How Long Does It Take to Optimize Google Ads?

Why Advertise on Google Ads?

Google Ads enable companies to promote their products and services via targeted ads presented to potential customers. These, in turn, aid in increasing revenue by increasing brand awareness, or by focusing on specific niches of keywords to drive prospective buyers with high purchasing intent. This is one of the most important aspects of Digital Marketing for an entrepreneur.

Here is a step-by-step guide:

Setting Up Google Ads

Setting up Search Campaigns is fairly straightforward. Once you visit Google Ads, simply click Start Now and follow the guided campaign settings. Google provides helpful tips along the way to get you set up in a matter of minutes once you have your ad copy already created. For newbies, Google provides a detailed checklist outlining how to set up Google Ads. This covers everything from organizing accounts into campaigns and ad groups, setting budgets and bids, keyword selection, keyword match types, and connecting to Google Analytics.

If you are a nonprofit with a 501c3 status, you would want to register for a Google Ads for Nonprofits account to be eligible for a Google Grant that can cover $10,000 in monthly spending on standard in-search text advertising. Pay particular attention to all the restrictions when setting up your Google Ads account as a 501c3 nonprofit, as there are a number of restrictions you need to abide by to maintain the grant.

Reach out to an experienced marketing agency like Prime Marketing Experts for help in successfully managing your Google Grant, especially given that you need to deploy specialized strategies to optimally manage the account.

Why Optimize Your Google Ads Campaign?

In order for your ads to perform well, they must be optimized. Google Ads rates your ad campaigns and assigns each keyword a quality score. This is an estimate of how each keyword performs. Along with the score, a list of recommendations is also provided to assist with optimizing each campaign. This is a diagnostic tool meant to give you a sense of how well your ad quality compares to other advertisers. Google states that while both optimization score and quality score are meant to provide actionable feedback to help improve the effectiveness of campaigns, it is the optimization score that provides a more holistic view of a Google Ads account’s health. As such, the process of a Google Ads Campaign is an integral process that ensures higher conversion rates and increased value for money on ad spend.

Optimization

Thinking about optimization of the actual structure of your Google Ad account is very important. As seen below, your Google Ads Account can have several Google Ad Campaigns active at once. These are then broken down into ad groups comprising targeted ads for various keywords.

This approach adds structure to Google Ads accounts and makes managing the search campaign optimization easy. This also ensures ads are relevant and targeted to a campaign’s ideal audience, based on defined keywords, the right location, and time. Once your Google Ad campaign is optimally organized and activated, the real work of optimization begins.

This approach adds structure to Google AdWords accounts and makes managing campaign optimizations a whole lot easier. This also ensures ads are relevant and targeted to a campaign’s ideal audience, based on defined keywords, the right location, and time. Once your Google Ad campaign is optimally organized and activated the real work of optimization begins.

How to Optimize Google Ads

Optimization involves tweaking specific areas of your campaign in order to strategically and effectively redirect advertising spending across ads, thereby improving performance and achieving campaign goals. This is a trial and error process based on how the ad campaign is performing. It is best to utilize a guided checklist to ensure key areas are covered and optimized. The main areas to focus on for Google Ads optimization are ad targeting, ad copy, keyword selection, and the quality of your landing page content and design.

Optimizing Ad Targeting

While setting up initial Google Ads campaigns, businesses go through a process of selecting the ideal target keywords they wish to rank for, however, until the ads go live the best mix of keywords for their keyword lists for each ad cannot be determined. In addition to keywords, other targeting factors are also of great importance in optimizing advertising campaigns. These include campaign bidding and campaign targeting.

Keywords – The initial selection of keywords forms a base for keyword optimization of campaigns. Once ad campaigns go live the performance of keywords for each ad needs to be reviewed, revisited, and replanted, if necessary, in order to fully optimize. The keywords can be an Exact Match, Broad Match, Modified Broad Match, Phrase Match & Negative Match

You can find Valuable Keywords or Exact Keywords for your campaign by carefully analyzing your niche, Ideal Customer, biggest goal & marketing strategy

Most common mistakes in Campaign Performance can be attributed to Poor Keyword Selection leading to lower Clickthrough Rate & Conversion Volume

For optimizing keywords the following must be done:

Ensuring only relevant keywords are utilized by removing those that may be generating clicks but not converting, thus saving ad spend
Removing irrelevant negative keywords from the negative keywords list which may not have been generated in recent searches
Review quality scores and remove all keywords with a quality score of 3 or lower. This will ensure better positioning of ads and maintain quality scores of other keywords in ad groups. Once lower quality scores are removed, the remaining ones should naturally be edited and improved. The aim is to have them rank at least 7 or above.
Revising keywords to include new relevant ones which are converting or trending
Replanting high-performing keywords together in separate campaigns to improve overall quality scores and to obtain more accurate reporting from Google

There are multiple Keyword Research Tool available on various Advertising Platforms which can help you to come up with Smart Bidding Strategies

These Tools can help you with Keyword Expansion, Actual Keywords enabling your success in PPC Advertising, or the type of Advertising campaign chosen by you on various Advertising Channels. This saves your precious Advertising Dollars

Campaign Bidding Strategy – The main goal of optimizing the bidding strategy is to determine the keyword-level bids that will result in the most profitable conversions for each keyword. When optimizing a bidding strategy, agencies must ensure that the cost per conversion for each ad is profitable. Thus, effectively utilizing advertising budget across ad spending will optimize your campaigns. This can be easily done by utilizing Google Ads conversion tracking, which is a free tool for measuring results.

