How Can I Better Track Results and Optimize My PPC Campaigns on Google Ads?

1. Quality Score
2. Negative Keywords
3. Keywords Bidding
4. Placements (for Google Display Network)
5. Audiences
6. Devices, location, time

 

1. Quality Score

According to Google, Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Quality Score is measured from 1 to 10. Until the Quality Score is assigned organically, Google itself sets it as 5. Here is how to add QS columns to your keyword report:

Look at the keys with a Quality Score of less than 5.

Higher Quality Score leads to lower prices and better ad positions. There are a few tips to increase it:

 

1. Check ad relevance:

Ads and Keys — how closely your keyword matches the message in your ads. 

Ads and landing page — how well the messaging on your landing page aligns with the ad that the visitor initially clicked on.

 

2. Split the keys into  separate groups:

If some of the keys in the group show a high ad match, and some do not.

If the keys are logically separated, allowing you to write more relevant ads.

 

3. Improve the quality of the landing page if needed. Google doesn’t just want to give the top result to the advertiser spending the most money without validating the content or page an ad is promoting.

2. Negative Keywords

Consistently add negative keywords to your campaign and your ad groups based on your Search Terms Report.

Go to keywords — Search queries. Select a date range, download the report to Excel.

Сopy search terms that do not fit and form a list of negative words, do not forget about the match modifiers. When in doubt about a search term, pay attention to the keyword that triggered the impression.

3. Keywords Bidding 

In order to optimize your campaigns, you can make changes to your bids as often as you like for the best results possible. Note: changing your bids does not increase the budget you have set for your campaign. 

If you want to improve your add performance, you may raise the bid for keywords so that they get to the first page: 

• filter the keys below the first-page bid 
• If they ever have given conversions or if the statistics are not enough — raise the bid to the first page 
• If there are identical keys in different matches — raise the rate only for keys in the exact match

To increase the rate, you should select all the necessary keys → “edit” → “Change max CPC bids” → “Raise bids to first page CPC”.

Lower the bid for those keywords for which there were a lot of clicks, but there were no conversions: 

• select all the keys in the campaign and sort them by spending 
• If there were no conversions, but there were expenses — decrease the rate

4. Placements (for Google Display Network)

Adwords has a large number of low-quality websites, some of them deliberately place Adsense units in such a way as to increase the number of random clicks on advertisements, and others are directly engaged in ad clicks (Google returns some of the money for such clicks, but not all). In addition, the Google Display Network has a lot of websites about games, entertainment, recipes, jokes, “do it yourself and do it yourself”, etc. Users clearly end up on such sites in the wrong mood (with the wrong intent). Easier: people came to have fun or kill time, and here is our advertisement, often in such a way that people click on it unintentionally. We will lose lots of money if we don’t exclude them:

Sort the table in several ways to filter out unnecessary placements: by cost, by clicks, and by placements.

• Sort by Cost to find placements with a high cost and no conversions or the conversion is too expensive.

If you find such placements, then check whether they converted in the past, since there may be a recession — a seasonal or just a human factor of consumption. To do this, go back to the Google Ads reports, set the period and choose the placement in the filter.

• Sort by Placements whether it contains android or starts with m. or contains games — if you do not want your ads to be shown in mobile apps, go to “Placements’ – “Exclusions” – “All Apps”.

• Sort by Clicks. If there are more than 50 clicks and no conversions — exclude the placement (if not targeted).

5. Audiences

First, some details of working with audiences: you can add audiences in one of two ways — using targeting or observation. Targeting narrows the reach of a campaign to a specific audience.

Observation allows you to collect audience data for running campaigns without narrowing your targeting to those audiences. This is where you should track it down: if some audiences are converting well, use adjustments to increase the bid for them or even create a separate campaign for them.  

On the other hand, if it’s a one-time purchase, then you can exclude the audience of users that made a purchase already.

Remember that many adjustments for one audience might increase the CPC for users from that audience. For example, if we set an adjustment for location, device type, and audience: this is called audience overlap.

6. Devices, Location, Time

All of the above are segments available for rate adjustments. The general principle of bid adjustments is simple: the higher your bid for the most productive place, time, or device in terms of sales, the higher your ad will rank in the SERP, which means the more conversion clicks you will get. Here is an example of a devise adjustment:

The screenshot shows that the Conversion Rate from mobile devices is more than twice higher. If you want to increase the number of orders, you should probably increase the rate for this segment.

Conclusion

I hope you found this article interesting and helpful.

If you’re having a hard time optimizing your PPC campaigns to generate quality bottom-of-the-funnel leads for SAAS, check out our article on PPC for SaaS and learn about successful strategies from our expert.  

You can optimize your Google Ad campaigns yourself or order our service.

If you have questions or want to share your experience on the topic, write in the comments of the article.