Top Google Ads performers are making far beyond the average 2-1 return on investment.
And they aren’t doing it by some fancy growth hacking methodology that some guru on Twitter is spouting.
They do it through advanced Google Ads Tactics that take time and effort to establish and capitalize from.
Truth is: there is no easy, get rich quick hack on Google Ads. No flipping a switch to generate a million bucks overnight.
If you are looking for an easy hack that takes seconds to do, this isn’t the post for you. If that post does exist, don’t even bother wasting your time reading it.
If you’re willing to put in extra work, you can milk Google Ads to the last drop.
And this post will help you do it.
It’s a fact: the average Google Ads advertisers can expect to net two dollars for every one dollar spent.
While that’s a pretty great return for the standard advertisers, it’s nothing special. In fact, that’s by definition, average.
It surely won’t win you awards or a promotion or unprecedented company growth.
But if you want more than average you’re in the right place, because we want to give you more!
Here are three advanced Google Ads tactics to boost performance and drive bigger returns on investment.
1. Write More and Better Ads More Often (and Test Them Heavily)
Inherently, this tip seems like a no-brainer, right? More more more!
But it’s not.
According to 2018 data from ClickZ, the vast majority of advertisers on Google Ads are using just a single ad per ad group.
Many are using two or three ads, but most aren’t.
Writing ads for your campaigns and ad groups on Google Ads is one of the most tedious, boring, annoying steps.
You have a limited character set and some ad extensions.
How the heck are you supposed to write six or more variations of the same value proposition? And beyond that, make them different enough to test which is actually better and drives more conversion value?
Yeah, it’s brutal.
It’s why the majority of people are firing up one ad and calling it quits.
But one ad isn’t optimal. Nor is three or four or five.
Even if you are writing six ads per ad group, how often are you checking data, tweaking ads, turning ads on and off, and writing new ones?
Setting and forgetting is possible on Google Ads, but for ad writing, it ain’t optimal.
So, what do you do?
On Google Ads, the default setting for ad rotation will usually be to optimize ads for the best performance.
What this means is:
Google will rotate all of the ads in your ad groups and start to give more impression share to better performing ads.
This is what you want.
The key is writing enough ads to keep this fresh, improving, and accurate over time.
Rotating ads indefinitely can work for a short period of time, but that requires some serious monitoring.
You don’t want terrible ads with 1% CTRs hogging up the impressions.
Make sure that your ad rotation is set to optimize best performing ads and then you can begin to write new ones.
Here are a few key takeaways and rules of thumb that you should follow for best performance.
Takeaway 1:
Make these ads unique by tailoring ad extensions, switching calls to action/offers.
Struggling to write this many unique ads this often? You aren’t alone.
One key tip I’ve used is taking advantage of grammar tools that can distinguish stylistically based on ad goals:
You know, writing ads that hit multiple ends of the spectrum from casual to aggressive to fearful and intense.
Using goals on a grammar tool, you can set style, audience, intent, and emotion to craft hundreds of different ad types!
Pretty cool, huh?
Select different combinations of these features and start writing.
Takeaway 2:
Depending on your traffic levels and budget, write new ads often.
As a general rule of thumb, the more you spend and the more traffic you get, the sooner you will need to write new ads to keep them fresh and testing. For example, if you only generate 500 impressions a month, you won’t need to write new ads for a while. If you generate 10,000 impressions a month, you will need to write ads often. Start by writing new ads for every 1,000 impressions you get on that ad.
Takeaway 3:
If CTR on a given ad is less than 5%, and conversion rates aren’t impressive, scrap the ad in place for a new one.
If CTR is low yet conversions are sky high, don’t pause the ad. Only pause ads with a bad CTR and poor conversion rates.
A simple way to streamline these four key steps / takeaways is to continually monitor your progress in a given ad group.
Start to analyze your metrics at the end of every work week. Focus on metrics like click-through rates and conversion rates, as well as total revenue per ad:
If you see high CTRs and solid cost per conversion metrics, keep the ad running!
2. Creating Dedicated Landing Pages For Every Single Ad Group
Quality scores are one of the most important factors for success in Google Ads.
They aren’t the end-all-be-all of metrics on Google Ads, but they say a lot about your potential performance.
That being said, even good quality scores can’t save you from bad ad writing.
They go hand-in-hand.
Quality scores are a function of three distinct features:
Each of these three diverse factors plays a huge role in your quality score and ad rank.
And quality scores control your ability to show up in top positions for less money.
The best advertisers on Google aren’t paying sticker prices for clicks. They are paying much much less yet dominating the SERPs with top-ranking ads.
How?
Better quality scores. More specifically, nailing the landing page component.
It’s not hard to establish SKAGs, otherwise known as single keyword ad groups.
Seriously, if you don’t have SKAGs setup, do it.
SKAGs nail both expected CTR and ad relevance in one go.
