Digital Marketing Insights

Knowing how to lower costs in any aspect of your ad campaign is always music to any business owner’s ears.

Learning how to make your Google Ads work to your advantage (and getting the highest possible ROI out of it) begins with knowing your Quality Score.

Google considers the following variables for determining what your Quality Score is:

• CTR – Click-through-rate
• Relevance of each keyword to its ad group
• Quality and relevance of the landing page
• Relevance of the ad text
• History of your Google Ads account performance

This article will discuss how improving CTRs, Quality Scores, positions, and impressions are ways that are worth seriously considering when you aim to reduce costs and profit more.

1.   SKAG

SKAGs or Single Keyword Ad Groups is what it is — the use of a single keyword in a specific ad group.

This may sound counterintuitive, as Google itself has recommended to use 10-20 keywords per ad group to help maximise ads:

 

So how does a single keyword help boost your ads, and in effect, lower CPC costs?

The simple answer is that by focusing on a relevant keyword, a specific ad is triggered. Your goal is to make sure that it is YOUR ad that comes up when a specific keyword is searched.

2.   SKAGs allow you to create relevant ad copies

Now that you’ve created single keyword ad groups, you can create ads that are not only specific but also highly relevant to words you want to target.

Another reason why SKAGs could make a difference is when keywords match words on your landing page. Google crawlers can check relevancy between keywords, ads, and your landing pages. More on this in a bit.

Let’s say there is a user who needs a debt collector. He goes on Google and searches for “debt collection agency” which, coincidentally are your keywords. Your ad pops up with the same language the searcher is using and because your landing page also has the same words, your keywords become much more relevant.

 

Simply put:

Higher relevancy = higher click-through rate = higher Quality Score = lower cost per click = lower cost per conversion.

3.   Use an Ad Copy Formula to improve CTR

The beauty of pay per click marketing is how quickly you can see results. By looking at how effective (or not) an ad campaign is, you have the chance to change strategies early on.

An ad copy formula lets you compare existing ad by split testing so you can improve CTR rates along the way.

Check this out:

 

Ad A is our existing ad. This is the ad that should be performing the best. Ad B has another headline but with the same description as Ad A, while Ad C has the same headline but with a different description as Ad A.

Run this experiment for as long as you can (preferably at least 1000 clicks) because the longer you let it run, the more data you have to analyse. The goal is to see if Ads B or C can outperform Ad A, and replace it accordingly. If Ad A still reigns supreme at the end of the test, create a new set of Ad B and Ad C and conduct your experiment again.

4.   Landing pages matter

Your Quality Score is also dependent on your landing page, and Google checks if it has any value attached to it. Google can score landing experience if it is below average, average or above average

 

According to Google, here are some tips to help improve landing page performance or experience:

• Offer relevant, useful and original content
  • If a user wants a particular item or service, be specific about it in your landing page
  • If you wish to offer options, generic or general terms work best

• Promote transparency and foster trustworthiness on your site
  • Share information about your business. Be open about you do
  • A concise explanation of the products or services you offer is much better than asking a user to fill out forms first
  • Don’t make it difficult for someone to find your contact information.

• Make mobile and computer navigation easy
  • Design your page in such a way that whatever information they need can be easily found

• Be fast—decrease your landing page loading time
  • Sometimes when a landing page loads at a slow rate or pace, it turns people off and they end up checking another website. Make sure that when someone clicks on your ad, your landing page loads seamlessly and quickly.

5.   Make use of negative keywords

Set yourself apart by including words you don’t want your ad to appear in. These are “negative keywords” and consistently updating the list can actually help the search engine optimise itself better over time.

It also helps narrow down relevant keywords, making your SKAGs all the more impactful to your ad campaign.

There are countless word combinations that you believe to be relevant to your business so trying to decide which keywords to use can be more of a conundrum than anything else.

Here’s how you can weed out irrelevant search terms from useful ones:

Let’s say you want +debt +collector to be your two relevant search terms. Results that may pop up are as follows:

-“Debt collector”

-“Small business debt collectors”

-“Debt collector jobs”

-“How to become a debt collector”

We can clearly see that certain terms aren’t applicable to your intended ad. “Debt collector jobs” doesn’t apply to your ad campaign, thus becoming a negative keyword. The next time you search for “debt collector”, any results relating to “debt collector jobs” would have been excluded already.

There are two benefits to focusing on negative keywords: you stop wasting your money on search terms that do nothing for your business, and your Quality Score improves over time because of keyword relevancy.

The Takeaway

Whittling down your keywords and making ad copies that are more streamlined to what your business offers will help you target a more specific audience or clientele, reducing ad spend and wasted clicks in the process.

PPC services such as those offered by PixelRush are designed specifically to help ad campaigns perform their best without breaking the bank. Partnering with a highly rated digital marketing agency will be an investment that is both beneficial and rewarding to you and your business.