Quick Wins for Google Ads Campaigns

Getting quick wins in Google Ads campaigns can lower your cost per lead (CPL), generate more leads or higher quality leads, and improve your return on investment (ROI). It can be frustrating when your Google Ads campaigns are not performing well. Turning your campaigns around only requires finding new areas of opportunity for optimizations.

Table of Contents

1. Settings
2. Recommendations
3. Keywords
4. Wrapping Up Quick Wins for Google Ads Campaigns

Settings

There are two categories for settings, one for account settings and another for campaign settings. We will focus on both as they each have room to increase your Google Ads campaign performance.

First, check the Google Ads account settings:

1. Log in ads.google.com
2. Click All campaigns towards the upper left
3. Click on Settings in the menu to the right and choose account settings.

For some easy, quick wins for Google Ads campaigns, make sure you have the following options set correctly:

1. Auto-tagging should be set to Yes
2. Message reporting should be set to On
3. Call reporting should be set to On
4. Call and messaging ads terms should be set to Accepted

Next, check the campaign settings for each campaign and see if we can find any quick wins here. Select your first campaign under the left menu and then select settings in the menu to the right of that. You will need to select each campaign and then change the settings for each individual campaign. It will not change settings for all Google Ads campaigns so you must do this for each active search campaign within your account.

Set the goal of Leads or Sales. While Website Traffic may be a goal, it is best to choose leads or sales since merely getting traffic to your site is not the end goal. The end goal is to convert traffic to leads or sales. Google’s Algorithm will compare your account with similar accounts and provide best practice recommendations for increasing your optimization score and overall performance. Setting the goals helps Google to determine what recommendations work best for your account.

Recommendations

Google provides recommendations based on several factors helping accounts achieve higher performing results. How much you follow these recommendations reflects on your optimization score. According to Google, the optimization score is an estimate of how well your campaigns will perform. For most accounts, a quality optimization score is between 85% and 95%. Anything below that means you may be missing out on performance.

1. Navigate to the Search Campaigns tab under the All Campaigns button on the upper left.
2. Click on Recommendations on the menu to the right.

Once in recommendations, you can see your optimization score and some quick wins below that. You can automatically apply these quick wins by selecting APPLY ALL on the cards that show recommendations such as Add Audiences, Remove Redundant Keywords, Add New Keywords, Add Responsive Ads, etc.

In some cases, you may not be able to apply a recommendation, such as Raise Your Budgets, because you have no additional budget to spend.

Keywords

When setting up your Google Ads account, add keywords you want to target into ad groups. Sometimes you may be targeting keywords that are wasting your money and not providing conversions. You might also target keywords with much higher CPLs.  There is also a possibility that you are targeting keywords that are bringing in user searches that are too broad or do not apply to your goals.

1. Select Search Campaigns from the upper left menu under All Campaigns
2. Select Keywords (on the menu to the right)
3. Select Search Keywords

All the keywords you are targeting should now be visible on the main part of the screen, with columns showing stats such as cost, conversions, and cost/conversion. Near the upper-right, there is a drop-down menu to select a date range. There is a spot on this drop-down that says, “Days up to yesterday.” To the left of this, input 90 so it reads as “90 days up to yesterday” and then click on Apply. Ninety days is a reasonable amount of time to see if a keyword is performing or not.

1. Sort your keywords by cost so that your highest costing keywords are at the top. Look for keywords with high spending and little or no conversions, and pause them because those keywords may be wasting your money. If you have an average cost per conversion of $25 and you see a keyword that has spent $500 and has only produced 1 or 2 conversions or even worse shows 0 conversions, then that is a poor performer and should be paused.
2. Next, look at quality to see if your keywords are bringing in poor user search terms. Select a keyword by checking the box next to it and then hit “Search Terms” in the blue menu. Appearing above the keywords once checked, you will the actual user search terms that caused that keyword to show an ad. If you find that many of the search terms are not quality terms, you can either add those terms as negative keywords or pause the keyword. Do this for your top-spending keywords one at a time to make sure you find as many quick wins as you can.

Wrapping Up Quick Wins for Google Ads Campaigns

In review, there are three sections for getting quick wins for Google Ads Campaigns: Settings, Recommendations, and Keywords. Follow these recommendations, and you should see improved Google Ads campaign performance.

If you’re looking for an expert to review your account, Colling Media provides full audits, including recommendations and detailed quick wins for increasing the performance of your Google Ads campaigns.

You may also enjoy this article: What’s Your Google Ads Optimization Score?