The 9 Best Tips for Google Ads in 2020

Google processes 3.8 billion searches every day. With such a large audience, it is only natural that Google Ads, the advertising platform of Google, has become one of the standard tools among marketers today. With this article, we want to give you nine practical tips to get more out of your Google Ads campaigns and achieve the best results with your marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, you’re not the only one who got wind of it. Many people like to access the large data pools and algorithms of the internet giant from California. It’s not for nothing that Google Ads is the business line Google makes the most money with. 85 percent of Google’s revenue comes from Google Ads.

Since Google Ads is more competitive than ever, Cloudwards has written this practical guide on the best tips for Google ads for you. If you’re new to Google Ads, keep reading because we’re going to show you the best tips for Google Ads.

Tip 1: Respect the Quality Score

As we explained in our article on how to promote your business with Google Ads, Google uses the so-called quality score to determine the quality of your ad. Not only does the advertisement play a role, but also the landing page and the keywords you’re betting on. The quality score is relevant because, next to the amount you bid, it decides whether your ad will be shown.

That’s why the advertisement isn’t all that’s important, but also factors such as its relevance and, above all, the benefit for the customer. On top of that, you should think about your landing page. Ideally, you’d design it to be mobile-friendly, with good user experience and your desired conversion target placed in such a way that the conversion rate is high. Karooya has an interesting free tool that will help you analyze your quality score.

Don’t just optimize your ads, but also think about how suitable your landing page is. If you have questions about how to create great landing pages, have a look at our Instapage article.

Tip 2: Use Geotargeting

Google Ads lets you adjust your bids to certain locations. You should use the feature to optimize your bids and save costs.

After all, your goal should be to have a high click-through rate and conversion rate on your ads. On one hand, that’ll improve your quality score and Google will know you’re relevant. On the other hand, adjusting your bids for certain locations will save you money.

Here’s a short explanation of the click-through rate and conversion rate in case those terms are Greek to you.

The click-through rate is a value that determines how many people click (as a percentage) on your ads. It’s proportional to the total number of people who’ve seen your ad.

The conversion rate defines the ratio of people who achieve your conversion goal. A conversion goal can be a newsletter subscription, calendar entry, profile creation or a product or service purchase. Ultimately, the issue is whether the person on your website is performing the conversion, or transaction, you want.

If you want to polish up your conversion rate, check out our conversion rate optimization article.

As you know, you pay for clicks on Google, regardless of if they’re relevant. Conversely, if you improve your click-through rate and conversion rate, only the relevant people will click your ads, and that’s how you save money.

You avoid such unnecessary clicks by using geotargeting. With geotargeting, you can customize your bids for specific geographic areas and increase their relevance.

For example, if you sell ice machines, it’s only logical that you lower the bids in Canada and Alaska because it’s likely that people in those areas won’t need your product as much as people in Florida or California.

Always focus your bids on your customer’s needs to get the best results.

Tip 3: Get Professional Help

Another strategy may be to get help from people who are familiar with Google Ads and have been working in the field longer than you. Adzooma, for example, offers a managed service solution, as well as a software solution, Adzooma Pro, with which you can optimize your Google Ads campaigns.

Tip 4: Take Care of Negative Keywords

Google Ads lets you add negative keywords to your ad groups in addition to the normal ones. With negative keywords, you can exclude topics and tell Google what your ad is not about. The effect of using them is often underestimated. They’re a powerful method to break down your target group and eliminate unnecessary costs.

Negative keywords save money in two ways: reducing the number of unnecessary keywords and unnecessary clicks and increasing your advertisement’s quality score by making it more relevant. That means you can lower your bid and pay less per click on average with the same, or better, results.

To add negative keywords to your ad groups, type the keywords you want to exclude and write a minus in front of them. That’ll ensure that your ads on those keywords won’t go up for auction.

We’ve excluded Wikipedia as a keyword because it makes sense not to advertise to people who are looking for Wikipedia articles. Remember, people who search the internet for certain things always have a certain search intention. That’s what you should orient yourself to with your ads.

Tip 5: Work with Extensions

Extensions are, as the name says, extensions for your ads. Often underestimated, extensions can make a difference. The people who see your ads will decide in a fraction of a second whether they’ll click on them. If they have to make more than two or three clicks to get what they’re looking for, it’s likely they’ll kick off.

