10 Google Ads Tricks To Help You Scale Profitably

Google Ads is one of the best advertising platforms if you seek additional marketing success in 2020 and beyond. It is a powerful tool to market your business to a highly targeted online audience. It's safe to say that you are probably using Google Ads to generate quality traffic to your website. A great ad experience is beneficial to everyone: you as an advertiser, users, and Google too.

Google has based its platform on this idea. The best way to make this great experience happen and scale the profitability of your PPC campaign is by improving the quality of your ads. Herein is a comprehensive overview of 10 highly effective Google Ads hacks that can help you improve the ROI on your digital marketing campaign.

1. Make Use of Location and Product Extensions

One of the most overlooked and underutilized ways to scale Google ads are ad extensions. Ad extensions enable you to take up significant real estate on search engine result pages (SERPs) with larger, more complete, and more enticing ads. Ad extensions provide additional links to your website, product images, contact information, and other rich data.

This data can help you draw in users and revamp your click-through rates. Google Ads provides several different ad extensions for various use cases and for different business models. Knowing how to leverage these extensions will make your campaign much more profitable.

Location Extensions

Location extensions enable you to add location data regarding your business to your ad. This allows you to provide more relevant information for local search, including clickable phone numbers on mobile platforms. This is a very powerful option since Google Ads location targeting is more aggressive than you may think.

A sizable percentage of Google searches are after local information. This offers a large swath of high-quality searchers and getting this extra real estate in local search results can improve your click-through-rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR). Google uses both these metrics to determine the Quality Score (QS) of your ads.

Product Extensions

Product extensions enable you to link your Google Ads account to your Google Merchant account and have enhanced listings for your products on Google properties search results. Leveraging product extensions allows you to grab the attention of prospective customers (higher CTR) while showing them more information about your products. If you sell products that are related to the keywords you are targeting, optimizing product extensions will give you more real estate within SERPs.

As you can already tell, an often overlooked aspect of Google Ads like ad extensions has many nuances that can be daunting for in-house marketers. This means that if you are serious about scaling your Google ads, having a professional advertising agency handle your PPC accounts is the best way to go.

2. Optimize for Niche (Long-Tail) Keywords

You can categorize keywords into two broad groups: broad keywords and niche keywords. If you seek to scale your PPC campaign, you have to apply different bidding strategies to both categories. As an advertiser, you should focus on the niche keywords and not just the broad, popular terms everyone is using.

Competitive keywords are not just difficult to rank for in organic search. In PPC advertising, they can be tricky especially if you are new to Google Ads or are in a cut-throat industry like law or insurance. If you want good results on your Google Ads account, optimize your campaign and website for niche keywords.

Niche keywords are long-tail keywords. Niche keywords are more effective because of three reasons. They are more specific and superior at pre-qualifying user traffic.

Long-tail keywords also align more with the end of your purchasing funnel. This means that they will convert at a higher rate and consequently increase your QS and lower your CPC costs. Finally, since they are less competitive, they cost less on Google's per-click basis. By using long-tail keywords extensively, you can achieve a greater ROI from your PPC campaigns.

3. Supercharge Your Conversion with Remarketing

Remarketing allows you to display ads to customers and prospects that have visited your site and failed to take action. You can achieve this through Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSA). You can follow the steps below to set up your remarketing list for search ads:

• Log into your Google Ads dashboard and create a new "Search Network Only" campaign
• You can also choose an existing ad group and search campaign
• Click on the "Audiences" tab right next to the Keywords tab
• Click on the "+Remarketing" tab then the "Add targeting" dropdown menu
• Select "Remarketing" and click on the Select Categories dropdown menu
• Select Remarketing lists to find the "All Visitors" list and other rule-based lists you created for various visitor groups
• Add this remarketing list to your ad group

4. Leverage Sitelinks and Call Extensions

Google Ad sitelinks offer you extra links to pages beyond your ad's landing page. Sitelinks offer powerful benefits such as:

• Extra SERP real estate for your ads
• You can elaborate on and highlight certain features and benefits of your offerings( like related products or free shipping)
• Allow you to point to specific models of your offerings in response to generic queries

With sitelinks, you will be able to direct users to more pages within your site from a single ad, without paying a premium. Sitelinks will help you improve your CTR and subsequently your QS, allowing you to create a great experience for users. It is worth noting that sitelinks work on ads that already have a high CTR.

Call extensions allow your customers to call your business phone number from your ad directly. They also allow you to measure the calls your ads generate (an engagement indicator). Call extensions are very important as they can increase your CTR and your ability to turn searches into customers.

If you are running a local campaign or you are likely to receive mobile impressions, call extensions are a handy tool. If you handle a large amount of call volume, having PPC tracking in place via call metrics (or a third party vendor) is a great idea.

5. Focus on Commercial Intent Keywords

One Google ad can have a 70 % CTR and another a 0.5 % CTR. What do you suppose is the main discriminating factor between those two ads? It most definitely is "commercial intent".

Basically, if users are looking for things to buy, then they are far more likely to click on ads. Good examples of commercial intent keywords are branded keywords and keywords regarding actual products or services. Such keywords tend to have much higher CTRs than information keyword searches.