A manual bidding strategy should not be used unless you have a dedicated Google Ads specialist from Prime Marketing Experts. Bid Adjustment in manual bidding is difficult to track & optimize. You may lose the relevant traffic if Search Ads are not properly optimized on the Search Network

Bidding Strategy can be based on your Daily Budget, Campaign Type, total Marketing Budget & Target Cost. It also varies based on the Search Network & type of PPC Advertising Chosen

Campaign Targeting – Google Ads campaigns must be targeted based on geographic user locations, device (mobile vs desktop users), Type of Display Networks Chosen, and times of day for posting. We must clearly understand the Prospective Customers, and review the customer list before doing audience targeting. The Funnel Audience in your CRM could be a good Target Audience and can lead to Actual Conversion, thereby meeting your Cost per Conversion Goal.

All these factors need to be taken into consideration as they can significantly and positively affect campaign success once reviewed and strategically targeted.

Optimizing Ad Copy

In order to complement optimized ad targeting, ad copy must also be optimized. This can be done utilizing split testing or ad extension.

A/B Testing – One useful tactic for optimizing ad copy is utilizing A/B Testing to test how different versions of ads are performing. Selecting the one that works best gets the higher click-through rate and which variation leads to more conversions.

Ad Extensions – Ad copy can also be optimized utilizing ad extensions. Google Ads recommends that you boost your ads with at least 4 ad extensions. These include site links, callouts, and structured snippets as well as additional ones to support your business goals, such as app extensions, location extensions, promotion extensions, and review extensions.

Optimizing Your Landing Page

Once ad targeting and ad copy have been optimized, the next step is to ensure the actual landing page your ad redirects to on your website is optimized. This will convert website traffic into leads and sales. It is important to create a custom landing page and not simply redirect traffic to the homepage. The landing page content and indeed the page heading should speak specifically to providing the product or service displayed in the ad and not general content about the business In general, a good landing page has the following:

A Strong Headline
Focused, Optimized Content
Clearly Defined Unique Selling Proposition
Your Offer
Social Proof Such As Testimonials or Case Studies
Credibility Indicators such as Memberships with Industry-Relevant Organizations
Call to Action

Google Shopping Ads: An Essential Tool For Ecommerce Businesses

Online stores need to deploy Google Shopping Ads to appeal to customers in their niche. Potential customers often come to Google when they need something, but are not sure what is the most ideal store to buy from. They like the convenience of seeing an image and pricing right in the shopping ad, so they know what to expect. Their smart shopping habits include the process of comparing different results within Google Shopping Ads. Since people already expect what they are purchasing once they click, Google Shopping Ads have a high conversion rate.

Often, it takes 4-6 weeks for Google Shopping Ads to properly optimize, and they must be continually managed to adjust for individualized keywords and product performance.

How Long Does It Take to Optimize Google Ads?

Given all the variables to cover when optimizing a Google Ads campaign, the timeline for executing the optimization strategy can vary from business to business. Factors affecting the timeline include how well the initial campaign was structured as well as optimization of ad targeting, ad copy and the actual landing page on your website.

Optimization is not a one-off task but rather a process of testing and trial and error to see what is working and improving the performance of a particular ad campaign. Results can be noticed in as little as 3 months. However, the process cannot be rushed. For truly effective campaigns, optimization will take much longer.

Additionally, each time you optimize your Google Ads campaign, you will need to wait for enough data to determine how that change impacted the campaign. This happens every time changes are made and will thus lengthen the process further. Depending on the number and size of changes, this process can take about 1-2 weeks maximum.

As such, with effective and continuous monitoring and tweaking, real tangible results and outcomes of a well-executed optimized campaign would only be visible after 6 – 12 months.

Google Search partners extend the reach of Google Search ads and listings to hundreds of non-Google websites, as well as YouTube and other Google sites.

On search partners’ sites, your ads and listings can appear on search results pages, site directory pages, or other pages related to a person’s search terms

At Prime Marketing Experts we provide robust Google Ads services that produce high ROI for your company.

For more information on how we can help to optimize your Google Ads campaigns, contact us for a free, no-obligation 45-minute initial consultation session.