If you’re wasting money on Google ads and not seeing the results you need, the problem isn’t with Google ads, but with the way your Google ads account is structured and the way you’re optimizing your Google ads campaigns. I know this because year after year, more and more businesses are increasing the amount of money they’re spending on Google ads in hopes of increasing the channels performance.
In fact, it’s estimated that by 2024, Google ads will receive over 81 billion dollars in ad spend revenue. So if Google ads wasn’t working, businesses wouldn’t continue to invest in it. The issue is likely with the way your campaigns are structured or optimized. In this blog, want to take you through one of the core concepts of how the Google ads algorithm works, so that you can put a strategic pattern into place for creating your Google ads campaigns. So lets dive into some optimization guidance below.
Understanding The Search Engine
To really understand Google ads, you need to know that its ultimate goal is to match the best landing page to the user search inquiry. What this means is that Google looks at your website not as one big website, but as a collection of different web pages, in order to match different search terms to those different individual web pages. This is important because it comes back to that ultimate goal for Google: they want the person to go straight from their search term right to the exact page which is going to answer their problem. If they can do this more and more often, people will continue to use the search engine as they know that when they click on an ad, it will take them to the direct service or product page they need.
Understanding ad rank.
This in turn means that businesses will continue to invest more and more in Google ads. When you understand this, it makes perfect sense for why Google has built their Google ads platform with a core metric called ad Rank. Ad rank has everything to do with user satisfaction because with Google ads, it is an auction but it doesn’t function like other auctions, where whoever is willing to pay the highest price wins that auction.
Why Ad Rank is important?
With Google, it’s not only the budget or the amount that you’re prepared to pay per click, but Google also adds that budget in with its metric called ad rank to determine which is going to be the winning ad for each individual auction. So rather than Google just letting the business with the biggest budget win each and every auction, Google uses this formula to determine the winning ad: CPC rank Plus ad rank equals ad position.
To improve the share of the top or absolute top of the search results, Google first tells you that you need to improve the quality of your ads and your landing page experience. But notice that when you receive the notification, it is always positioned above the recommendation to increase your bid. This means that ad rank is more important than increasing your budget, which is something you will hear us say time and time again. The budget you have in your Google ads campaign only magnifies the current results. So If you want to improve the performance of your Google ads account, you don’t do this by increasing your budget. You do this by increasing the quality of your ads and the quality of your optimizations.
How can you start some Google Ad optimizations to improve Ad Rank?
Google itself clearly states where it says better ads means better ad rank. So now that you know that the core aspect of seeing better success with your Google ads campaigns. Through focusing on the quality of your ads and also the quality of the landing page experience that you’re sending people to when they click on your ads you can improve your Ad rank. We will breakdown a few ways you should be optimizing your ads to boost your ad rank.
Click Through Ratio
The most important metric to focus on is your click-through ratio. Google takes into account your ads’ expected click-through ratio. They get that expected click-through ratio looking at the past performance of your account, so what you always need to be focusing on ways you can increase your click-through ratio. If the ads in your account have a very low click-through ratio, why would Google worry about showing your ads when they know that it’s a very low chance of getting clicked on? Google will always focus on showing ads that have a high click-through ratio because this increases the revenue google can generate. So, in order to increase your click-through ratio to win auctions against your competitors, you should focus on three key areas:
- Ad Copy
- Keyword Targeting
- Landing Page Optimization
Writing Quality Copy
First you want to make sure that your ad copy clearly states the keyword that the user has used. Throughout your ad copy you also want to give little bits of extra information. This is the extra information that you’ve got in your headlines and your descriptions. The goal is to drive extra confidence that when they click on your ad, it will take them to a web page which has exactly what they’re looking for, whether that be a specific product or a specific service. Finally, to increase your click-through ratio you want to make sure that your ad copy is building a sense of urgency. So where possible, give them a reason to click on your ad right now, whether that would be a downloadable report or e-book, or simply just letting them know what they will learn on the landing page.
Quality Keyword Targeting
The second key area of focus would be making sure that each ad is highly relevant to each individual search term. The way that you achieve this is that you make sure that you’ve structured your account in the right way. Now it does take some extra work to set this up, but the results are so worth it. These ad groups need to have specific keywords which are all related to this ad group theme, and then these keywords have related ad text which relates once again to these keywords. It is also good practice to opt for standard campaigns instead of “smart” campaign, it is key to control the exact combination of headlines and descriptions to ensure it stays relevant to the target keyword. This make sure ad campaigns drive people to the exact landing page which is going to provide all the information or solution related to their google search.
So, let say you’re an electrician. You have your ads about installing air conditioning units or about installing solar panels. Those two different services should not appear in the same ad group, you would have either of them within an ad group or a campaign. One would be focusing air conditioning, and the other one would be focusing on solar power. Within the air conditioning ad group, you have all of your keywords related to air conditioning with ad copy specifically mentioning your air conditioning, all while sending them through to a landing page about your air conditioning installation services. The same with your solar panel installation. First you would have all the viewer related keywords here with your related ad copy which is talking about solar panel installation. Then once again it’s sending them through to a landing page which is about solar power and not air conditioning.
Optimize Your Landing Page
Then this brings us to the third important factor that you need to work on to increase your ad rank: the quality of your landing page. Now, similar to your click-through ratio, Google won’t show your ads if they know your ads are not going to be clicked. This can be applied to landing pages.
Why would Google show your ad if Google knows that it’s sending people to a landing page which is just a poor experience? The user clicks on the ad only to go to the landing page and then jumps straight off it in a couple of seconds because it’s such a bad landing page. Once again, the reason why Google values this so much is because Google knows that if it continues to send people to websites or web pages which don’t answer people’s questions, people will start to blame Google, not that individual website.
Think of it like this, you’re new in town. You want to go out to a nice restaurant for dinner. So you ask a friend for a recommendation. They give you a recommendation to a restaurant which just has terrible service, terrible food, and a terrible location. So now you probably wont be asking that friend again for a recommendation on a restaurant. That’s the same for Google mentality google upholds. If it continually gives websites with a poor user experience, users gradually loose trust in the search engine.
Conclusion
To sum it up, if you want to improve your Google ads campaigns and you want to improve your ad rank, you need to be focusing on your click-through ratio, making sure that your ad copy is relevant, and also that your ad groups are structured in the right way. But most importantly, you need to focus on the quality of your landing page experience.
