Managing Google Ads 2: Digital Boogaloo

Managing your Google AdWords is an absolutely critical piece of any successful digital campaign, that’s why we make it one of our key efforts. Need help getting more clicks now? Are your budgets getting blasted through? Understanding keyword match types is a great first step to managing a campaign, but there is so much more to learn and put to work!

Negative Keywords & Bid Strategies & Ad Copy, Oh My!

Knowing what keywords to target is important, knowing what not to target may be even more crucial! That’s where negative keywords come into play.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords allow you to specify search terms you do not want your campaigns showing for. It is an easy way to whittle away at a large bank of keywords and create more refined targeting. WBetter, and more precise targeting will serve your ads to interested users, thus stretching your budget further and increasing your overall ROI.Let's drop in an example! If you were selling an online copywriting course, you would want to add the word "Free" as a negative keyword to eliminate value/window shoppers.Just like keyword match types, there are a variety of negative keyword match types including broad, exact, and phrase match.

Negative Broad Match

Like the standard match type, negative broad match is the default for negative keywords. Selecting it means your ad won’t show at all if the search contains your negative keyword terms. This applies even if they are out of order. If the search only has some of the words in your negative keyword term, your ad may still show.

Negative Exact Match

This one hones it in a step further. For negative exact match keywords, your ad won't show if the search contains the exact keyword terms specified. And we mean exact, same order, and without any extra words. There can be additional words after or before the term and your ad will show.Let’s stick with the copywriting course example. Your exact negative keyword could be ‘free copywriting.’ These will show: best free copywriting course, free copywriting examples, free copyThis won’t: free copywriting

Negative Phrase Match

For negative phrase match keywords, your ad won't show if the search contains the exact keyword terms in the same order.  The search can include additional words, and additional characters to a word and the ad will show. Knowing which combinations to apply, judiciously, can help maximize the potential of the campaign.  For example, relying too much on broad match negative keywords can cause you to miss out on a lot of potential traffic that could benefit you. Using exclusively exact match will require a ton of work to keep your budget from being blown through on search terms with no value to you.

Ad Copy Relevance

Ad relevance is a measure by which Google judges the content of the ad using the keywords the ad group is targeting. There are three ranks:

1. Above Average
2. Average
3. Below Average

Very descriptive right?  If your ad is rated “average” or “above average” then there are no clear, major problems with the ad. If the ad gets a “below average” status that means a few possible things. One, your keyword might not be specific enough, or the ad group may cover too many seemingly different topics. If you keep your ad group zero’d in on the theme, then you can be sure the relevance will increase.Keeping an eye on the relevance status can also help feed you new ideas and strategies for your negative keyword plans.Paused ads will keep the same relevance status as when they were last active. Trying to tweak a paused ad for better relevancy won’t bear much fruit. Stick to improving active ad groups and campaigns.

Choosing The Right Bid Strategy

The Google Ads platform allows for several different bid strategies, each made for their own specific goals.The first thing you need to do is really consider what you want your campaign to do. Do you want to generate more impressions to get the brand out there? Are you looking for customers to click over to your site and complete an action? Knowing the goal of the campaign will help you find the right bid strategy for you.

Conversions

If your focus is purely on conversions, you'll want to closely monitor the conversion rate for each keyword and adjust the bids based against that metric. That way, through a Manual CPC Bid Strategy, you can have more flexibility with the Target Cost Per Action. Once you have a lot of data for each keyword, try using an automated bid strategy such as Target CPA (tCPA) or Maximize Conversions through a Smart Bidding Strategy. But be wary, using a Smart Bid Strategy too soon can give Google too much leeway to blow through your budget.

Impressions

If your goal is simply impressions, there’s a few different strategies that will net you results. CPM is a simple one: you pay based on the number of impressions you get on the Google Display Network (and YouTube). Another is Target Search Page Location. This automatically sets the bids to give you better odds that your ads will show up at the top of the page. The higher up on the page, the more impressions it will get.That’s just to name a couple. Google has plenty of bid strategies for impressions including vCPM, Target Outranking Share, etc.

Clicks

Want to get more traffic over to your site? Of course, you do! That means your main goal should be clicks. The best bid strategies to get you there are going to be Maximize Clicks and doing manual cpc bidding. Maximize Clicks is an automated bidding strategy and it’s dead simple. You set an average daily budget and Google will work to bring in as many clicks within that budget.It’s a lot to take in! Running Google Ads can be as involved or hands off as you like.t However, the only way you’re going to get truly great ROI is by rolling up your sleeves and diving in deep. Don’t have the bandwidth for that? Want experts to take care of it for you? Then you already know who to call – Helix House New Media Agency, for profitable PPC campaigns, stellar social, and SEO work to get your business the rankings it deserves!