That’s where extensions come into play. They extend your advertising with useful functions to achieve better conversions and click-through rates. People are more willing to call you or make an appointment with you if they can do so with just one click.

The best thing is that Google Ads extensions come at no additional cost. They’re free of charge.

Google Ads offers you the following extension types for your advertisements, depending on the goal of your advertising campaign:

• Location extension: this extension is good if you’re doing local search engine optimization or are after local search results in general. It’s suitable for brick-and-mortar stores.
• Callout extension: with this extension, you add another call to action to your ad. It allows you to achieve higher conversions and click rates in general.
• Call extension: adds your phone number to your ad so people can call you. If your ads are displayed on mobile devices, there’ll be a phone icon that people can use to call you.
• Message extension: expands your advertising with a messaging function so people can write you messages directly from Google.
• Sitelink extension: with the Sitelink extension you can direct visitors to specific pages of your website.
• Price extension: shows your price for selected services or products in the Google ad.

We’ve only dealt with the most important extensions. There are more. If you’re looking for a nice overview of the extensions, have a look here.

Let it be said, though, that extensions aren’t always displayed with your ad. If you want to know when Google Ads switches the extensions on and off, take a look at the official Google documentation.

Tip 6: Grow Paid and Organic Traffic

In the world of online marketing, a fundamental distinction is made between organic and paid traffic. Google Ads is the latter. With paid traffic, you can start faster and reach more people in less time. That said, it costs you more money.

When you start with Google Ads, it’s important that you also think about long-term growth. Use the generated traffic in such a way that you work on your community from the beginning. Try to get as many email addresses, names and general information about your community as possible.  

That way, you can not only consolidate your community but also retarget and expand it with Facebook ads and other platforms.

Tip 7: Annoy Your Competition

If people are looking for the brand names of your competitors, you can simply bid on those keywords to appear in the search results.

We’ll show you what that looks like by using Shopify as an example. Shopify, as an e-commerce solution, competes with WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento. When we search for BigCommerce on Google, we’ll see the following advertising:

Here’s what we get with WooCommerce:

Shopify managed to get its brand out when people search for its competitors. It might be a controversial technique, but it works.

If you’re interested in Shopify, we recommend our beginner’s guide to Shopify. If you’ve used the technology and would like more in-depth advice, take a look at our advanced guide to Shopify.

Tip 8: Test, Test, Test

No matter how much expert knowledge you think you have, nothing works in online marketing without testing. Experienced marketers test everything that can be tested. In so-called A/B tests, the wildest combinations are tried to find what attracts the target group and what doesn’t.

In many cases, it’s even necessary to verify who your target group is.

Our advice to you is to test the hell out of your campaign. Don’t take anything for granted and question everything. Mix keywords, target groups, regions and change your messaging as often as possible until you find out which combination is the most promising.

Ultimately, what counts is the goal and the degree to which you achieved or missed it, not your personal feelings. By the way, that’s how you should budget, too.

Tip 9: Don’t Underestimate Mobile Search

An often underestimated thing in marketing is the role of mobile search. We’re experiencing a phenomenon: the rise of mobile search. The use of smartphones, and mobile search in general, is increasing from year to year. In 2018, 58 percent of website visitors used their smartphones to browse the website.

That said, what’s important here is that people search differently on mobile devices. For example, terms are abbreviated because people are in a hurry or different search terms are used when people use their phone’s voice search function.

You should also keep in mind that people on smartphones have much less patience and will jump off your website more quickly.

That’s why we recommend not only using other keywords but creating another Google Ads campaign for mobile. With that campaign, you can optimize descriptions, landing pages and many other things to fit in the mobile context.

Final Thoughts

As it so often does, the following rule applies to online marketing, too: there’s no silver bullet. That said, there’s no universal solution or one ultimate tip that’ll make your marketing problems go away.

The tips you’ve just read depend on your customers, products, services, market and many other parameters. After all, it’s up to you how you implement them.

The bottom line is that you have to test, try and make your own experiences with Google Ads if that’s what you want. If you’re looking for professional help, though, check out Adzooma.

What do you think of our Google Ads tips? Do you have your own best practices? Please let us know in the comments, and check out our list of the best social media analytics tools, too. Thank you for reading.