeavors.

Whether you’re an individual or a business, we can help with your paid search campaigns. Learn more about our full-service Marketing Consulting or Marketing Help Desk support options. We also provide corporate marketing training and marketing boot camps open to the public. Contact us anytime.