It’s important to know that your ideal optimization strategy will depend on the advertising goals you define for your campaigns. With specific goals in mind, you can perform strategic optimizations that are more likely to get you the results you want. In most cases, using a combination of many optimization techniques together — such as improving your ad as well as editing your keywords — is the best way to improve the overall performance of your account and increase your Quality Score.
Here are some key strategies depending on your primary advertising goal:
Improve Your ROI
Return on investment (ROI) is a measure of the profits you have made from your advertising, compared to how much you’ve spent on that advertising. To identify and optimize your ROI, you need to measure conversion data instead of clickthrough rate, traffic, or other measures. To optimize for ROI, aim for high Quality Scores which can reduce costs, encourage conversions with enticing ads and by using the right landing pages, and target customers who are likely to convert.
- Lead potential customers to the most relevant page on your site
- Add a call-to-action in your ads to highlight the action you want customers to take
- Include unique selling points to make your ad stand out
- Allocate your budget according to performance
- Group highly relevant keywords and ads together so that your ad text will match a user’s search
- Target the right region and language for your business
- Use Conversion Optimizer to get more conversions at a lower cost
Improve Your CTR
Clickthrough rate (CTR) improvement is really about making your ads more relevant to your potential customers. Optimization should focus on creating more relevant and compelling advertising to help drive more targeted traffic to your website. Filter out irrelevant searches by refining your keyword list and incorporating negative keywords where appropriate. In addition, your ad text should reflect a user’s search as closely as possible. For example, if you’re running on the keyword “Paris travel tours,” your ad text should also highlight travel tours in Paris.
- Use keywords in your ad title and text to make the ads more relevant
- Use negative keywords to eliminate unwanted impressions that won’t result in clicks
- Create a relevant keyword list to target when your ads will show
- Use keyword insertion to make your ad more relevant to a diverse audience
- Increase Your Clicks and Traffic
- If your aim is to draw as much relevant traffic to your site as possible, you may want to consider running on a broader range of keyword variations. Keep in mind, however, that running on very general keywords can negatively affect your Quality Score and increase your costs.
- Create keywords for unadvertised parts of your website
- Find new keyword variation ideas using the Keyword Tool
- Increase daily budgets (to allow more clicks to occur) and maximum CPC bids (to raise your ad position) and/or increase your Quality Scores
- Reach more customers and maximize traffic by targeting the Display Network
- Broaden your location targeting settings
Promote Brand Awareness
Branding campaigns are designed to increase traffic to your website and enable a customer to interact or learn about your company’s brand. If you want to promote your brand, you might decide to run a cost-per-impression (CPM) campaign in addition to a cost-per-click (CPC) campaign.
Supplement your text ads with image and video ads that are great for branding messages
Use Display Network placements to show your ad to people who are interested in what you sell
Choose a landing page that focuses on the interaction with your brand