How to upgrade your Google Ads strategy

Whether you’re totally new to Google Ads or you’ve been using it for years, it’s always useful to refer to insights of paid media experts to ensure your Google Ads strategy is the absolute best it can be.

We asked our in-house Paid Ads Specialist Cara Bousfield for her advice on steps brands can take to drive more relevant traffic to their site with paid ads on Google. These are her 5 top tips to upgrade your Google Ads strategy, featuring insights from the podcast episode "5 ways to upgrade your Google Ads strategy".

1. Consider your target audience

One of the most important aspects of your Google Ads strategy is the audience you’re looking to target. This is something you should establish long before getting into the Google Ads platform, because it’s around this audience that you’ll build the entire campaign.

When it comes to your target audience, consider:

• Are you targeting a certain demographic?
• Are you targeting a group with a specific interest?
• Are you able to break your audience down to a specific income band?

The more specific you can be with this, the more likely you are to draw people to your site who are naturally further down the buying funnel.

Once you have this key element nailed down, you can enhance your Google Ads strategy by tailoring your ad - and the copy - to that audience. What sort of keywords will attract to your ideal customers? Will certain language appeal to them more? Get into the head of your target audience and produce your ads for them.

2. Revisit your ad copy

Speaking of ad copy, this is something that’s essential to get right if you’re to find any success with paid ads on Google.

Your ad copy needs to stand out and empower searchers to click with a powerful call to action (CTA). It’s your opportunity to sell your business, products or services in just a few words, which can be challenging.

To inspire your ads, explore what your competitors are doing and saying, and look at what has and hasn’t worked for your business in the past. There’s no magic formula for writing the perfect ad, so it will likely take some experimentation and testing.

And remember, include the keyword you’re targeting within the headlines of your ads to establish relevancy. This is a key step to upgrading your Google Ads strategy.

3. Group your keywords into relevant campaigns or ad-groups

A key metric Google uses to rate your ads is Quality Score. To get a good score, your ads need to be relevant to the keywords you’re bidding on.

For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “white chunky trainers”, and your ad copy includes the term “White chunky trainers”, you’re likely to get a much better Quality Score than if your copy says “Cool trainers”. Simple, right?

A higher Quality Score usually lowers your cost per conversion, as the people clicking on your ads know what they’re clicking on.

To keep your ads relevant, and to enhance your Google Ads strategy in general, group your keywords into clusters so you can write ad copy that includes them.

For example, if you’re selling trainers, you should create separate ad groups for men’s trainers, women’s trainers and even different coloured trainers, and tailor the ad copy to each group. This will keep every ad relevant and help you generate a high Quality Score, which is essential for any successful PPC campaign strategy.

4. Utilise ad extensions

A great way to upgrade your Google Ads strategy and really make your ads stand out is to embrace ad extensions, which are helpful little extras that allow you to bulk out your ads.

Ad extensions involve various different things including callouts, which give you space below your ad to shout about your company’s USPs. This is a great place to highlight things you can’t fit in the ad itself. 

There’s also sitelink extensions, which link to other pages or products on your website and dramatically increase the size of your ad, without costing you any more money.

For ecommerce brands, another useful extension is a price extension, which you can use to showcase your prices.

A key benefit of ad extensions is that they increase the size of your ads, granting you free ad real estate that helps you stand out from your competitors. It’s a brilliant way to upgrade your Google Ads strategy because ads that use ad extensions have been shown to increase click-through rates (CTRs).

5. Set up conversion tracking

Lastly, all the efforts you’ve made to upgrade your Google Ads strategy will be for nothing if you don’t have conversion tracking set up. This is because without it, you’re not going to know if your strategy is working at all.

Conversion tracking measures the success of your PPC campaigns because it shows you if users “convert” as a result of clicking on your ad. What that conversion is depends on your business and your PPC campaign strategy. For an ecommerce brand, it’s probably going to be a user making a purchase. For an agency, it might be a user making an enquiry.

If you’ve set up conversion tracking correctly, you’re able to see how many leads are coming through your ads, how much revenue your PPC campaigns are generating, and get insights into how your ads are performing. This is essential to enhancing your Google Ads strategy because it gives you full visibility and allows you to work out your ROI (return on investment).

This blog post features insights from "5 ways to upgrade your Google Ads strategy", an episode from our Setup for Lifetime Value podcast series featuring Paid Ads Specialist at Underwaterpistol Cara Bousfield. You can watch the full episode here.

A helping hand from the paid ad experts

Here at Underwaterpistol, we have over 21 years of experience supporting some of the world’s best-known ecommerce brands with stand-out Google Ad strategies.

With pinpoint targeting, compelling copy and powerful calls to action, we drive high quality traffic to stores, engaging with your potential customers in the right place and at the right time. Talk to us about how we can support your PPC strategy.