Having trouble increasing the performance of your Google Ads campaign?
Whether it’s declining impressions, increased CPCs, or a drop in conversions, this article outlines six key steps to diagnose problems and unlock opportunities for improvement.
From checking your conversion tracking settings and bidding strategies to evaluating ad groups and search terms, these helpful tips will help you refine your PPC approach for better results.
1. Make sure your conversion settings are accurate
When you figure out why a Google Ads campaign isn’t performing well, start by checking how conversions are set up. Clear and accurate conversion tracking is critical to evaluating campaign effectiveness.
Make sure conversion tracking is set up correctly to capture essential actions like form submissions, purchases, or any goals you’ve set up.
Check if you have existing conversion values or if you can apply them to tell Google the value of each conversion action.
If conversions are low, fix tracking code issues and contact Google Support for help with tag setup. Accurate tracking and aligned metrics are critical to improving campaign performance and getting accurate data on ROAS and conversions.
2. Check your bidding strategy
If you have an unattainable goal, Google may have a status on your campaign that is “Limited by bid strategy.”
If your bid strategy is limited, you can upgrade it to a fully automated bid strategy, which will help you get more conversions with a similar CPA or a higher conversion value with a similar ROAS.
Other common limitations can be bid limits below the average of your keywords. Increase your max CPCs or, if you use Smart Bidding, increase your CPA tc or decrease the TROAS.
3. Get your search impression share
Search impression share indicates the percentage of total impressions an ad receives compared to the total number it could receive.
If you have a campaign that is struggling to spend, this is a great metric to look at. A lower search impression share suggests missed opportunities for visibility. This could involve:
Refinement of keyword targeting. Adjusting bid strategies to have a lower ROAS target or a higher cost per acquisition. Improving the relevance of ads. Expansion of the budget in competitive auctions.
There are two more metrics to add to your report:
Search lost IQs (classification): Search impression share lost in ranking.
Search lost IQs (budget): Share of search impressions to budget.
If you’re seeing a high ranking percentage, you should improve your landing page, ad copy, and keyword targeting. If you see a high budget loss percentage, you’ll want to spend more to be competitive.
If you have a search impression share greater than 10%, you may also see competitive metrics in the Auction Insights report. This will show you other advertisers bidding on the keywords in this campaign.
If your impression share is much lower, you may want to expand your budget and adjust your bid strategy to be less restrictive.
Regularly monitoring and optimizing search impression share is a proactive strategy for fine-tuning campaigns and maximizing a campaign’s reach.
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4. Evaluate your ad group settings
This is the next critical step in diagnosing performance issues in your Google Ads campaign.
Ad group structure is crucial to ad relevance and targeting accuracy.
If a campaign is underperforming, check how your ad groups are structured.
Do all conversions belong to one campaign? How many keywords do you have per campaign?
Assessing whether keywords in an ad group are closely related and aligned with ad copy and landing page content ensures a cohesive user experience.
A well organized ad group structure should have a maximum of 1-20 keywords and can be broken down into the best performing ad groups.
If many keywords have low quality scores, you should look at:
Add or remove keywords. Confirm that all keywords are in your ad titles and that your main keywords are in your descriptions.
Ad group evaluation and optimization increases campaign relevance, improves quality scores, and improves overall performance by aligning ad content with targeted keywords.
5. Check the quality scores
Quality Score is a metric that reflects the overall quality and relevance of a campaign’s ads, keywords, and landing pages.
It’s a number for each keyword from 1 to 10, with a lower quality score indicating potential issues affecting ad performance, such as misaligned ad copy, irrelevant keywords, or experiences of suboptimal landing pages.
By closely examining quality scores, you can identify specific areas that need improvement.
Add metrics for landing page experience, ad relevance, and expected CTR, which affect Quality Score. If any are below average, focus on that area to improve your Quality Score.
A higher Quality Score positively influences ad rankings and positions and lowers your cost per click. This, in turn, improves the overall efficiency of the campaign.
After making changes, check your keywords after 1-2 weeks to see if the quality score has increased.
6. Extract the search term reports
Regularly monitoring this report allows you to identify irrelevant or low-converting search terms that may be draining your budget without delivering meaningful results. This is crucial, especially if you use broad match keywords. I suggest doing this every week.
By compiling a list of negative keywords and applying them to this ad group or campaign, you can:
Prevent low-quality searches from arriving. Refine your targeting. Improve the relevance of ads.
In turn, this can increase your quality score and expected CTR.
6 essential tactics to optimize your Google Ads campaigns
Relaunching a Google Ads campaign requires a methodical approach to identifying and addressing underlying issues. By following these must-have steps, you can gain insight into areas that need improvement.
Regular optimization based on performance data is crucial to achieving campaign goals. With continuous improvement guided by metrics, you can unlock the full potential of your Google Ads investment.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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