These are questions that all DIY first-time advertisers eventually start asking themselves. If you are running your Google Ads’ campaigns for some time now, you might be constantly trying to improve something and to optimise your ads, so that they are always better. But is there any real difference in the results? Or maybe, are you trying to solve a problem by implementing the wrong solution?
Let us share some ideas with you on where to look for potential improvements on your Google Ads, and what might they be.
If you are running your campaigns for a while, then you definitely have some historic data in your account that you can analyse. However, if you have just activated your campaign, you need to wait a little bit longer to see the results and to gain enough statistics to make an informed decision.
If you have several months of data, here are some ideas for you. You may want to open your account and select a time range for your analysis. We suggest that it should be one month minimum, but you may see some patterns even better if you analyse, for instance, a 3-month period. Now you need to compare the results from the last three months to the previous three months’ results. Alternatively, if you have more data, you may compare 3-month periods during this year with the same periods during the last year. This way, you may get a feeling on whether the results improving or not.
So, what numbers you should analyse and which improvements implement?
1. Analyse – Impression Share / Optimise – budget, bids, and your offer:
Analyse your Google Ads’ campaigns Impression Share or, in other words, the percentage of impressions that your ads received when compared to the total number of impressions they could get. If you see that your impression share is low, or gets lower and lower with time, you need to check and optimise first and foremost your budgets and bids, and then examine your competition. Maybe, you’ll need to invest more in the campaign; maybe you’ll need to change your bidding strategy. Or maybe, you need to check your Auction insights and see with which other companies are you competing with this campaign, see who the winner is and try to analyse what he’s offering. You might want to adjust your offer and ads to become more enticing for your clients and to try and “steal” some additional impressions and clicks from your competitors.
2. Analyse – CTR (click-through-rate) / Optimise – your ads:
CTR shows you the percentage of people who clicked on your ad, out of people who saw it. If this number is getting worse, than it is time to renew your ads. See if you can make your ad texts more appealing for your audience; try to address the exact problems your target might be experiencing, and immediately suggest a solution that you can provide. Analyse your ad extensions, as these are the perfect tool to make your ad stand out and display even more advantages or benefits that your audience gains if they choose to become your clients.
3. Analyse – Bounce Rate / Optimise – landing page:
Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who clicked your ad, landed on your website, and then left it without opening more pages or taking any other actions. If you notice that your bounce rate is high, you can, for sure, start by checking the search terms in your Google Ads account to see if the keywords you have are bringing you relevant traffic. But most likely, you’ve done this already, shortly after activating your campaign. So, if your bounce rate started to get worse just now, it’s quite possible that you do not need to search for a reason in your Google Ads account, but rather analyse your landing page. Is your offer clearly expressed on that page? Does it capture the users’ attention from the first moment? Does your page create a sense of credibility? Are all your competitive advantages displayed in an easy to understand way? If you think that your page is as good as it gets, than have a look at the pages of your direct competition. Maybe you are missing out on something. Or maybe, your offer is somewhat overpriced, and people close the website because they think they can easily get the same for less money elsewhere. The best way to keep on improving your landing page is through A/B testing. Put online two versions of the same page, gain statistics on which one works better, then apply the change permanently and start testing the next point.
4. Analyse – conversion rate / Optimise – landing page, and the offer itself:
If users do not bounce from your page, but still there are no leads coming in, you may want to analyse all the points you were looking into before because of the bounce rate, but in a more detailed way. If you are getting relevant traffic (people are interested enough to click on your ad) that is potentially interested in your product or service (they do not bounce from the page), than it’s either the page that “doesn’t sell”, or your offer isn’t good enough. See if you can get your page’s copy better and once again, analyse the offers of your competitors and analyse the needs your target audience may have. It’s not about what YOU want to SELL; it’s all about what YOUR CLIENTS want to BUY.
5. Analyse – sales / optimise – sales process:
Sometimes we see situations where traffic is coming to the page, leads are being received in good volume and at a good price, but there are close to no actual sales. At this moment, business owners tend to come to digital marketing professionals and ask them to “better optimise the Google Ads‘ campaigns”. But, if there is no problem with the incoming leads, there is virtually nothing that a digital marketer can do. To get more sales, you will need to move your analysis from the online to the actual world and ask yourself: are your sales people doing a good job? Maybe it’s time to introduce or change your scripts? Are your delivery conditions “comfortable” for the clients? Is the waiting time for “out of stock” options reasonable? And so on. You can come up with many more questions to analyse depending on your exact business.
You can perform this type of analysis once every quarter, or once every six months, and then optimise your digital performance based on your findings.
There is no limit on how deep you can go with your analysis, but if you start at least with these five points, you might already feel a big difference in the results.