As such, one way to scale your Google ads is to bid on your own branded keywords. Branded keywords are a low hanging fruit for your PPC campaign. Google usually discounts the CPC on branded terms due to high QS and brand dominance.

Therefore, you should use your Google ads to promote various assets. Create different conversion flows via specific landing pages for each funnel. You can then set up A/B tests for comparing conversion flows and determining your best performers.

6. Implement Assist Clicks and Conversions

Google Ads allows you to add custom columns to your campaign statistics. Some of these metrics include bid strategy type, impression share, and shares. Often underestimated Search Funnel tools include assist click and assisted conversions.

This standard metric shows up in all Google Ad accounts. Assist clicks are the clicks that occur when users click multiple search ads prior to a conversion. A click that occurs before the final click preceding a conversion is an assist click.

When you understand and implement assist clicks, you are able to prevent optimization mistakes. For instance, let's say the keyword "grey jackets" gets you profitable conversions but the keyword "grey blazers" does not. You may see in your account that grey blazers get lots of clicks but rarely converts. You may decide to pause the keyword grey blazers and allocate more budgets to grey jackets.

After taking this action, you notice that your conversion rate for grey jackets decreases. What has happened is that the keyword grey blazers that you paused was the beginning of the search process that is related to later searches for grey jackets that convert. As you can see assist clicks can be vital for keyword optimization and understanding your Google Ad search funnel report.

7. Device Targeting

A good PPC campaign practice is setting up your campaigns in a way that you can analyze, track, and optimize to make better decisions. One seemingly minor but important tactic to leverage in Google Ads is device targeting. Device targeting will help you realize a dramatic impact on your cost per acquisition (CPA). You can target image and text ads to desktops or laptops as well as smartphones and tablets.

If you seek to understand the performance of your campaign, you must understand how users access Google and their behaviors across different devices and platforms. As such, you must separate your Google Ads campaigns by type. Doing this will allow you to highlight how one campaign can perform differently for different devices (access platforms).

For instance, if your target mobile devices or tablets, Google Ads has the option for fine-tuning your targeting through Google's Enhanced Campaigns. If most of your customers locate you through mobile devices, this fine-tuning will help you achieve higher impressions and conversion rates. When you set up your campaigns, duplicate them, and optimize for different devices.

If you have a mobile site, create a separate ad campaign to target your mobile device users. The same applies if you are targeting the PC demographic. Not only does it help you keep your data integrity, it makes reviews easier and allows you to dedicate specific budgets for each target audience.

8. Separate Your Search and Content Campaigns

When you are setting up a new campaign, Google leaves the content network pre-selected. In case you leave this option selected, you will be met with a nasty surprise. Google applies what you may think is your Search bid to the Adsense content placements across the network.

The end result of this is a higher advertising cost that will deplete your PPC budget a lot faster than you'd like. This may seem like a minor thing, but you will be surprised by how many advertisers fail to separate their search and content campaigns. Google Ads and Adsense content ads are different domains.

As such, you must create separate campaigns for both your search and content campaigns. To do this, when you are creating your Google Ads campaign, ensure that you deselect the "content network" in the "Campaign Settings" section of the new campaign. Doing this will help you track meaningful statistics for the performance of your PPC campaign. It also helps eliminate overpaying for content clicks.

9. Look Out for Google Ads Optimization Opportunities

One great method for raising your CTRs is always being on the lookout for jackpot opportunities in Google Ads. Mostly, this opportunity presents itself when nearly all the paid search ads for a search keyword are similar or nearly similar. When you encounter this situation, you have a valuable optimization opportunity.

Usually, these scenarios arise because of a lack of creativity by SEM managers or Dynamic Keyword Insertion usage. This is a great opportunity for you to do some old-fashioned marketing. Optimize your ad text such that you differentiate your products or services from the pool of similar ad listings.

Analyze what the competition is offering and determine how you can outsell them. Create a unique selling proposition using a similar search query in a way that you will stand out and attract all the clicks.

10. Include Special Characters In Your Ads

When you are advertising online, one of the most important things is making your ad stand out from the crowd. There is a higher chance that your Google ad will attract interest and get clicks if it doesn't appear like everyone else's. One simple but effective way to make your ads stand out is to include special characters.

Our eyes tend to focus naturally on things that stand out. For instance, you can incorporate your twitter follow tag such as @example to make your ad stand out more. You can also include a Copyright symbol or Trademark to increase your CTRs significantly.

All in all, Google Ads is largely driven by the Quality Score algorithm which will determine your ad position, CPC, and several other factors. In order to scale your profitability on this advertising platform, you must understand how Quality Score works and how to optimize your campaigns based on the factors that affect this score. Google Ads, like other advertising channels, is not just a coin-operated system.

Your ability to smartly manage your PPC campaign had a great impact on your ROI. We know that you don't want to waste your advertising budget on paid search campaigns that yield no results. As such, it is always advisable to enlist the services of a reputable advertising agency with the right tools, expertise, and experience to handle the often complex nuances of paid search.