5 things you can do right now to improve your Google Search campaigns

We audit a lot of campaigns for prospective clients, and what we’ve found is that there are certain mistakes that are so common, we can almost guarantee they’ll be present before we’ve even looked.

While some require longer term changes and technical input, there are others that are relatively quick to fix. We’re going to take you through our top five things you can do right now:

1. Switch off Search Partners

If you’re bidding on keywords via Google Search, your ads are also live on their Search Partner network by default. Partners include Google owned sites like YouTube, Maps, as well as non-Google sites such as Ask.com, BizRate and W3Schools. While that doesn’t sound the worst, 9 times out of 10 the traffic that comes from these is not good quality, and can often lead to a high level of spam conversions.

You can see how the Search Partners are performing by segmenting the campaign data by “network”:

If as we suspect, it’s not leading to as positive a set of results as Google Search, you can switch it off via the campaign settings.

2. Remove auto-apply functions

Google likes to optimise your campaign for you. A lot. And that can be helpful sometimes, but when it comes to writing your own ad copy for example, you know your business and customers best, and you don’t want Google pulling random lines of copy from your website and inserting it into your ad.

Most frequently, we see this within ad extensions like sitelinks and callouts. Anything with “Automatically created” next to it, hasn’t been carefully crafted by your team:

You can turn these off one by one (and you will have to for any already created), but to stop this happening moving forwards, navigate to the Recommendations tab and hit the “auto-apply” clock at the top right. You’ll then be able to tick auto-applied settings on/off:

3. Check your keywords are matching to relevant search terms

You choose relevant keywords for your campaign and Google shows your ad when users search them, right? Well, sometimes. Depending on the match types you’re using, Google can choose to show your ads for a whole range of searches, using a single keyword as the starting point.

Under the Insights and Reports section of Google Ads, you’ll find “Search terms”. These are the actual searches users have performed to find your ads. If they aren’t relevant, consider changing your match type on keywords to something more restrictive like Exact, and/or block the irrelevant search terms by ticking them and “add as a negative keyword”:

4. Change location targeting from “Interest” to “Presence”

If you take a look at the location targeting within the campaign settings, and find you’re using “presence or interest”, consider switching this to “presence”. This will ensure you’re only targeting users who are in or regularly in your included locations, whereas the former will also include others Google deems as “interested in your included locations”. We’ve found this can lead to all sorts of unintentional targeting internationally:

5. Improve your responsive ad strengths

Your ad strength is rated from Poor to Excellent. The better the strength, the more visibility you’ll achieve. Google makes the process of improving your ad quite straightforward. If you edit the copy, you’ll get a summary at the top of the page:

Fill up each tick box to quickly improve it to Good or Excellent. The best thing about this is, Google will update their rating in real time, so you can see the impact before you hit save.

Hope that all helps you to implement some quick wins for your campaign. Interested in a more detailed audit of your account? Get in touch here