Google Ads Best Practices

Don't you just love it when Google calls?

[chewy]

Just got a call from the Big G telling me they were auditing my Google Ads account and they wanted to speak to me about Best Practices.

I said, well alright, this could be good - let's see what they have to say - I hope I learn something!

They then proceeded to ask me why my geo-targeting was set so narrow and why my limited use of the account (for a small seasonal and very localized business) was also set to only run for part of the year. Anything about "was this truly what I wanted" wasn't part of the discussion, only the implication that I somehow was not meeting best practices.

They were happy with my use of exact match, and of course they suggested I use broad, and there were a few other things like that.

I thought they were calling about my need to upgrade to GA4, but no, that was not on the caller's list.

I asked - in terms of best practices - why for every account that I have run (some in excess of a million in spend) I have never seen click prices go down, despite the fact that this was a suggested likelihood and she laughed, pointing out that my bidded cost per click was only half the 30 dollar current bid on my keywords. (In truth I have seen this, but it is always pennies and never enough that it matters.)

By now, the only thing I could do was laugh. Google is still calling to increase my spend. So much for "best practices."

Seems like the only "best practice" is to max out my account?

Why do I always fall for these calls - thinking maybe I'll learn something when they call?

Not bitter here - just curious - has anyone ever been able to optimize an account in such a way that CPC went down? And I mean "WAY DOWN"?

[TechNoob]

I don't have much to contribute other than agreeing with you 100%. I've been getting harassed by Google to increase spend and make all these changes with very little reasoning. The girl that I had the call with was very bossy, and would not listen to me and my PPC manager about what we felt. We were doing just fine in March!

That said, I've noticed a drop in phone calls, like, to ZERO. Ever since that call, things started falling, and we've been trying to do all types of things to salvage it. To add salt to the wound, we were hit with the wonderful "limited by budget" labels. Hard for me not to suspect Google of forcing people's hands to spend more.

[chewy]

Thanks Shadow.

Been doing all that and more since before AdWords was AdWords. Anyone remember Overture?

Have you (or anyone else) actually ever experienced your CPC or CPA significantly dropping after following the above practices?

Sorry for the negativity, but maybe my experience is different than others? After years of running a million plus campaign, there were plenty of things I did to "hold the line" (that are not mentioned above) but there was truly little that brought back those low cost clicks and conversions like we had when it all started.

Used to be I came here to read between-the-lines to learn what wasn't already listed on far too many pages, articles, etc.

Maybe we can start a thread that lists some "best practices from the field" - so here's one.

I learned through close inspection of the "search terms report" that there were many (somewhat invisible) queries that were costing us money. This was about 10 years ago. Clearly there was no engagement when ANY number was used as part of a query. This probably still holds for certain accounts. The solution? Just a bit of Excel magic to make several thousand negative "keywords" that consisted of numbers from zero to 5,000 or so (including a single hyphen) that blocked out all those inappropriate queries of street addresses, phone numbers etc. Yep, impressions went down, CTR went up, client was happy - however the cost per conversion may have gone down a tiny bit, but overall it continued to go up (just a bit more slowly).

I learned this as I had attended one of the "shows" - I think this was in NYC - and there was a group of people selling "negative keyword lists" and somehow this concept jelled for me after I went through my normal phase of dis-belief, etc before realizing these guys had a concept I could apply.

So Shadow, if you have a "from the field" best practice, please share?

[chewy]

Meanwhile, anyone care to share their own Google Ads best practices from the field?

My one (mentioned above) is - by far - not unique, but may be new to some.

Love to hear what you might want to share.

Thanks!

-C

[edited by: not2easy at 8:09 pm (utc) on Jun 4, 2023]
[edit reason] ToS #24 [/edit]

[FranticFish]

I stopped taking these calls a long time ago. Never come across another company that call paying customers and tell THEM what to do, rather than take it as an opportunity to listen to what the customer would like .

I've long suspected that hidden keywords are very likely to be ones I'd add to my negative lists (after all, GOOGLE knows what they are).

Things that have helped me (be aware these are all on fairly long running campaigns, not necessarily advice for a new campaign):

1) Indefinite even ad rotation (my decision to pause poor-performing ones)
I used to let Google pick 'winners' and they pick too early - at least on campaigns at the scale I operate which is SME.
Let each ad get to at least 100 impressions before seeing which have best/worst CTR.
And keep an eye on the historical CTRs too. I have sometimes turned the 'weakest' ad back on after 6 months because one of the others stopped doing so well.

2) Ignore any 'Impression Share' metrics
Distraction. Focus on the raw % metrics of Top 4 and Top. I use Manual CPC to stay Top 4.

The only Impression Share related metric I do care about is...

3) Campaign level Lost Impression Share (Budget)
Since the 'Accelerated Bids' (i.e. show me for every relevant search until my daily budget is gone) option was retired, those who cannot afford to have ads on all day no longer get a chance to compete equally for a good CTR. So you need to keep an eye on this and raise your budget until it is as close to zero as you can afford. If this means cutting back on the scope of the campaign, or the schedule, then do it. Otherwise your great CTR that you slowly whittled into shape will be ruined and you'll never be seen anyway. Do NOT let Google decide when you are allowed into the auction room to bid.

4) Manual Device Split (cloned Ad Groups each with 100% negative bid adjustment for mobile / tablet & desktop)
You can bid differently (mobile bids are frequently a LOT lower), have different wordings (optimised for device width), even different keywords.

5) You can hack responsive ads back into ETAs using the 'pin' function.
Say you have a 'sleeper' campaign that you have carefully optimised over years but then need to change one tiny thing in the ads to keep it up to date and Google says you need to switch to responsive ads.

6) Strip back brutally rather than switch off (last resort)
One campaign that we were going to switch off was saved (for the time being) by pruning it right back to only exact match terms with the highest conversion rate on the site and blocking all other variants and possible variants we could think of.

The sad fact these days is that pretty much everything I do is damage limitation. And it's so much more time-consuming than it used to be.

[chewy]

Thanks FF!

A couple of more tricks re negatives. You'll find quite a bit of useful information in the Google Search Console. Not quite what it used to be but not bad. Apparently Bing doesn't block to the same extent that Google does, so it might be worth using Bing PPC to get a better handle on useful negatives.

Plus, if you are new to this, there are numerous patterns of extremely useful negative keywords (stop words, prepositions, proper nouns, etc) and it is really worth building huge sets of negatives. I've never A / B tested negative lists, but I suspect it would be an extremely useful thing to do to try to sort out a few things.

[FranticFish]

@ chewy - thanks, I should remember to check Search Console as well.

+ 1 to going to town on negatives.

I maintain a 'generic' list of negatives that I adjust for all campaigns. When researching keywords to start a campaign, I drill right down to the very bottom of all the possible suggestions to then build a niche-specific negative list. Since the 'exact match close variant' change I now also have 'close but no cigar' list for things that are almost but not quite my key terms.

One more thing related to negatives I've found: if you're running multiple groups to target related terms, then you want to add a group level negative for the other groups, e.g.
- BANANAS (block apples & oranges)
- APPLES (block bananas and oranges)
- ORANGES (block bananas and apples)

If you do not do this then Google can show your ads for Bananas when people search for Apples - even with exact match only targeting.

[chewy]

Years (a decade at least) ago a client was in the business of selling business printing services.

I was stunned that the word "paint" matched the word "print".

Today, with hidden search queries, one would never know to add this as a negative.

[Mark_A]

Just started a thread about G advisors.

I am in two minds.

No I won't be increasing my budget thank you!