The last component is creating a landing page experience that matches.
Back when my agency used to do PPC management on Google Ads, we used this strategy with every client.
And it took them from a joe-schmo return on investment flop to “get rich quick” levels. Fast.
I’m talking conversion rate increases of 200%+ and decreasing conversion costs by nearly 70%.
Here is an example landing page we used:
Matching the exact keyword query in a given ad group, we directly used that keyword on the landing page header.
“Disability insurance quotes for attorneys”
Why? Message match.
Instead of a generic landing page about disability insurance, we tailored the experience to each segment of insurance from attorneys to dentists and any profession served in just three easy steps:
This last step can literally make or break your success. CTA intent is game-changing.
Using SKAGs, this process becomes straightforward:
If you aren’t creating dedicated landing pages for each SKAG or are familiar with dynamic insertion, you can use DKI to get the job done too.
For example, DKI essentially allows you to have a single landing page where the keywords can be customized based on search queries.
Landbot used this strategy and generated a 100% increase in conversionswith a single campaign on Google Ads.
How?
First, you create a search network ad and insert the DKI {keyword} string:
Then on your site, the keyword will adjust based on what exact search is conducted by the user:
This is a quicker method than building landing pages for each SKAG, but can get complicated when scaling and traversing multiple verticals.
Does it take a crap-ton of time to do?
If you have multiple campaigns with a dozen SKAGs per campaign, you bet. If you have just a few SKAGs to do, you can knock it out in a few hours with the right tools.
Are 200% increases in conversion rates worth the extra time?
Duh.
3. Create Audiences From Social and Loop Them Back in Google Ads
Standard Google Ads audience targeting is fine and dandy.
Demographics are cool.
But again, you aren’t (hopefully) here for beginner information.
These are advanced tactics, and there is nothing less advanced then firing up a remarketing campaign for “all website visitors.”
Does it work? Sure.
Is it optimal? Hah. I crack myself up sometimes.
The best advertisers on Google are using audiences that combine multiple platforms like organic and paid social.
Why? They know the power ofFacebook to drive purchasing behaviour:
Facebook accounts for more than half of consumer buying online. Beyond that, it’s also stellar for lead generation.
According to Venngage’s State of Lead Generation 2018 report, social media is a top dog for generating leads with high conversion rates.
So, why not combine such a powerful lead generation tool with Google Ads for maximum impacts?
Because most don’t know how to do it properly.
Typical audience measures on Google Ads don’t show any ways to connect social to PPC.
Which is why I am going to show you how to do it here.
Whether you want to run organic social posts on Facebook and target those interested users or run ads on Facebook and loop them back into Google Ads, the options are endless.
One of my favourite ways to run these multi-channel ads is by using RLSAs + Facebook Ads + UTM Codes.
This three-pronged approach works by:
Taking an active, engaged Facebook Ad audience and targeting them on Google searches.
If you aren’t familiar with RLSAs (get familiar here), it’s essentially remarketing but on the search network, not the display network.
To do this with Facebook Ad audiences, you’ll need UTM tags.
UTM tags will help you distinguish traffic and create audiences on Google Ads:
By tagging key source and medium features, you can easily recognize where traffic came from.
And for remarketing via URLs, you need it to ensure you aren’t targeting just any page visit.
Using Google’s UTM Builder, create a new UTM code for the landing page that you will drive traffic to via a Facebook Ad or organic Facebook post.
Under “Share the generated campaign URL,” copy your new URL and use it as your destination URL for Facebook Ads or posts.
Once traffic has started to accumulate, you can head to Google Analytics and create a new audience.
To do this, head to your admin section and choose the audience section:
Next, create a new audience based on site visitors to specific sections:
This is where you can input the UTM code link that you used for that given Facebook Ad or organic post URL:
This will ensure that: only people clicking on that exact ad or organic post you published will be targeted.
This is highly specific for a reason.
Don’t create an audience just based on source traffic from Facebook in general.
Base it on specific campaigns you run on Facebook that you can tie back to organic Google searches.
For instance, if you created a UTM code URL for an organic post on SEO Tools, now you can run RLSAs to this exact engaged audience targeting an “SEO Tools” keyword on Google searches.
Cool right?
Now connect this audience directly to Google Ads:
Now when you go to run a RLSA ad on Google, your audience will be available to select.
Enjoy running multi-channel ads to the same audience for huge conversions.
Google Ads is a wonderful place to bring in extra business and sales.
Most advertisers will do pretty well on the platform thanks to powerful features and automation.
But doing pretty well isn’t all the fun.
What’s more fun? Tripling, quadrupling, or quintupling your investment.
How do you do that?
By implementing tactics and putting in work that others are not.
Here’s a quick recap:
Want better Google Ads performance? Put in the work that your competition is too lazy to do.
Give our strategy a try and let us know how it worked in the comments, of course! ?
